#20 Finding My Voice

For many years, Kelly hid behind her keyboard and the limiting belief that she can write much better than she speaks.

Hear what made her crawl deep into her shell to the point she became a recluse, afraid to talk to real-life people about her work and hiding a big piece of who she is.

Pushed to step outside of her comfort zone and face her fears head on, here's how Kelly finally found her voice - and what opened up for her when she did.

This episode challenges you to reflect on your voice and how you use it to express yourself.

Do you use your voice as a force of good? Or are you holding yourself back from speaking your authentic truth?

Resources mentioned:

Rebecca Dennis of the Breathing Tree  https://breathingtree.co.uk/conscious-breathing

Miisa Mink of Driven Woman https://www.driven-woman.com

Elliott Kay of Speaker Express   https://www.speakerexpress.co.uk

Emma Stroud https://emmastroud.london

The High Vibe Journey is coming again soon!

Come and join Project WE, Kelly's online membership club for women with a growth mindset who want to work on their lives in a positive we-space.

Read the Transcript for this Episode below:

Episode 20 of the Project Me podcast.

Hi, I'm Kelly Pietrangeli, the creator of  myprojectme. com. This podcast is designed to be an entertaining, lighthearted, inspirational, personal growth journey.  Each episode goes in a mostly chronological order as I piece together the books, modalities, people, and experiences that have fallen onto my life path exactly when I needed them.

And how often I resisted the very things I needed the most, or didn't see the gifts contained in the challenges until later.  By sharing my stories, I hope to inspire you to reflect on your life path. What are the seeming coincidences that have led you to where you are today?  What are the hidden gifts within your challenges?

And what magic is out there waiting for you as you let go of resistance and follow your own breadcrumb trail?  At the end of each short episode, there's an opportunity. For you to reflect on how my story relates to your own life. You'll also find a PDF of journal prompts in the show notes or in the podcast section at myprojectme.

com.

Hi guys, welcome back. I'm recording this from my Airbnb in London's Camden town. It's the day after Easter and it's actually snowing outside. Yesterday we were sitting outside in the glorious sunshine and now it's snowing.  I want to give a quick shout out to whoever wrote this five star review of the podcast in Apple podcast.

Love, love, love Kelly's podcast.  So calming and warming. I really look forward to them. They're like listening to your favorite music, comfortable and reassuring, or looking forward with anticipation to the next episode of a favorite TV show. A feeling I haven't had for years in this age of everything on demand.

It's signed. Programmer Henny in Great Britain. Thank you. I do know what you mean about how all TV now is on demand and there's no longer that feeling when an episode ends on a cliffhanger and you just have to wait until the same time next week to find out what happens next. You can literally just keep watching or know that you can watch it the very next night.

That excited feeling of, Oh, it's Tuesday. It's Sex and the City tonight. Or when I was a tween, it was the love boat followed by Fantasy Island every Saturday night. And everyone you knew was also watching the same thing because there wasn't so much choice. Well, thanks so much for that review. I'm sorry that I don't drop a weekly episode on the same day each week, and that I keep you guessing on when the next one will appear.

I aim to get better at that once I'm settled into Spain. If you're not on my mailing list, get on that at myprojectme. com as I always let my subscribers know when a new episode is out.  Okay, let's get straight into this week's episode. How I finally found my voice.  You may think that because I have a podcast, I might find speaking easy, but it has been a real journey for me.

Here we go. Episode 20.

I'm the kind of person who can either talk your ear off or I have nothing to say at all.  Gossip gives me the creeps. I find most small talk dull, but I also don't like big lofty intellectual discussions on politics, economics, global issues, feminism. I don't get drawn into debates because I have no desire to win anyone over to my side.

I genuinely believe everyone's entitled to their own opinion. I can almost always put myself into others shoes, and even if I don't agree with them, I can see where they're probably coming from based on their circumstances or their belief system.  Not having strong opinions means I rarely get heated up about anything.

This makes me feel very peaceful inside. But it can also make me feel like others might think I'm boring or wishy washy, so I can get very quiet in groups when I really don't feel like I have anything I want to add to the conversation.  Conversely, when I'm with a like minded friend, I can get lost in conversations for hours.

I prefer interactions with friends where we talk about our lives, share our dreams, our goals and ambitions, talk about what's challenging us, what scares us, our personal and spiritual growth. What books we're reading, films and Netflix series we're watching,  observations about what's going on in the world and what it might all mean,  a curiosity about the future, and talking about the universe and the higher levels of conscious living.

