How to Build Your Speaker Identity with Two Little Words

By Natacha Montemuino, MD  ·  3 minute read  ·  Issue #6

It’s a July afternoon and I’m driving to Westchester to spend quality time with a few of my high school friends at a fabulous cookout.

After filling my red gingham melamine plate with salad, a spoonful of paella, and a few slices of filet mignon, I sit down at the Mediterranean-style patio table next to a woman named Martha, whom I’m meeting for the very first time. She smiles warmly and introduces herself. We exchange pleasantries and she’s delighted to hear that I help quiet high-achieving corporate leaders communicate clearly in high-stakes situations. She leans in closer to me and lowers her voice as she confides, “I’m an English teacher and I love what I do. I can speak in front of kids all day long but I am terrible at speaking in front of adults.”

What Martha doesn’t realize is that by saying “I am terrible at speaking in front of adults,” she has already chosen her speaker identity.

The choice you make every day

I ended my last newsletter with a question: Who do you choose to be when you speak?

The answer to that question is your speaker identity.

Your identity is how you see yourself and who you believe you are. It’s the story you’ve internalized about yourself, built from your lived experiences and what others have said about you. Your speaker identity is even more specific because it’s who you choose to be when you speak.

You speak every day of your life, in meetings, on virtual calls, in hallways, and at networking events. In every one of those moments, you have the power to decide and choose who you want to be.

If you are not intentional and specific about choosing your speaker identity every time you speak, a choice gets made by default, and it’s probably not the one you would have selected.

The choice that gets made for you

Two weeks ago I wrote about imposter syndrome in high achievers, the intense self-doubt they often experience even when they have a track record of success.

When left unchecked, your self-doubt makes the default choice for you, and it probably sounds a lot like what Martha told me at the cookout. “I am terrible at speaking in front of adults.” Or maybe it sounds like, “I am terrified of giving presentations.”

Pay attention to how those sentences start. They are declarative statements that begin with “I am.” Everything that follows an “I am” statement becomes something you believe about yourself.

People act in ways that fit who they believe they are. If you believe you’re terrible at speaking in front of people, you will probably avoid it whenever you can. You might send an email instead of volunteering to give a presentation in the meeting. You might stay quiet during an offsite workshop instead of offering to summarize and present the key points for your team. Then you look at all of these moments as proof of exactly what you already thought. And you end up building a case against yourself.

But there’s another way to do this. A much better way.

You identify the pattern, disrupt it, and intentionally decide who you want to be when you speak, because identity is a decision and a choice. After choosing your speaker identity, you must then take the required steps to build the habits and skills that are congruent with your chosen identity.

What’s in the way

Choosing your speaker identity sounds simple enough, right? So how do you do it?

Well, before you can choose and build your speaker identity, you must first identify the roadblocks that keep you from expressing yourself freely.

The roadblocks are the patterns that keep you quiet in the rooms that shape your career, and most of them have been running so long they probably feel like part of your personality.

You can’t build a new speaker identity on top of old patterns that make you second-guess yourself.

So your first step is to identify the current situations where speaking feels uncomfortable and ask yourself the following questions:

• What sensations do I feel in my body in those moments?
• How do I react?
• What thoughts do I have about myself?

The second step is to look at uncomfortable speaking experiences in your past and ask yourself the same questions:

• What are my earliest memories of speaking that felt this way? What happened?
• How did I react?
• What thoughts did I have about myself?

By reflecting on and answering the questions above, you start to develop awareness around the early speaking experiences that have shaped your current ones. This awareness is required for you to identify the old patterns and build new ones.

Where this leaves us

You’ve been building your speaker identity your entire life, in every room where you avoided speaking up and with every “I am” statement disparaging your public speaking skills.

What’s different now is that you know you have the power to decide and choose who you want to be as a speaker. That’s a very different position from the one Martha was in when she unknowingly declared her chosen identity as “terrible at speaking in front of adults” at that cookout in Westchester.

Over the next few editions I’ll walk you through the rest of the steps required to identify and clear the roadblocks. Then you can start building your speaker identity and layering on the skills to communicate clearly in career-shaping high-stakes moments, so you’re heard, respected, and taken seriously.

That work starts today, with the sentence you’re already telling yourself.

What comes after “I am” when you describe yourself as a speaker?

Reply and tell me. I read every response, and I love hearing from you.

See you in two weeks.

Dr. Natacha