Speaking From Your Heart

“What comes from the heart goes to the heart.”  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I am so proud of my parent group who participated in the “Developing Your Speaking Voice” series of workshops.  They breathed deeply, practiced relaxation imagery, visualized success and got up there in front of the room to share some incredibly moving personal stories.

Everybody’s got a story, in fact many stories.  And when given a chance to share to a welcoming group of listeners, the stories flow naturally and with beautiful emotion.  It’s a relatively easy way to begin getting comfortable speaking to a group – by talking about something near and dear to you.  It’s like sharing a part of oneself with a friend.

Speaking from the heart makes its way into the listeners’ hearts; and we left each session feeling (here’s one of my often-used favorite words) Faklempted.  Native English speakers, English as a second language speakers, didn’t matter; the openness and vulnerability made their way in.  There were universal messages that we could all take for ourselves.

Loving really hot showers; cherishing and appreciating one’s partner;

From dreading hip surgery to it becoming a transformative family event;

Having a spouse encourage you to become a better You; watching your mother die and talking about it with your six year old; failing at a project and trying over and over until you succeed; speaking aloud about your pain in having a special needs child; writing a speech to your unborn child and presenting it at your son’s upcoming Bar-Mitzvah – we were all privy to these most beautiful talks.

And a couple of other powerful take-aways that can be used in all of our lives:

• We don’t have to be the best or extraordinary in our speech or any endeavor; we can be good enough.  This can take a lot of the pressure off ourselves so that we can simply be good.  And who knows, in being good, we may become great. And if not, good is good enough.

 

• We cannot rid ourselves totally of our fear or anxiety over speaking (or anything else that brings forth those run-away feelings).  That would be a goal in futility because these fearful emotions naturally arise in us.  What we can do is learn to manage our anxiety (and maybe even minimize it) over whatever it is that we want or need to do, so that we can do it.  Otherwise we get locked into our nervousness and don’t spread our wings to see how high we can truly fly.  And we can all fly higher than we think.  I recently heard a great line: “don’t believe everything you think.”

 

Bravo to these parents who spread their wings by getting up there and presenting their voice.  What came from their hearts certainly went into all of our hearts and we are all left feeling enriched, elevated and connected to some very powerful universal messages and lessons of humankind.

 

Thanks for stopping by.  Here’s the link to my audio interview with Robert Wall where I speak from my heart and hopefully give over some of my life lessons, thus far.