And of course, lighthearted laughter and banter over funny memories and inside jokes.  It hasn't always been easy for me to find my tribe.  Back in episode 4, The Joy of Journaling, I talked about being a cheerleader in high school and feeling very lonely because I didn't find meaningful connections within that confined social circle.

This reared its ugly face again when I became a mother and the friends pool was made up of mothers from the school gates and coffee mornings and kids sports events and birthday parties. I don't do well in these kinds of group conversations for the reasons I stated earlier, so I didn't feel like I had much to add to the conversation.

I often felt bored and boring.  When I started my Project Me blog in 2013, I discovered my passion for writing outside of my private journaling.  I realized I actually have a lot to say, and I cranked out a weekly blog post and a newsletter, and conversations began happening in the comments under my post.

Women from all over the world began writing to me to say how much they enjoyed opening up their inbox every week to get my Monday motivator newsletter and to read my post on Facebook.  It was a real joy to discover I have got something to say and people want to hear it.  I found my niche which was helping busy mothers to live a well balanced life and to dive into their personal growth.

I was so in flow with it and excited about how it was all unfolding.  But then something happened. That really shouldn't have been so significant, but clearly it triggered something in me.  I shared about the success of my blog to someone very close to me. I'd hope she'd share in my excitement over getting my first 1000 newsletter subscribers within three months.

I'd noticed she hadn't subscribed. Which I found quite odd, since she's a mother of two young daughters and had known all about the big blog launch.  She point blank told me that she didn't go in for all of this self help malarkey.  She was critical of the website design. She was super dismissive of the entire Project Me concept, saying it was all a bit me me me and selfish.

It felt like such a deep, personal slap in the face.  I'm ashamed to say, I reacted badly.  I told her that if she had gone ahead with her idea to open up a girl's shoe shop in the village, even though I only have boys, I would have been supportive. I wouldn't have said, oh, this is of zero interest to me. I wouldn't tell her I don't like the layout of the shop or the sign out front, knowing she'd just invested money in it and was only getting started.

I'd very honestly have told all of my friends with girls to go to her shop, and I'd have stopped by myself to see how the new biz was doing, and I'd have been supportive. Even though her girl's shoe shop was of no personal interest to me, I'd have known what it meant to her, and I'd have been encouraging.

Well, some part of what I said must have triggered her, because she became enraged. I mean, really nasty enrage to the point that her husband came to intervene and defend me, and then she lashed out at him too. I was in tears, and it ended up having such a huge, long lasting impact on my confidence to talk about Project Me to anyone, unless they specifically asked.

From that day forward, I've been in tears. Whenever I met someone and had the opportunity to share about what I do, I played it down.  If it was a mother, I really didn't want her to think I was trying to judge her as a mother by telling her I wrote a blog to help mothers, so I barely mentioned it at all.

It was excruciating being at the school gates surrounded by mothers and not feeling like I could talk about the one subject I felt like I had the most to say about.  What if they didn't go in for all this self help malarkey either?  I needed to protect myself from feeling vulnerable to criticism, so I just didn't really talk about my work, unless I could tell someone was genuinely interested.

I became more and more of a recluse. Hiding behind my computer screen, building my business from my home office and connecting more and more with mothers from all over the world who wanted to hear what I had to say. I felt so connected to this growing global community I was building, and I cared less and less about real life interactions.

I branched into my online productivity and time management mentoring, got my book publishing deal, and spent more and more time than ever in front of my computer typing away.  Then Misa Mink of the Driven Woman Network included Project Me on her list of best personal development blogs alongside Deepak Chopra and Marie Forleo.

I was blown away. I wanted to thank her for this incredible exposure and I offered Misa a one on one session with me to teach her my method of mastering her to do list.  On that call, she told me about a women's conference she was creating in London called the Festival of Doers. She offered me a stand in the Doers Village to share about Project Me.

I was thrilled.  The conference was amazing. As each of the female speakers came to the stage, I was in awe. So inspiring. I loved hearing their stories and empowering messages. But in between the speakers, standing at my little Project Me stall, I cringed. shy and unsure of what to say to any of the women passing by.

I didn't know if they were a mother or not a mother. I was so afraid to talk about motherhood in case somebody was trying to conceive maybe, or had lost a baby. I just had all this stuff in my head. How can I talk about what I do when I don't know who this person is? I absolutely was not owning what I do.

At the end of the day, Misa Mink took to the stage as assistants walked on the aisles, passing out blank cards. Misa then asked all of us in the audience to pick up our pen and write down something we'd love to achieve by next year at this time.  Something so audacious that it excited us and scared us in equal measure.

