"Dissatisfied."
"I hate corporate life."
"I never really wanted to."
"I feel lost."
“I still don't know what I want to do.”
I've heard these phrases spoken by some of the most ostensibly successful people of all, senior posts at work, glittering accolades, much material comfort.
But how can this be how they feel?
Social voices can be many. They may be parental, peer, gender, socioeconomic, religious, cultural. None of these are in themselves a problem or necessarily to blame for why we might feel disconnected from ourselves and our chosen career paths.
But if the social voice we elect as the main one in life drowns our own, we begin to unravel how disorientation can come about in career.
Think about external voices that you might be listening to when you think about who you are, how you identify yourself, and how you make decisions. Whose voice are you hearing more loudly than any others?
What does yours say? Can you even hear it?
I talk about this in my book, The Creative Voice, a theoretical memoir-album I wrote to explain how it was that I lost my singing voice at 16 when I could simultaneously speak perfectly well.
"The moment social shaming enters human psychology—the feeling that one’s innate mode of expression is inferior or inappropriate for public display—the linearity of the voice-to-mind relation fractures into a web-like voice-to-mind complex, where some parts of ourselves we show to the world, and others we learn to hide.
This process starts early. Say Dada. No, not Lady Gaga, Dada. Good boy. Make Mummy proud. Naughty boy! That’s not nice. Be a big boy. Do your homework. Sit up straight. Do you as you’re told! That’s not what we do. Work hard or you’ll fail.
Here we have the social voices of praise, shame, gender, morality, authority, propriety, prospect, and status entering the ears of the young before they’ve even learned to speak. Notice that these voices are also reflected back into the home even if they originate from outside it.
None of these are our own voices and yet they are the prisms through which we learn to become a person. Voices speak of social identity because they are social identity. Language itself cannot form in isolation, but this again speaks to just how much the voice is both personal as well as public property."
If you are looking for your voice in the mix of the many that have become you, you might have to first start with really listening to those voices that define you.
Somewhere among them is your voice. Try to hear it.
It's there.