Voice.

How can you find your voice? And speak with it clearly and confidently?

It's not that apparatus that rests in your throat and produces the range between screech and melifluous, but that essence within yourself that asserts its identity, steadily and surely.

For writers, it is the particular style they write in, that identifies, even without their byline, that the words that they write contain their unique voice. Ditto for artists, the strokes, the images, the palette they use, paint their individuality on the canvass. For musicians, its the way they combine the seven notes that sets their signature, and even for doctors and lawyers, the way their personality and their unique 'touch' that creeps into the cases they handle.

So much for the personality that creeps into work we do. Its always shaky at first, fumbling to find the right chord, the perfect pitch, but once discovered, we delight in it, finding ourselves over and over again.

But a voice is much more than the way one expresses oneself through work.

It is the core of our self. The essence of our nature. The ability to be truly comfortable in our own skin.

But how many of us really find this voice? This startlingly clear, infallible, unshakeable, firm voice that arises from deep within us. That is immune to any pressure, internal (our own insecurities)as well as external(societal).

Most of our days are spent in living a life that is shaped by expecatations and fears. Spent in conforming to inner demons and outer role models. In trying to make ourselves understood. In confusions and distractions. In trying to find a way to fit in with the world with what we have within us.

Some children have this gift at a young age. They can be with their friends, or alone, but they will be the same people - not changed in space or silence or the crowd. They sing their own song, even when they are alone - or with others.

But for many, even old age doesnt bring our own tune to our ears. We struggle, shift and change many times over, to get that comfort level, that feeling of being in sync with ourselves.

For a definite, crystal clear voice to emerge from this turbulence of the mind, is, to first find the silence within. That lets us hear the sound that is uniquely ours. That lets us speak in a way that is unambigous and aligned with what we do and how we are.
The voice that speaks - even when it is silent.