I found my pen writing to speak at an event like Driven Woman with complete confidence and inspire others.  Then I looked at what I'd just written in utter disbelief. I could barely speak in small groups or even to like one person passing by. How could I speak to an audience of over 200?  Envelopes were being passed out.

We were instructed to put what we'd written into the envelope, address it to ourselves, and hand it back in to the volunteers. It would be mailed back to us in nine months. I was like, wow, I better enroll in some kind of public speaking course if I think I'm going to possibly stand a chance of achieving that.

But I didn't.  Instead of improving my public speaking, I was hiding more and more behind my keyboard.  Writing what I wanted to say felt safe. I could write it, and if people liked it, I might hear nice things from them. And nothing I said was ever controversial enough to get any hate mail. I was just writing about safe lifestyle management tips and advice.

I built up a story that I write so much better than I speak. When I tried to say things, I could never be as eloquent. I couldn't find the right words. But when I typed, the words flowed out beautifully. And I could tweak and edit and polish it later, which I did to death. Do you do this too? Write something and then keep going back and tweaking it to death?

The more reclusive I became, the harder I found to talk to people in real life, except my closest friends and family.  I tried to make videos in my business and they were awful. I'd attempt to memorize scripts. I had huge cue cards taped up everywhere. I'd try to make it look like I wasn't reading what I'd written.

It was, they just were terrible.  I joined Misa Mink's Driven Woman Network. The idea being that you meet up once a month with a small group of eight to 10 women to talk about business and life. But in those roundtable discussions, when it was my turn to speak, I don't know, something happened. I couldn't even see the people in the room, like they would just turn into blurry objects.

I just babble something out really quickly. My surroundings were just kind of blurred out. And when my turn was over, I think, what did I even just say? Everyone else seemed so at ease. What was wrong with me?  My book launch was now in a few months, and I didn't know how I was going to talk about my book.

So, I scheduled myself in for another session of conscious breath work with Rebecca Dennis. I shared about my first session with her in episode 19.  This time, I wanted to see if she could help me find my voice and what was blocking me with my speaking.  Well, I didn't leave my body that time and turn into pure light and energy, but something very cool did happen.

She worked on my throat chakra. And as her hands went over that area, it felt lit up with blue, the most powerful blue glow washed over me. It was absolutely beautiful.  I thanked her and kind of floated out of there.  I now understand that the throat chakra is associated with the color blue. I didn't know that at the time.

This chakra or energy center plays an essential role in communication, creativity, and self expression.  When there's an imbalance in this chakra. We have a harder time communicating effectively. If your throat chakra is blocked or unbalanced, you may feel fearful about speaking your personal truth,  have a harder time expressing your thoughts, feel anxious about speaking or communicating.

Those with a throat chakra imbalance may be highly critical of themselves and others.  Physical symptoms may manifest in sore throats.  I'm only thinking about this now, but I have never had a sore throat since that session with Rebecca over three years ago. Not once. And I used to get them a lot.  Here's what happened soon after that session.

I opened up my inbox one afternoon and there was an email from Misa Mink of the Drummond Women Network inviting me to be a panelist at the next Festival of Doers conference in London. Holy crap. I'd put that on this card and now here was the opportunity. And I was nowhere near ready.  I wrote her a reply, thanking her so much for the opportunity, telling her I wasn't quite ready yet, but to please ask me again for next year.

I was about to hit send when my inner voice gave me a big talking to. It said, Kelly, you won't be any more ready next year than you are now.  You are always telling others to start before they're ready  and to step out of their comfort zones.  Time for you to take your own advice.  I deleted what I'd written and retyped,  Thank you for the opportunity, Misa.

I'd be delighted.  I pressed send and nearly threw up.  I decided I'd better find some speedy public speaking lessons because it was late October now and this conference was in January. Holy crap.  I also have my book launch coming up in January and there was Christmas in between. There wasn't going to be much time.

I called up Emma Stroud, who was the fabulous MC at the conference the previous year, and she would be again this year. Help! How would I be good enough in such a short frame of time? Emma helps experienced high end speakers to up their game. But I was not in that league, so she diplomatically referred me to Anik and Elliot at Speaker Express.

