Find Your Voice: The Simple Way to Tell Your Story as an Ordinary Person

Posted on May 16, 2018 by Kaylee Houde, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

You heard me, even if you are the most ordinary person on the planet you are still going to have to get out of bed and tell someone your story at some point. It might be for your dream job or it might be just to make a friend at the bar, but you’re going to have to find your voice eventually.

I did not realize that I even had a voice until I became the typical disgruntled cubicle millennial who felt like she was not making a difference in the workplace.

I had written rants in my journal countless times, but I had never shared my thoughts or my story loud and proud. I always thought, “Why would anyone care about me, I am just Kaylee – the average overachiever who lives and dreams like everyone else, I am not special.”

That is where I was wrong. We are all unique and have something great to offer the world, and once I started seeing and believing it, people started listening to what I had to say! This is where belonging was born!

So, I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you are a brick layer or a professor at a university. You are a human being and your story will inspire others no matter how ordinary you think you are.

I am going to tell you the simple ways I learned to tell my story that had nothing to do with social media marketing algorithms or trying to get rich quick schemes. I simply did these three things…

(1) I figured out I was passionate about something
(2) I wrote about it, authentically
(3) I told people about it, confidently

(1) Figuring out you’re passionate about something

Yes, it was that simple. In 2015 I was feeling uninspired and stagnant in my day job. I was working on projects that were of little interest to me, and stifled by the bureaucracy of the corporate world. Instead, I wanted to feel passionate and inspired again, so I started doing some research in the areas of positive psychology and the power of positive thinking. I learned about neurons and neuro-linguistic programming. I started to realize that I had this innate interest and read so many Psychology Today articles I am surprised my head hasn’t exploded. It was like a fire had been lit inside me with everything I read. I wanted to share it with the world, and that’s when I realized I had a passion.

If you haven’t found something to be passionate about yet, that is okay. That is part of the journey. Heck you could just tell people about how you’re still searching for something, as long as you are being intentional about it, I promise you are more interesting than you think.

Also, the things I am passionate about, are part of deep-rooted personality patterns that date back to my early childhood. So, if you’re feeling uninspired, ask yourself what were you interested in at age 5 or 7 for some ideas. I was organizing bag clips by color and size and asking lots of really strange existential questions about the meaning of life… (organization skills and Psychology were written all over it).

A lot of this boiled down to listening to my gut instincts. I consider myself a very logic driven person, but what I have realized is that my instincts have rarely been wrong. Now I combine the two, and always do a gut check before making a decision.

The decision for me, in this case, was to start a blog about happiness (from a millennial perspective) which is where my voice was born.

(2) Writing about it, authentically (or singing, or talking, or vlogging, or whatever)

The next step was simply putting pen to paper, or in this case fingers to keyboard. I went about telling my rants in a blog post format. No, I didn’t analyze 15,000 other blogs first. No, I didn’t check to make sure my model was aligned with the online trends. (A quick Google of “online blog trends” resulted in about 202,000,000 links in .75 seconds).

Ain’t nobody got time for that!

I simply wrote. I wrote based on what I found interesting or inspiring at the time, and cited my research in the process – which I had learned was important to do as a Psychology minor.

I took the topics I was reading about, learning about, or thinking about and put my perspective out into the world for others to see. All I wanted was for one person to read it, to feel that they heard me or learned something, and that we would be connected. That’s it. That was my only intention. Being connected was the fundamental “why” behind everything I did (and still do). It is a fundamental human need.

Thus, whoever you are, if you pretend you are just having a conversation with a friend or family member, you can tell your story. Choose the medium that best serves you, and just do it. The only trick to it is being yourself, and not giving a rats ass what others might say about it. Being real was more of a mindset thing for me than anything else, which leads me into point three.

(3) Confidence and telling people

The kicker for me was overcoming insecurities around judgment and being good enough. There are so many haters out there, and Taylor Swift was right, they’re going to hate. This never stopped being true, but what did change was my mindset. It became absolutely unbearable for me to continue to hide behind my “post previews” and I finally hit send on sharing my first domain name with my friends and family in late 2017 and cringed as I waited for my first comment.

In reality, however, nobody really cared, and if they did they actually typically had positive things to say! Even an ex-client of mine from Oil and Gas read one of the posts that I shared on LinkedIn and sent me a comment saying that my stuff was great and that he would share it with his daughters.

Excuse me!? He said what!? Yes, this senior executive said these things and it made me realize one crucial fact…

We are all human. It does not matter who you are, we are all connected by our humanity.
So with that in mind, I started to become more confident. I did not care if my posts were absolutely perfect, because if I was not trying and taking imperfect action daily, I would never say or do a gosh darn thing! I decided that silence would be much worse than a negative comment or two, and the more I shared the more encouragement I got from my network.

Now I reach out to friends and they say things like, “Oh hey, I saw that post you did about purpose, it was super inspiring,” and the pattern continues. So, instead of sitting there listening to all the gremlins in your mind trying to play tricks on you and keep you small, just try it. What is the worst that can happen?