What prevents you from speaking up?

When you were younger, what was your experience when you spoke up? Were you heard, or were you silenced, ignored, or punished?

The echoes of earlier wounds often shape our ability to speak up. Our ability to speak up is often influenced by the burden of past experiences, whether it’s in meetings, public forums, or one-on-one conversations, speaking up can feel like a significant risk when past relational traumas resurface.

Even the most confident leaders may carry fears of rejection, judgment, or failure, stemming from previous experiences of not being heard or valued. We may worry about being misunderstood or feel that our words lack significance.

Embracing your voice, even in the face of uncertainty, is a transformative act. It’s a journey towards building more courage and leading in alignment with your values.

Speaking with grounded confidence isn’t just about exerting authority; it’s about fostering trust, connection, and respect within yourself and with those you lead.

Today’s guest lives the principles she teaches on speaking up and showing up with more power, especially for those who hold identities outside of dominant cultural norms. Her work offers us all a powerful road map for speaking up without exiling our story.

Samara Bay is the author of the best-selling book, Permission to Speak, a revolutionary take on public speaking for the future we want. She is a Los Angeles-based speech coach whose clients range from candidates for US Congress to C-suite executives, change-making entrepreneurs, movie stars, and high school girls. She has led workshops and keynotes for groups across various industries, from significant corporations to nonprofit foundations and academic institutions, and her work has been widely featured in the media. 

 

 

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How Samara’s work with emerging political leaders caused her to realize that we need to change the narrative of how authority is “supposed” to sound
• How she connects losing her voice in grad school to an internalized shame of sounding “different” that people of non-dominant identities carry
• Why we need to shift the narrative to allow authoritative voices to be emotionally honest and vulnerable
• The value of using our voices to care out loud and to tell our stories
• Why it’s normal to sound different in various settings, as long as we aren’t compromising our integrity
• Unpacking common “negative” speech patterns and how they function in our communication
• Breaking down the impossible balancing acts of archetypes we expect of women in power

 

Learn more about Samara Bay:

• Website
• Instagram: @samarabay
• How to Show Up
• Connect on LinkedIn
• Permission to Speak: How to Change What Power Sounds Like, Starting with You

 

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

 

Resources:

• A Court of Thorns and Roses, Sarah J. Maas
• Taylor Swift – marjorie
• Bridgerton
• Kids Incorporated
• The All New Mickey Mouse Club
• Moms Demand Action
• EP 90: Engaged and Consistent Leadership: with Moms Demand Action Founder, Shannon Watts

 

Transcript:

[Inspirational Intro Music]

Samara Bay: The permission is that perhaps we just don’t expect that there will be some end day when we believe that we are enough and have the confidence. We just get to be people who keep trying and who keep gathering our allies so that the trying feels really good on the inside.

Rebecca Ching: What fears hold you back when you want to speak up? What did you experience when you spoke up when you were younger? Were you listened to, celebrated? Were you shushed, dismissed, or punished?

Now, when we think about leaders speaking up, we often imagine this confident voice, clear communication, and decisive action. But even the most seemingly confident leaders carry burdens of fear, of rejection, judgment, or failure shaped by past experiences of not being heard or valued. Now, our ability to speak up often can feel shaped by the echoes of earlier wounds, and my guest today offers us all a powerful roadmap for speaking up without exiling our story.

I’m Rebecca Ching, and you’re listening to The Unburdened Leader, the show that goes deep with humans who navigate life’s challenges and lead in their own ways. Our goal is to learn how they address the burdens they carry, how they learn from them and become better and more impactful leaders of themselves and others.

Relational trauma leaves many unseen burdens. I know, it’s a heavy start here, right? But I see how past wounds cause so much internal angst and labor for folks who feel frustrated about how old struggles keep showing up when they desire to speak with power and clarity. I also see in my work how relational wounds cause so much frustration and wonderings like, “Why is this still a struggle after years of personal and professional work?”

2:10

Relational wounds can be sneaky, real sneaky to address fully, and healing them and integrating them often occurs in layers and seasons over a lifetime. I know, not a three-step plan to change your life in ten days. But this leads to a lot of disappointment when you have to keep moving through the impact of these burdens.