As the name suggests, they'd be able to express me into public speaking in a hurry. I enrolled in their three month program starting in November, even though I wouldn't finish the program before my speaking engagement, I could at least get cracking on how to find my voice.  In the beginning of my Speaker Express training, I was completely in my head.

overthinking, trying to memorize scripts, attempting to get my words perfect. I was nervous. I spoke a million miles a minute. Then we had some workshops that required ad libbing and doing unprepared exercises and getting up and speaking in pairs or in small groups. And I began to get over myself.  I learned that when I speak from my heart, I feel connected and alive, and somehow I find the words from within without overthinking it all.

As the Speaker Express program is geared towards entrepreneurs, we were all encouraged to talk about our businesses through effective storytelling. I learned how to tell a story, but still make it about the audience.  The amazing fellow students I met in this program and the exercises we did together helped me to see that I do have interesting things to talk about.

And I can talk about what I do to anyone, not just a mother who's into her personal development.  This is where I also learned about the resting bitch face.  I stopped assuming that just because someone is not smiling and nodding as I speak, Doesn't mean they don't like what I'm saying. Some people just have a resting bitch face as they listen.

This has helped me so much in my normal life too. To stop thinking about what someone might be thinking about what I'm saying at the same time as I'm saying it. Pure gold.  Something major shifted in me and speaker express training helped me overcome my nerves and speak authentically. Now it doesn't matter if it's two people or two hundred.

I learned that I can speak as well as I write, and that I'm an engaging storyteller with lots of stories to tell.  My book launch party was exactly one week before the big Festival of Doers conference, and it gave me the opportunity to give a talk to everyone who came to support me.  I very deliberately did not invite the person who had not supported my business at the start, not out of spite.

We were good with each other by then, but because it was very important for me to be surrounded by my cheerleaders, the ones who'd been supportive and encouraging and who were always sharing about Project Me to their friends.  My speech was funny and heartfelt, and I was still nervy and I referred to my notes, but I was doing it, and you only get better by doing it, right?

The following week, on stage, at the Festival of Doers, I felt exhilaration. What I'd written on that card one year previously, which was mailed back to me by the way, had indeed come true. I loved being on that stage.  An audience member asked me a question that triggered an emotion in me, and I began crying.

Not sobbing or anything, but I was clearly emotional.  I took some very deep breaths to get that vital oxygen flowing to my brain. I'd learned that in my speaker express program. I was able to regain my composure and carry on successfully.  I realized later that in my vulnerability, I became real to the audience.

Afterwards, there was a queue of people lined up to give me a hug, buy my brand new book, and one woman went on to become a treasure client.  I now have an overview of how finding my voice has unfolded for me, and it looks something like this.

My higher self made my pen write that I wanted to be on that stage. My soul knew I was playing small and not using the gift of my voice.  I intuitively booked in for that session with Rebecca Dennis, which began to open up my blocked throat chakra.  I manifested the invitation to speak by writing down that intention.

And because I didn't run away from the opportunity, I got to face the discomfort that comes when we step out of our comfort zone. And come out the other side of it so much braver.  Life really opened up for me.  I ended up organizing my own women's conference called Project Me Live, where I invited female speakers to come and speak to my audience about health and well being.

I hired the wonderful Cheryl Brooker to be my emcee. We had met in speaker express training.  The women who attended all loved it. I have to admit that I was so busy organizing the entire thing that I only got to practice my own speaking segment the day before. And I could have been so much better if I'd focused more on this part of the event, but it was a huge accomplishment.

I'd gotten the audience members to pair up with people they didn't know and explore their health goals with each other. I designed fabulous workbooks and project me goodie bags.  At the very end of Project Me Live, I went back on stage and I said,  Don't you all wish you had more like minded women to join forces with, to work on your goals and dreams together, in a really supportive space?

To know that your ideas won't be squashed by naysayers?  To be inspired by each other in a non competitive way, with no jealousy, and only positivity?  That's when I dropped my big bombshell announcement. In January of 2019, I would launch Project WE, my online membership club for women with a growth mindset to work on their lives together.

Founding members could join for only 19 or 15 a month. I said, if you're interested, my volunteer at the back has a clipboard for you to add your name.  There was such a long queue to sign up that one of my other resourceful volunteers grabbed another piece of paper to take names in a second line.  With that kind of positive energy behind me, Project We launched two and a half months later with 120 members, and it's been going strong ever since.

I'm laughing now to remember that I had to explain what Zoom even was for our very first meetup, and convince wary women to please turn on their cameras and not be shy. Of course, by the following year, when the pandemic struck, the whole world knew what Zoom was.  It has been such a joy to witness other women finding their voices.

