Author interview: Find Your Voice as a Leader

As a Communication Coach, I’m always on the lookout for books that will help my clients. I’ve found many works on psychology, business, inspiration, spirituality, and leadership that have been useful for supportive research, helpful personal growth tools, and more. And with the amount of reading I’ve done, it’s starting to get hard to find a book that sounds new, that has legitimately fresh ideas that can be immediately implemented. However, Find Your Voice as a Leader, by Paul N Larsen, MA, CPPC, is just such a book.

Mr. Larsen is a certified executive coach and leadership facilitator and speaker, a former C-level executive for a 3-billion-dollar corporation, and a current member of the Forbes Coaches Council. Paul helps leaders and teams to find their unique “voice.” His new book gives readers some of the insights and tools that his clients have found invaluable, and now so do I.

I had the privilege of speaking with Paul N Larsen recently, and I expressed to him how much I found the end of each chapter helpful with its questions, affirmations, and action items all directed at the reader. I not only found these sections useful to the implementation of Mr. Larsen’s concepts for myself, I could also see how to make use of each chapter in my Coaching practice.

As I made my way through the book, I kept thinking about, not just my business clients, but my personal clients who could use this book to discover and empower the leader within each of them. So, I asked Paul about this. Did he mean his book to useful to everyone? “Yes,” he said. “Finding Your Voice applies to everybody. Leadership is not confined to an organization or an enterprise. In fact, I would even say that right now in the world, we really need to find our inner leader. We need to find our Voice. It doesn’t matter what your title or career projection is, we all have an inner leader.”

The idea that the world really needs all of us to find and use our inner leader resonated with me. But I have clients that have a very hard time seeing themselves as leaders. They want to learn to be better parents, partners, managers, or volunteers, but they don’t think they can or should lead because of the way they have learned to think about themselves. I saw quickly, while reading Find Your Voice as a Leader, that even those who were sure they could never lead could learn, not only how to lead, but that they wanted to. Paul commented on this.

The expression of who we are, that brand of who we are, is sometimes dictated to us. It’s dictated by norms of behavior, by management ideals of how we should be. “You should be like this or like that.” So we norm ourselves to what others think we should be. We need to figure out what we represent, what’s our expression. What’s my brand that I’m representing to my company, my boss, my family, the people I meet on the street? Can I make a small difference in the way I look at the world? Can I make a difference for the person in the supermarket? Creating your expression is really a culmination of understanding your values, really dictating and creating those outcomes you want for yourself, utilizing that influence, having the courage to look at things differently, to try on a new behavior.

Paul was careful not to over exaggerate leadership as the activity of those who save the world. He said that finding your voice is more about understanding your values and how to express them than it is trying to lead everyone.

Figure out who and what you can influence instead of trying to influence what you cannot. The important piece is to be courageous, to act, to step outside our comfort zones. Be courageous enough to try on a new behavior or skill. Try on a new way of looking at a situation. Sometimes it requires action mentally instead of physically. But we may really need to look at things through a different perspective, through a different lens. For many of us, that might be courageous.

For me, this was a foundational point. In my work and my life as a whole, I have seen situations and individuals where I wanted to be of service, but those weren’t the right places for my influence. I learned, over time, to let go of what I could not do, and figure out what I could do. Find Your Voice as a Leader has a number of really helpful examples and tools to assist readers in discovering where, when, and how to use one’s influence, to lead.

Because a number of my clients are women working to establish themselves more as strong, independent thinkers and doers, I’ve needed to step them through the process of understanding their value and their values. And as I worked my way through Paul’s book, I kept thinking about how great this information would be for my clients. This got me wondering about if there was a gender gap in leadership development in Paul’s experience.

What I find is that sometimes it’s not just gender. It’s how a person is constructed. People are emotionally constructed with the head, heart, and gut. They need to have all three in balance no matter what decisions or actions they are undertaking. So, more than gender, the emotional construction of a person will definitely affect they way they process the information in the book to a certain extent. But what I have found is that, in the long run, no matter how men and women come to the information, they leave it achieving the measure of success they have set for themselves. Absolutely, there are differences in approach and in what resonates with them, but once we get in and do the work, once we get beyond the facade of reactions, the results are very similar. The bigger measure of success is if an individual is ready to be coached, if they are coachable.

I could definitely see how an individual’s upbringing, experience in relationships, business, school, and so on, can create a lens that may cloud their ability to productively process the information in the book at first. However, the layout of the information, the care and guidance exhibited in Paul’s writing style, and the depth of information and examples provided, give everyone a level field on which to discover their leader within.

I have more than twenty years in the business of helping people discover their true natures and put that information into action, and Find Your Voice as a Leader gave me new insights and tools that I have already been successfully putting to work. It’s an impactful read that is worth the time and effort to dig into so that no matter where you are in your life, career, or relationships, you can find your unique and valuable voice.

(Originally published on LinkedIn)