Because these wounds impacted our sense of safety and connection in foundational relationships, like with family or peers or authority figures like coaches or bosses, it can have a lifelong impact. But they don’t have to have the intensity of impact forever. In fact, they can move from running our life to informing us. I call these echoes for those who’ve done a lot of deep work but see these echoes show up when they step up to speak and lead in ways that feel new and vulnerable. These kinds of relational disruptions teach us early on that our voice, our presence, our needs are too important to be honored by those in positions of power in our lives or influence in our lives.

Now, for those of you with relational trauma and you put yourself out there and step up to lead, these early messages from these wounds can quietly shape how you step into positions of authority and use your voice and your power. I know many of you excel at projecting an image of strength but inside you battle fears of rejection or invisibility or inadequacy that stem from these types of wounds in your past. You might second guess yourself or self-sensor before offering an opinion or deflecting attention from your contributions. You may also fear being wrong or not taken seriously.

4:00

I often hear clients say things that ruminate in their head. “Will I be misunderstood?” or “What if my words don’t carry enough weight?” or “What if everyone turns on me?” And I see how many leaders I work with hold back, not because they lack knowledge or insight (far from it), but because they’ve internalized the belief that speaking up could lead to conflict, shame, and dismissal. And I want to make it clear, this internalization is based on lived experience.

Now, this tension between our inner world and outer expectations exhausts us and leaves us unmoored because we lose connection with our authentic voice (meaning who we are) and disconnects us from our personal power. But when we pause and recognize our relational trauma story and how it’s created patterns of ways we protect that prevent us from accessing the full power of our voice, things can start to shift. Truly just awareness and witnessing, for many, is that start. When we begin to understand how these past experiences shape our present behavior, we open the door to healing hope and different leadership.

I’m remembering someone I met a while ago, and they were talking about a struggle they had with getting a promotion to the C-suite level. There was a pattern of this certain archetype of a person that would come into their office and their presence would just — they’d start to feel agitated, they wouldn’t trust themselves, they felt small, they felt weaker, and I asked this person, “When was the first time you remember feeling this way?” [Laughs] And they kind of paused and sat back and were like, “Oh, my goodness. I went right back to my ex-husband who abused substances and was abusive. I never knew if I was gonna get what I was gonna get when I came into his presence. And dang, this particular team member is pretty volatile. While not violent or as disrespectful or dehumanizing that I experienced, but they’re not safe, they’re not honest, and they’re not trustworthy.”

6:20

And it was so cool to see how just that reflection — and now this isn’t the case for everyone. Some folks need some deep, deep trauma work. But this is someone who’s done a ton of work, and they just needed a little bit of an update, a little bit of an orientation to help their system know that, “Wait, this feeling isn’t one from the past,” but helps ground them in the present.

So when we begin to understand how these past experiences shape our present behavior, we open the door to healing, hope, and different leadership. We need patience and perspective when we look to heal from relational trauma, especially as it relates to finding our voice, and I encourage you to consider this as a lifelong practice unfolding where we change gradually, just really want to drive that point home. And this perspective will help you feel less like a failure or pined and normalize the winding path of being human and leading in this time that we are in.

Now, speaking up, whether in meetings or public forums or one-on-one conversations often means taking a risk that can feel risky to enormous when the echoes of relational trauma show up. But when you start to allow yourself to get to know your voice again and even trust it in the face of uncertainty, you can build more courage, you put in those reps and build up that trust and that confidence with that consistency while leading aligned with your values. Now, this is practice, so as we grow and do different work or make higher-stakes choices, always review the following and note these can shift as you grow, so make sure to go and update them. Do a review. We’re in the moment. Get clear on your triggers and trailheads that cause your self-censorship.

8:09

So if you are speaking on a topic where you feel less experienced or have less expertise, you might feel inadequate, and that might bring up those echoes of being criticized or dismissed. Make sure to check in on your self-trust. I think we always need to kind of check that and see how we’re doing and trusting ourselves, trusting our ability to handle difficult things, to be vulnerable. See, self-trust is one of the main casualties of relational trauma, and so, it’s something to always pay attention to because when you don’t have trust in you, you may doubt your ability to navigate a challenging conversation or (this is the one I relate to the most and I see a lot) you over-prepare or under-prepare because you feel like nothing you do will be enough, that over-functioning or under-functioning.

