About a year and a half ago, I posted about wanting to define what my particular voice was. Its something I continued to think about, and eventually I settled on this list:
My voice is approachable, knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and articulate.
This is mostly for professional communication, though the idea behind the exercise is that while one’s tone changes to match the occasion, one’s voice is consistent. And it does give me a certain framing structure when I’m writing and email (or any other writing) to remind myself of these core characteristics.
It’s kind of like any kind of self-analysis in that regard. By focusing on certain elements, I enhance those elements until through a bit of self-fulfilling prophesy they become the core attributes I defined them to be. Which is why I made sure my definition was all positively framed.
However……
A few weeks ago I was frustrated and a little sick and in a generally unhappy place, and I wrote some things that were very decidedly not positively framed. And then, as I got un-frustrated and un-sick and .. un-unhappy? .. I thought about how I’d written what I wrote, and the voice that I used. So I wrote out the characteristics of that voice.
Which came out as sarcastic, self-deprecating, apathetic, and rambling.
I wrote the two lists side by side to contemplate them. What could I learn; who was reflected in these two lists. And it dawned on me in this flash of insight that they were the same list, just mirrored back at each other. In a good mood I am approachable; in a bad mood I am sarcastic (possibly caustic). I see myself as knowledgeable; I am self-deprecating. Enthusiasm turns to apathy; articulate (presumably focused) becomes rambling. It’s all the same essential me in there, just in a positive or negative light.
Like most psychological insights, it seems perfectly obvious when you just lay it out there, but the discovery was personally illuminating.