How to free your voice and keep your peace.
Tips from 14 years of public expression.
Loads of people do it.
Loads of people say the less honest, less edgy thing because of their gnawing fear that one day they’ll be wrong. Then it’ll be documented online. I’ll change my mind. I’ll be a fraud!
Of course there is the very real fear too that your honest, edgy ideas may initiate an onslaught of criticism that your nervous system can’t handle too.
But what if you’re most honest, pure ideas and thoughts aren’t as prickly or offensive as you think? What if when you leave the humanness in your words, and stop decorating your honesty with awkward baubles that are just distracting, people actually feel the you thats behind them?
You are worried about how your words will be received because you don’t fully stand behind them. You haven’t said what you really mean. You’ve beaten around the bush, let others opinions influence your voice, and you’re writing as if you’re already in combat with ‘those readers who just won’t get it’.
You are not at peace with putting your words out there when you are not at peace with the words. You are not at peace with the place in which you wrote them from. When you write something from the most honest part of you, there is nothing to be argued.
When you write to try and win people over, or to prove your goodness, or be seen in a certain way by your audience (good! caring! articulate! convicted only, never curious!), you will ever be at peace with your work.
I believe self honesty is one of the most valuable virtues. Without honesty with ourselves, we cannot be honest with our readers and we cannot even be honest with God.
So, these pieces of advice are from my 14 years of having a public profile online— from self publishing 4, almost 5 books (two are kids books mind you),speaking on stages for 14,000 people and hearing both glittering praise and uncomfortable criticism afterwards and also just being a keen observer of my own peace and friction.
Honesty and Truth are not the same thing.
This should be incredibly freeing. It was for me when I first grasped it.
I was on a training call for a course I was taking with a man named Dr Sasha Kesic. He was teaching on the biological differences between man and woman, and how knowing these differences can create more harmony in relationships.
Truth is the language of men. It is factual. Logical. Provable. This is why masculine content centers around statistics and arguable facts that you can debate. It’s also why, men don’t tend to send each other 18 minute audio messages like women do. Men want to know where they’re meeting. ‘See you there 1pm.’ ‘Sweet.’ Men are solution oriented.
Women communicate through honesty. Honesty is subjective. Honesty is telling the truth about what we are perceiving in the moment. It is ‘this is how I feel and this is what I see and this is what I sense and this is what I’m excited about.’ Women love and notice detail where men don’t. Women send 18 minute audio messages because we need connection. Women are connection oriented.
It is very helpful to know this because if you’re a woman, you might be trying to write only things that are TRUTH, rather than what is HONEST.
I want to give you permission to share what is HONEST, even if you can’t back it up with peer reviewed studies.
Tell what you’re seeing and sensing, what you’re curious about, what you’re excited about, what you’re wrestling with, what you’re not sure about, what happened from where you sit.
You do not have to arrive at logical, arguable conclusions about everything.
Women are trying to communicate like men and are losing the softness, the freedom, the permission to just be honest about now.
This leads me to the next point…
Overcome the ‘fear of one day being wrong’ so you can live honestly.
I can’t tell you the amount of people who are crippled by this— the fear of one day being wrong about what you share now. I have suffered from it too. The thing is though, I have lived through so many ‘changes of mind’ with a public audience following along, that I had to make peace with the simple fact— you will change your mind. Usually, you can do it privately. But when you are sharing your ideas and wrestles and innocently honest thoughts with an audience from your 20’s until your late 30’s, it does add a layer of complexity.
People do expect a certain something from you. But you cannot let their expectation of you rule your life, rules your thoughts or rule your voice.
You cannot stop others, even strangers from developing a connection to your work and feeling disappointed if you stray from a certain belief or perspective. They’re allowed to do that. You have to stay true to what is honest.
In 2017 when pregnant with my first baby, and 27/28 years old, I wrote my first book titled ‘Earth Is Hiring’. I self published it, with some distribution help and went on a (sold out, toot toot), global book tour with my new babe strapped to my chest.
That book won an independent publishing award and sold many thousands of copies.
At the beginning of that book, I wrote ‘I reserve the right to change my mind.’ I knew I was young. I knew I was naive. I mean, who gives a 20 something the ability to write a book? God does, clearly. Although I was very passionate about the topics and ideas I wrote about, I inherently knew that I would grow and change and that it was important to me to declare to my readers: ‘Hey, I’m young!! This is written from where I’m at now! But I’m just letting you know that I’m free to change. I reserve that right.’
Fast forward to 2022, when I stopped printing that book. I was going through a big change personally, meeting Christ and innocently discovering what that meant.
I looked back at my old ideas in that book (and the one that followed) and cringed at some of my natural naiveity. I didn’t know if i fully stood behind all of the concepts and so as a move of integrity, or so I thought, I pushed ‘pause’ on it’s distribution.
People still somehow found it in bookstores.
People bought it for exorbitant amounts of $ secondhand.
It is only recently that, as I’ve matured not only in age, but in Christ, I realise that I might always look back on my old work with a little bit of cringe— that’s the creative life. If I unpublish all of my old work because it’s not on my exact level today, I’ll have no work for my kids to look back on— no written evidence of my imperfect journey, growth, maturing individually, as a mother and a wife and as a woman of God.
When I announced to my audience on IG that I was preparing to let it be published again (unchanged, but maybe with a prologue), they were ecstatic and honestly it blew me away.
These were people who STILL followed me despite all the twists and turns I’ve made. They commented things like ‘this book changed my life!’ ‘we love watching YOUR journey and we know what to take and what to leave’, which to be honest, is the kind of relief we need to give ourselves.
Trust your audiences own discernment and intelligence. You aren’t responsible for hand holding them through YOUR evolution. They are big kids.
Your words will be cringe in 3 years, say them anyway.
I imagine my 80 year old self will look back on 37 year old me and my writing with fondness, not cringe, because she will know so well how much we change and deepen and hopefully lighten as we grow. She would laugh at the idea of me trying to only have work out there that perfectly represents my ideas now.
This doesn’t mean you want to live free of conviction. But don’t convictions take time and wrestles to arrive at?
I have let myself rest in the knowing that one of the gifts God gave me was my curiosity. I want to explore and taste and know for myself. I won’t borrow your convictions.
My work is not work of certainty, unless it is.
It is always work of curiosity.
Let that free you.
Yes, your mind might change. But what else can you be but honest about where you are now?
It might actually be that by saying it now, you can go to the next place.
Some things are not for sharing publicly.
I will wrap it up here.
Some things are for your journal. If you share them publicly, you must be sturdy in what you’ve shared. You must know that you may get advice, or praise or criticism, but you must care more about your honest expression, than about what and who people perceive you to be. When you micromanage how others see you, you strangle your honesty, your authenticity and your magnetic expression.
You may want a private, paid subscription where you can share to a smaller, more invested audience.
Or you may just want to share certain nuggets and wisdom, without sharing details of your life that are simply not meant to be shared on the internet.
Our generation needs to remember dignity and poise and elegance when it comes to our online voices.
You will become more free in your voice when you are brutally (and lovingly) honest with yourself.
You will be more at peace with what you share when you have shared it from the right place— the place that cannot be rattled by misinterpretation.
Easier said than done, maybe, but I believe we’ve got to find both freedom and peace in this online world and in our lives in general.
You don’t need to have a public platform at all. If you’re going to have one, ensure it’s life giving. Otherwise, it’s taking too much from you.
If you want more loving pep talks on creative integrity and vitality— subscribe below.
If you want to binge a 160 page guide called ‘Honest— Creative Integrity in a performative world’— it’s here.
Lotsa love,
PK XX