Maybe this is obvious. I have a strong bias for this. But check your supports. Where are you at with your support? It could be a coach. It could be a therapist. It could be a mentor. It could be a peer group, a mentor group. Do an inventory of the supports you’re getting. Sometimes you need to lean on them again. Sometimes you need to move things around and get some fresh perspectives and new eyes on what you’re struggling with. Finding specialized support where you can practice speaking up without fear of judgment or at least a space that creates a safe enough space to be brave is so key. I love this work with my clients and value how they challenge themselves to grow and heal and learn as they move through leadership challenges real time. It’s pretty incredible to see, because when you speak from a place of grounded confidence, you don’t just command authority, you inspire trust, connection, and respect within your inner system and with those you lead.

10:00

My guest today, oh, she wrote the book. She wrote a book, but I kind of feel like it’s thee book. And she lives all she teaches on how to speak up and show up with more power, especially those who hold identities outside of dominant culture norms.

Samara Bay has written extensively about the power of our voices and how we can reclaim them. She is the author of the best-selling book, Permission to Speak, a revolutionary take on public speaking for the future we want. I can’t think of a more important time right now to be thinking about this too, right? She’s a Los Angeles-based speech coach whose clients range from candidates for US Congress to C-suite executives, change-making entrepreneurs, movie stars, and high school girls.

Listen for when Samara breaks down how to tease out those stealth expectations on who we should be and how we think we should show up and embrace being humans in a world that can feel really, really hard. Pay attention to how Samara talks about the power and impact (and I love this phrase) of caring out loud. And notice throughout our conversation how Samara talks about the power of permission in regards to how we speak and how we don’t need to wait for others to give us permission to speak up, which can be tricky for those with relational wounds or trauma. All right, y’all. Now please welcome the incredible, the dynamic and wholehearted Samara Bay to The Unburdened Leader podcast.

Samara, welcome to The Unburdened Leader podcast! Thank you so much for making time for this conversation. I am really looking forward to learning with you.

Samara Bay: Thank you! I’m very pleased to be here.

Rebecca Ching: So I want to start off — we’re gonna dig into your book, Permission to Speak.

12:01

But I want you to take me back to the moment when you stopped looking for others to give you permission to speak and started permitting yourself to speak. What was the turning point there?

Samara Bay: Okay, there are a lot of ways to answer that, right? Because I have to admit my first thought is I continue to find new delightful, challenging opportunities to work on giving myself permission. So I don’t want to suggest that it’s like a one-time thing and then, you know, “Did that!” But I will say there were a few really essential moments, and one of them was a literary agent saying, “I think there’s a book in you.”

And, you know, I say that because I really do want to dispel the myth that I was the one who fully pushed this forward. But I will say that what I pushed forward that what he saw and heard when I was chatting with him that led him to think that was that I had given myself permission to acknowledge that what I was noticing in 2018 when I started coaching women who were running for office for the first time for the 2018 midterm, what I started noticing was that everybody was approaching public speaking in this way that was, like, so heartbreaking and that I kind of had a better way. And that did not come from decades of experience; that came from an inner spark of permission, of I’m just gonna name the thing.

So, you know, I had been a dialect coach in Hollywood for many years prior to that and, you know, there aren’t a lot of dialect coaches in the world, but if you think about it, actors need accents, or they need to make their own natural accent clearer. So if English is your second language and you’re working in The United States of America, right, producers that worry that “middle America” isn’t going to understand you, and they fly someone like me in to do this really delicate work of opening up people’s mouth and consonants but also helping them with the confidence side of things, which is what always is happening anyway if English is your second language. I like to say, more simply, I have a long history of telling movie stars what to do with their tongues, which is also true! [Laughs]

14:13

But, you know, summer of 2018 was this really wild moment for me, for everybody. I was in Washington DC coaching Gal Gadot on Wonder Woman II. Most of the film ended up being filmed in Europe, but they did the first month in DC to get all the outdoor establishing shots, as they say in Hollywood. And I was her coach! I got to be there the whole time, but for anybody who’s seen Wonder Woman II, there’s a lot of stunt work, there’s a fly of flying sequences, and literally I had nothing to do. I had nothing to do. I was on the other side of the country from my family, from my child, and I had too much down time.