Those that were too afraid to unmute themselves in the beginning were never pressured into anything, but they slowly gained confidence by hearing other women open up, be vulnerable, and share.  Those who wouldn't even come to a meetup if I mentioned that we might be going into a small group breakout room started showing up.

And saying how surprised they were to really enjoy them.  We all need to feel heard.  And sometimes we don't feel heard by those closest to us.  Or we don't feel like we can talk about anything anyone else wants to hear.  Or we feel afraid to speak up in case we are criticized or feel ridiculed.  Like I used to feel for so many years.

Finding my voice has been quite a journey and launching this podcast 10 months ago has given me a platform to use my voice to share stories in a more powerful way than my written blog post could do.  I hardly ever write blog posts anymore. There are hundreds of blog posts on the Project Me website.

They're divided into the eight key life areas on the Project Me life wheel, and it is a total treasure trove of helpful advice and real life examples of how I've overcome challenges using practical strategies. And there's my Project Me book as well.  But this podcast has given me permission to authentically talk about the stuff I was always afraid to write about because I thought I'd feel like a woo woo freak.

No, I don't talk about politics or feminism. I don't share strong views about much of anything. But I realize that when I speak from my heart, I do have valuable things to say. That like minded people enjoy listening to.  I'm using my voice to share inspiration and encouragement and to open up minds and hearts rather than be divisive and opinionated.

You can find plenty of that elsewhere. If that's your thing.  Even when I started this podcast, I was still telling myself the story that I don't like my voice. I don't have a podcaster's voice.  But enough people have now told me that they love my voice that I have to get over my complete disbelief of that.

I now know that most people don't like hearing their own recorded voice. So we all need to just get over that one and not let us hold us back from speaking.  What I'm kind of working through right now is whether or not I want to record episodes without writing down what I want to say first. I know I'll miss important stuff out, I'll babble, I'll go off piste, and the episodes make it much longer.

I think what people like about the podcast now is that it's kind of like an audio book. It's easy to listen to, it stays on topic, it doesn't run too long,  but maybe that's just a story I'm telling myself as I'm still not ready to take off the training wheels and ride without a script.  One day, I'll try just hitting record and seeing what comes out without planning it, and you can let me know what you prefer.

Thank you so much for listening to my stories. I hope they help you to reflect on your own life path as you step further into who you are and what you came here to do and be in this lifetime.  You have very important things to say, I know you do.  Give yourself permission to find your voice.

Dear listener,  relax your forehead.  Take a nice, long, deep breath in  and let it out with a sigh.  Continue to breathe in and out through your heart space as you relax.  Take a moment to reflect on your voice and how you use it to express yourself.  Do you use your voice as a force of good?  Do you speak with honesty and truth?

Does what comes out of your mouth flow from a place of love?

Do you refrain from gossip?

Are your words kind and helpful?

Do you pay more compliments than criticisms?

Do you look for the good and express appreciation and gratitude?

Are you able to ask for what you need and want?

What about telling people about who you are and what you do?

Reflect on where you're holding yourself back from speaking and why.

Are you willing to step out of your comfort zone and find your voice?

Thank you for listening to the Project Me podcast. There's no PDF of journal prompts this time because I realize it's what holds me up some weeks from cranking out more episodes. If you do love the PDFs, please let me know so I have the motivation to keep producing them. I hope this episode inspires you to let go of your excuses so you will live to your fullest potential.

I'm running a Zoom workshop this month called Eliminating Excuses. You will identify the excuses you're making in different areas of your life and discover how to drop them.  My monthly workshops are a part of Project WE membership and I'd love you to be there.  It's incredible to think I had the foresight to create this whole amazing online membership before everyone was cut off from real life connections.

And I am so proud of the women who are creating beautiful lives for themselves. I want that for you too.  Here we are over two years since I launched Project WE, and I've never raised the price from that super low founding members rate that I announced at Project Me Live, but I really am going to do that.

From May 1st, it's going up from 19 to 29 a month. Which is in line with my original idea of a dollar a day investment in yourself. A portion of that also goes to support women in really hard situations. Project WE is very much about giving back.  Once you join, your membership fee will never go up. So this is a great time to try Project WE.

If it's not for you, you can easily cancel. And if you love it, you'll get this low price for the lifetime of your membership. You'll also get two months free. If you decide to do annual membership.  Members also get great discounts off my High Vibe Journey program, which is coming up soon.  Go to myprojectme.

com and head to the Courses and Workshops tab for Project WE.  Until next time, open your mind, open your heart, and stay curious.  We all need some space in our lives for the magical and unknown.