#06 - I Don't Have a Voice. I Just Talk.
The most common sentence founders say to me. Always said with the voice they've decided they don't have.
A founder said that to me on a discovery call last month.
She said it out loud, with her voice, in a real sentence, while explaining how she was the only person at her company who could actually describe what they did to a customer without putting them to sleep.
“I don’t have a voice. I just talk.”
I wrote it down. It’s the most common sentence I hear in this work. 25+ years, hundreds of founders, dozens of execs and coaches. “I don’t have a voice.” Always said with the voice. Always while doing the thing they’ve decided they can’t do.
Let me say the obvious thing once so we never have to say it again.
You have a voice. You have, in fact, a very specific voice. I know because I just listened to you describe your customer for forty minutes without using the word “synergy” once.
What you don’t have is a writing voice that sounds like the people you admire on LinkedIn. That’s a different problem.
It’s also not the problem you think it is.
The thing nobody tells founders is that the voice they’re looking for is the voice they already use. The one that comes out at dinner. On a podcast. In a Slack message at 11pm to a co-founder you trust. The version that doesn’t get edited.
That voice isn’t missing. It’s been disqualified.
You disqualified it because:
It doesn’t sound like Naval.
It doesn’t sound like Justin Welsh.
It doesn’t sound “professional.”
It uses the word “knackered” instead of “fatigued.”
It says “the bit our customers hate” instead of “a primary friction point.”
It tells stories about your dog when you’re explaining your pricing model.
You have looked at your actual voice, decided it doesn’t qualify as A Voice, and then concluded that you don’t have one. That’s not a missing voice. That’s a rejected voice.
The rejection happens before you write a word. By the time you sit down to draft a post, you’ve already vetoed the version of you that would actually be interesting to read. What gets typed is whoever’s left after the veto.
That’s why the post sounds like a press release. That’s why you read it back and think that’s not me.
It isn’t you. You disqualified you.
Here’s the trick.
Open the voice memo app on your phone. Find the most recent recording you sent to yourself, a friend, or a co-founder. Anything. The one where you were thinking out loud about a problem, or rehearsing what you wanted to say to a customer, or just venting.
Listen to it.
Now read your last LinkedIn post.
Two voices. One is sharp, opinionated, occasionally rude, intermittently funny, full of specifics, fully recognisable as you. The other is “value-driven content” written by someone you’d cross the street to avoid at a conference.
The first voice is the one you’ve been telling yourself you don’t have.
You have it. You use it. You just don’t publish it.
So the question isn’t “how do I find my voice.” It’s “what made me decide my actual voice doesn’t count.”
For most founders the answer is some version of:
Fifteen years of being told to be more professional in meetings.
A boss who edited the colour out of your emails.
Someone in marketing who once “softened” a thing you wrote, and you let them.
A creator you admire who writes in a tone that isn’t yours, and now you think that tone is The Tone.
The voice was always there. The decision to disqualify it was learned. Anything that’s learned can be unlearned.
It just takes one decision to publish the unfiltered version once and see what happens.
The thing to do this week is small and specific.
Take the next post you’d ordinarily write for LinkedIn. Don’t write it.
Open your phone, hit record, and talk for three minutes about whatever the post was supposed to be about. Don’t structure it. Don’t introduce yourself. Don’t think about who’s listening.
Now transcribe it. Don’t clean it up.
Read the transcript twice. Find one sentence in there you’d never have written down on purpose.
Publish a post built around that sentence.
If it does worse than your usual posts, ignore everything in this newsletter and go back to whatever you were doing.
If it does better, you’ve just proven the thing I was trying to tell you.
You don’t have a voice problem. You had one all along.
You just talk.
Sarra The Ghost 👻