And that was the summer, simultaneously, that we were two years into our former president’s term, and we were gearing up for this midterm that could perhaps change the narrative in our country. And we were getting, frankly, inundated with pictures of kids that were getting separated from their parents at the border, and it was a real moment. My activist friends were burned out. I was really feeling it. I was going to all these rallies and, you know, feeling honestly quite useless, and that was the backdrop when I got this call from moveon.org, which is one of these organizations that finds candidates and offers support, and in this case the support was training, and they wanted to find a few coaches who would help them with public speaking. And I had not formally done that before. But because I thought — I mean, if we’re talking leveraging our skill sets, that is more useful than me just attending a rally with a body. So I jumped at it, and then I coached all these women over Zoom, and I just had epiphany after epiphany about, first of all, how brilliant they were.

16:03

It wasn’t lost on me that I was working on a project about a superhero who comes in and saves the world while we desperately needed a superhero. And then these women showed up, and every single one of them in their own really, really specific way represented their community, were exactly the type of leader that we could actually trust whose lived experience would allow them to actually literally represent us, and they were having a lot of trouble translating their true magnificence into the microphone because of all of our cultural story about what happens when eyes are on us and what happens when we’re supposed to sound like a powerful figure or an authoritative figure and we have a different story in our own head about what we sound like.

And I came out of that summer really burning with sparks of like, “Oh! Oh, the entire cultural approach, individual and cultural approach to public speaking is wrong,” and it’s no one’s fault, except for, whatever, white patriarchy’s fault. But it’s no individual’s fault, and this is not a shame exercise. But it is a real opportunity to change the cultural story at large about how we approach public speaking, how we approach talking about what we care about out loud so that the care’s spread.

Rebecca Ching: So, if you feel comfortable, can you share about a time that you worked, whether it’s with one of these candidates or maybe an actor, helping them really discover their own, as you call it, voice story, and what were some of the most common struggles that you saw, particularly with these emerging leaders?

Samara Bay: Yeah, I’ll say one of the struggles. Okay, here’s two. They’re sort of practical and existential. One of each! But the practical one, which I imagine anyone listening will have some sort of resonance with (I do, maybe you do) is pace. Inevitably, there was a sense of, “I either talk too fast or I talk too slow,” that they were coming in with.

18:12

Or the other version of it is like, “I’m supposed to XYZ. I’m supposed to talk slower. I’m supposed to speed things up.” Just offering as an alternative, instead of, “I talk at the pace of the thought.”

The thing is, we have lots of reasons why we might speed up. One of them is that we’re just culturally born that way. We’re born and grow up that way, you know? New Yorkers understand this. Some maybe just that, you know, we’ve been told our whole life we talk fast, or we think fast and talk fast, and it kind of gives us an inner sense of delight. Another completely separate category of a reason why we might talk fast is if we’re inside of some sort of agreed upon conceit where there are two minutes, and I know there’s two minutes, and you know there’s two minutes, and so, we’re playing the same game. But then there’s this third category, which is that many of us talk fast when either we’re just literally nervous or we don’t totally believe that we deserve to take up time.

Rebecca Ching: Ooh.

Samara Bay: That’s really my diagnosis with is this a story that one of these candidates has, is this a story that needs to — do they need to change or does the story need to change or does the culture need to change, right?

So in many, many, many cases on some level it is that last one. It really is. Public speaking, why I care about it, one of the major reasons I care about it is it feels like speaking in public is an opportunity to finally face all of our stories about playing small, which we have often picked up to keep us safe and that had value as a result if they kept with it. But now we’re up to something else. So what it feels like to expand into that side.

Rebecca Ching: You know, I’m listening to you and I’m even thinking back from what I read in your book even about your own voice story where you were studying acting and had your own experience of your voice shutting down. There’s almost this parallel process of you — why don’t you share a little bit about that experience, and then I’ll follow up to that.

20:23

Samara Bay: Yeah, to be clear, a voice story, which is just a term that I made up, is meant to capture not just for each of us, not just the plot points of our own relationship to our voice but the myths and comments we’ve gotten here and there, media saying that women who run for office are “shrill.” Say, you were around during the Hillary Clinton era.

So our voice story, like a money story, is a collection of truths and half-truths and non-truths. But I will say that for me an aspect of it for sure what you’re talking about, I opened the book with, right, I opened my introduction with because it’s sort of an inevitable origin story for me, and there is also profound irony in it, yes. I lost my voice, and now I help people find their voice. I know. It’s almost too pat.

Rebecca Ching: Yes.

