How you Show Up Affects my Voice
A while back I had one of the most profound conversations of my research into ‘speaking truth to power’. It was with Iain Wilkie and Helen Carpenter from 50 Million Voices, a not-for-profit organisation that seeks to ‘transform the world of work for people who stutter – and for employers and society too’.
“It takes two to stutter” Iain told me – a phrase well known amongst leaders in the stuttering community and their allies.
He told me that how I show up will either help or hinder his voice. What helps is when I show up with calmness, patience, curiosity and respect. What doesn’t is when I am busy, distracted, interrupting or disrespectful.
Iain added “as a stutterer, it helps to put on the ears of the person who is listening.” He explained that stuttering often instigates a stress response in the listener – it is important therefore that he understands the experience of the listener and helps them to become more comfortable.
Similarly, he hopes the listener reciprocates by understanding his experience in his moment of stuttering – the unpredictability of occurrence, sound, length and physical expression. “In that moment, mine is a different way of speaking. One which potentially offers an invitation to a different way of listening, hearing and responding.”
And so, it is like a dance between speaker and listener as each takes turns in the knowledge that their moves cannot fail to impact the other and then impact themselves once again in a constant flow of gesture and response.
Martin Buber, the 20th century philosopher, whom I studied in my doctoral work and in my book Dialogue in Organizations, suggested there are two main ways we encounter ‘the other’. ‘I-It’ describes how we meet another in a subject-object transactional manner. We view the other as a means to our own ends. It is a calculated meeting in that we tend to be preoccupied with our own needs or the issue at hand.
‘I-Thou’ meeting, on the other hand, is genuine mutual encounter in the present where we meet the other as a unique subject with whom we nevertheless share deep connectedness and the awareness of our inescapable impact on one another.
Buber described how ‘all real living is meeting’. In other words, we are always relating; it is the nature of being human to be in relation, and it is when one glimpses that very nature and depth of relationality that one encounters ‘Thou’. Then one knows what it really is to feel alive. We only become ‘I’ through encountering ‘Thou’ – self and other are inseparable, in constant dialogue, co-evolving.
My voice dances with yours. It’s pace, volume, tone, intent and the very ‘steps’ or words I utter, dynamically choreographed in connection with yours.
So, as my co-researcher John Higgins and I are at pains to emphasize, ‘speaking up’ is not a matter of ‘fixing’ the other – the person who is silent or the person who stutters.
It is in how we pause, ‘turn towards’, as Buber would put it, see and listen to the other.
It is in how we are able to imagine the other’s perspective whilst being so closely aware of our own.
It is in our realisation that our breathless, pathological busyness disappears the other. And our deep knowing of what a tragedy that is for them, for us and for the world.
It is in our commitment and re-commitment, every day, to make the small choices to show up in a way that enables us, together, to really live, to flourish and to find our voices.
It is not you, not me. It is us.
With thanks to Iain and Helen from 50 Million Voices and to John Higgins for his advice when writing this blog.
If you would like to discover more about the work of 50 Million Voices please contact Iain Wilkie at chair@50millionvoices.org
Joshua St. Pierre’s article ‘The construction of the disabled speaker: Locating stuttering in disability studies’ explores the relational dynamic of stuttering through the lens of both the speaker and the listener. In short, that “It takes two to stutter.”
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