Samara Bay: It’s almost too pat. In my twenties, I was in the middle of an acting graduate program, a three-year master’s program, and I was sure I wanted to be a Shakespearean actress. And in the very middle of the program I was already having a pretty bad time. I was in Providence, Rhode Island, and my class was a small group of eight men and eight women, and none of us totally clicked.

Suddenly, I realized that I couldn’t talk. It wasn’t sudden. It was coming on slowly, but the suddenness was like the moment that I really felt like my body was saying, “Stop. Just stop talking.” I had been, for months, just going through pain in my vocal cords, and it wasn’t associated with sickness.

22:01

And in fact, I went to a doctor at some point early on, and they said, “Oh, it’s probably acid reflux. Here, take this drug for the rest of your life.” And I was like, “That doesn’t — I mean, maybe? But that doesn’t feel like the solution.”

And finally I got myself to an ear, nose, and throat doctor, and they put a scope, a little tiny camera, up my nose and down the back of my throat, and I got this photo of my vocal cords, which I’ll never forget, and it was very clear from that photo that I had vocal nodules, a little blister in the same place on each side of the V of my vocal cord, which it turns out teachers get, cheerleaders get, anyone who really has to talk about a crowd with perhaps not enough amplification. And here I’d been in acting school singing and talking and dancing and yelling and, God knows, more than usual, I suppose. And so, whatever habits I might have picked up were exacerbated.

And I got back to class the day I had found out this diagnosis and missed the morning session, and the guy who ran the acting program stopped everything in front of everybody and said, “So, what’s the diagnosis?” And I wanted to answer, right? I was trying to be a good student, and so, I breathed as deeply as I could, and through these really, really painful vocal cords I tried to be as audible as possible, and said, “Vocal nodules. I have to go on full vocal rest.” And he said, “Huh, yeah, just as I thought. Bad usage.”

Rebecca Ching: Ooh.

Samara Bay: It’s so weird, right? Just to name it. It’s not like this is a well-known phrase. And, by the way, he’s probably right, right? This is a “usage issue.” I had to relearn how to talk. But the feeling, you got it.

24:00

Rebecca Ching: Well, the victim blaming, it kind of has that victim blame vibe. “What did you do to make this happen?”

Samara Bay: Literally.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah.

Samara Bay: Literally. “You’re the victim here. We all see you got this injury but let’s be honest, you’re the perpetrator too.” That’s what I got.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah.

Samara Bay: The timing was sort of good. It was around Christmas break, and I went home, and I worked with a speech pathologist who helped me solve what the problem had been. And in a way, the whole thing was over and done with in about a month. But that shame stayed with me a lot longer because I truly didn’t know why would I have self-sabotaged at that level? I properly lost my voice. I had to drop out of the play. I had been going to class for weeks like a ghost because when no one expects you to talk they don’t turn towards you. I was just a literal nobody. Why had I “done that to myself”?

And I have to say that 20 years later, nearly 20 years later when this guy said, “I think there’s a book in you,” and then I wrote the proposal, and then I sold the book in a 13-way bidding war that totally changed my life. And then I wrote the thing during the pandemic, and then I wrote the introduction last, and as I was writing the introduction I was like, “This is the book that 24-year-old me needed.” Because I really didn’t know how to process that.

Rebecca Ching: What are you feeling right now just even as you connect with that part of your story? What are you noticing right now?

Samara Bay: I mean, I’ll tell you it’s why I tell the story. It’s not just like, you know, “Look at me.” What I’m connecting to is the feeling of shame or embarrassment or I effed up that almost all of us have, and by us I mean women, I mean people of color, I mean immigrants, I mean queer folks, I mean anybody listening who, on some level, feels like your voice sounds “different.” There’s just a lot of unprocessed layers of often self-directed-shame or embarrassment around, “Why can’t I hack it? Why am I doing this wrong? I need to fix myself.”

26:04

So yeah, I mean, I have big feelings about this because I believe that all of that self-directed crap is directly connected to who has power in this world and why.

Rebecca Ching: Oof. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that, and for me, it wasn’t like a path thing, like, you know, “This is your story and now you’re helping others, oh how ironic.” To me, especially as someone who’s been working in the trauma space and the leadership space for years now, it actually makes my heart expand knowing that you’re doing this with your background. There’s like a holistic approach, at least that’s what I make up, when you’re with these leaders, with these actors. It isn’t just, “What do you need to fix?” It’s not a box to check. There’s this whole-person piece that I feel like I sense when I read your book that you’re doing this work. So that’s why, to me, it’s like, okay, you weren’t gonna be the actor, but my goodness, you’re gonna help people get their voice out there and address it in a way of power.

One thing I want to talk about, especially when Move On reached out to you and you started working with emerging leaders, particularly, at least emerging leaders in the political space, I will say, you talk about ambition and intersecting ambition with our voice story, and you wrote here, “To get your voice to match your ambition –,” and I want to say, too, before I go on, ambition is like a complicated word, particularly as a woman who’s also a person of color. So it’s just an interesting intersection of ambition, women, and our voice.

When you said, “To get voice to match your ambition, I want to offer you something else since pitch is indeed destiny, a chance to recognize your own voice story to identify your own voice, to identify who told you with words and actions, to be quieter, louder, or gentler, or more assertive and to consider what happened as a result. What did your voice do?”

28:20

Is this part of your coaching work? Is this what you — is this the story — and if so, talk a little bit about some of the things that these individuals told you when you named this and asked them what their voice did.

Samara Bay: Yeah, I will say it rarely comes out as a direct question with a direct answer. It often is uncovered in, you know, sideways ways, often while working on an actual project. So what we get to do is pretend that we’re working on a deliverable, and we’re really, of course, all — we are, we are. The speech is gonna be great by the end, but really it’s a container to allow the stuff that comes up to come up. Like a side question of am I talking too fast, which actually reveals, you know, perhaps just a long-standing general story of, “I talk too fast.” But maybe like a, “My high school English teacher told me, ‘You talk too fast. You sound like a valley girl. And no one’s ever gonna take you seriously.’”

Rebecca Ching: Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Samara Bay: And maybe that high school English teacher presented as, you know, the type of trustworthy authority figure that we took what he or she said as wisdom, and now we get to actually, in our grown-up self, turn that over in our hands. “Is that story serving me,” right? I mean, we know these questions but sometimes when it comes to our voice, because our voices are invisible, literally, you know, we have to kind of throw ink on the invisible and go, “What is the shape of this thing? Is it bringing joy to our life, or is it holding us back?”

29:59

What I really found that summer of 2018 was there were six different spark points that all led to, you know, meeting the literary agent about six months later and having a whole philosophy I had been working on. But one of the other things that happened was that I had gone to hear Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speak. She had not won yet. She was not a congressperson, but she had just won the primary in New York, so my New York friends had been talking about her nonstop, and she came out to LA, and it was the same summer I had just gotten back from DC and a friend had an extra ticket to go hear Alexandria speak in person. And I thought, “Ah, perhaps women speaking in public is my job now? Maybe it’s my business? Let’s find out!”

And as I was driving to go hear her speak, I called my mom who is my biggest fan, and I told my mom what I was doing, and my mom said, “Oh, thank God. She needs you.” And I said, “Oh, mom, I think she’ll do just fine without me.” And my mom doubled down and said, “No, I can’t take her seriously with that voice.”

Rebecca Ching: Oh.

Samara Bay: And my mom is a second-wave feminist. She kept her last name when she got married, and she’s a Fulbright scholar, and she was like the Hillary Clinton era of four women in a class of hundreds in law school, but she “couldn’t take her seriously with that voice.” And I had this instantaneous response to my mom in that moment where I said, “Or she’s teaching us what getting taken seriously might sound like.” And then I had to unpack what I even meant by that, right?

But I bring it up because, yes, there is just unpacking around stories but there’s also unpacking the biases that resulted in not just how we listen to others but how we listen to ourselves. My mom is clearly not the bad guy in this story, right? It’s just such a great example of how all of us can stand to ask, “What are powerful people supposed to sound like? Have I built my answer to that question based on how powerful people have traditionally sounded? Has that worked out well for our culture? Or perhaps, per your theme, dare we dream of a different sounding future? What do I want leaders to sound more like, and could I embody that today?”

32:25

One example is emotional content. So there’s an old story that being emotional in public is a liability, and I’ve coached in the corporate space as well, academia, scientists, right? This story pervades, whether you’re a man or a woman for different reasons, right? If I get emotional, I will lose all credibility or I will seem “out of control” or “crazy.” And then there’s this other story, which is that when somebody is emotionally honest in front of you while talking about what they care about AKA talking about what they care about and making clear they actually care about it, we are moved, impacted, and they [Indiscernible].

Rebecca Ching: Yes, those moments. You know, I’m thinking about what you just said but also the feedback from your mom, and I am taken back to the many female mentors of a certain age, of a certain era who we cared about the same beliefs but were some of the most challenging and difficult bosses and mentors, and in hindsight, there was still this element of if you’re going to succeed there’s only one way to do it.

I’ve had some really good mentors who gave me some good guidance on different dynamics and things like that, but in terms of voice and presence, it sounds too pat to say you have to do it like a man (particularly a white man) but there was this sense of this internalized bias to succeed. 

34:08

Samara Bay: I’m feeling inspired to read a tiny piece from my book that completely captures that. Is that a good idea? Okay.

Rebecca Ching: Please do that, yes.

Samara Bay: So in the “Emotion” chapter in my book, which by the way is the chapter that I almost cut because it was so hard to write I kept abandoning it and then coming back to it later and then abandoning it, and I finally said — I know, your mouth is open. I love this.

Rebecca Ching: Yes!

Samara Bay: It’s my favorite chapter! It’s my favorite chapter. So, listen, I quote bell hooks in this bit. I say: “The powers that be have codified the ideal worker and defined the word professional, ensuring that both describe someone that’s more machine than human, as bell hooks wrote, ‘The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence towards women. Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.’”

And then I wrote: “I think of the women who first trickled into male-dominated industries, desperate to be taken seriously, looking around to glean the rules of play in lieu of adequate mentorship and crippling themselves to fit in. I think of them mentoring the next generation of women, reinforcing what worked for them, enshrining their hobble.”

It’s like a learned cynicism that it has to be that way, as you say, and part of what the dreamer in me is doing with putting this book out and with talking about the ideas in it is saying there must be another way. Just the tiny but powerful revolutionary act of saying, “What if the culture’s the problem, not me?” And if the culture is the problem that means the cultural stories are the problem, and stories can change. Stories should change. Stories will change, and we get to retell them.

36:21

For example, anybody listening, who do you love listening to? Who do you just love how they show up, you know? For many of us it’s Rebecca! It’s Brené. It’s Esther Perel. It’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, right? It’s Lizzo! It’s Kamala! We get to think not just like if I Google, “How do I sound authoritative,” and Google tells me five things, which by the way it will. “Keep your voice low. Speak at 75% your regular pace,” right? Okay, great, Google, but that’s the collection of the conventional wisdom that has thus far left us chasing a standard that will not serve us and will not build the future we want to live in.

And then there are these examples all around us, and I think that part of what the white patriarchal scenario that bell hooks is referencing does for all of us is create a sense of cultural amnesia. It’s very hard to actually hold onto those data points, that evidence of the people that we love listening to when it comes to us. We revert back. And so, part of the work is to intentionally hold into, “Oh, wait. Oh, wait, but I love how Taylor Swift talks in The Eras Tour. What can I  learn from that?” Not, “I need to sound like Taylor Swift, but what permission does she give me?”

[Inspirational Music]

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38:10

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[Inspirational Music]

Rebecca Ching: I keep thinking about, again, you working with emerging political leaders and the parallel of the violence against political leaders on all levels of government. It’s something I’ve been following. There are some different organizations that are working just to help women running for office be safe, which is, you know, its own thing. And I want to read another quote with that in mind that you said. “Caring out loud is vulnerable and brave. It’s the opposite of neutral and cool.”

When I sat with that quote, I’m thinking it’s like, “Oh, you’re so vulnerable and you’re so brave.” It’s like you’re putting a lot on the line right now in the culture that we’re in, and I think the default for a lot of leaders, especially a lot of more traditional organizations, whether it’s corporate, education, old school non-profit, it’s just the opposite of neutral is cool. And we’re seeing more folks come forward with their voices, caring out loud.

40:37

How can our speaking up now or encouraging others to speak up right now and the way we speak up impact the future that we desire and that we’re imagining?

Samara Bay: So there are a few things going on here, right? One is literal safety, as you say, or psychological safety, which also matters profoundly, right, for mental health and for sustaining ourselves in any kind of public. So that is a personal navigation that we all get to do, and I’m not here to be like, “Ignore your instinct. If a room doesn’t feel safe, speak up anyway.” I am not here to say that, and that feels very irresponsible. And I am here to say in what rooms do you have more leeway than you think you do because of old stories about what your assumptions are, how much space you’re allowed to take up in the world.

And a major reframe in moments like that is to think, okay, we know that one of the fundamental dichotomies for humans is love versus fear. The entire approach to public speaking since probably the caveperson era is accidentally fear-based. I hope I don’t get kicked out of the tribe, exiled, and die alone. In regular life, I hope I don’t get laughed at. I hope I don’t get canceled. I hope I don’t get never asked back again.

42:18

These are all completely understandable fears, and in the exact same moment that we could choose to think about those things we could also choose, especially with practice, especially with hands on our back, right, especially with the sense of community and the sense of collective action that we are changing the story right where we are, we can choose the love approach. What would it be like if I stepped on that stage and talked about what I care about in a way that makes that care spread, where I am willing to make it clear with my body language and with the tone of my voice as well as with my words that this matters to me and I’m gonna share stories. This was the other part. I’m gonna answer when you asked early on about themes that came up with those women that were running for office, bad at storytelling, right? Not actually the storytelling itself but bad at, inexperienced at discerning, “Is this story worth telling?” and almost always choosing no, right? “It’s gonna be irrelevant. I’m gonna sound like I’m bragging. I’m gonna sound boring,” right? So opposite. I’m either too big or I’m too small. “Better skip it.”

Rebecca Ching: Mm.

Samara Bay: So I’m adding storytelling into this caring out loud as well, the love approach, because often when we tell stories, as you can tell from the ones I’ve been telling, right, I’m not just telling them to be like, “Oh, my God, me!” If I were, that’s also an interesting experiment, by the way. No shame there either. But we tell stories as gifts.

Rebecca Ching: Mm.

Samara Bay: And so, we have to believe that we have gifts, that what we have is of value to others, right? The final chapter of the book is called “Heroism,” and it’s really believing that we are heroic enough, in our smallness or our bigness, to be of use and to really show up and to really tell our story.

So when we get the chance to speak on a podcast like this, on a stage, in front of a camera, to our boss alone in a room and no one else is watching, we do get to choose fear versus love, and we get to notice if we’re just falling into, “I hope I don’t get kicked out of the tribe,” and we reconnect to, “I love this tribe. I have an idea for how to make it better.”

44:39

Rebecca Ching: That’s a real big choice. I need to move from a “How do I protect,” to “I care so much. How can I make it better?” And there’s many ways to do that. It’s not always forward facing but it’s still using our voices.

Samara Bay: I mean, right? On a nervous system level, we’re told that basically we are protecting or connecting but we cannot do both at the same time, and it’s the same with public speaking. And the reasons to protect are totally understandable, and I say this with so much love, and connecting is a different thing.

Rebecca Ching: It is such a good reminder. We are good at multitasking, but when we’re in the states, we cannot protect or connect, and it’s how Brené Brown says, you know, “We can choose courage, or we can choose comfort. Both have their role, but we can’t do them both at the same time.” I feel like that’s just an iteration of that.

I’m curious for you, how are you caring out loud right now?

Samara Bay: I mean, I try to model it every time I talk in public. I had a fascinating moment. I interviewed for a magazine over Zoom, and the journalist who interviewed me, I had known her previously.

46:05

We were chatting a little bit off there and she pressed record, and then she asked a question, and I started to answer, and she did this tiny little, “Gotcha!” of, “Oh, you sound different. Oh, you sound different than you sounded before,” as though to suggest I was putting on a fake voice, and I said, “You know, I do sound different but first fall, we all have many voices. I would like to dispel the myth that there’s one authentic voice and the rest are fake. But second of all, it’s not that one is real and the other is not real. It’s that private me and public me actually have different responsibilities.”

Rebecca Ching: Yes! Oh, that’s so good.

Samara Bay: And when I show up publicly, I can be and I choose to be full of mischief and full of surprise and messy, and I use the word “like” and I don’t try not to, right? This is the work.

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]

Samara Bay: And I do have a heightened sense of responsibility because I’m holding this idea that I think could change the world, and I’m holding all of people’s emotional stuff that comes up inside of it, and I choose to. It’s different than, “Hey, what’s up? Let me tell you about what my kid did this weekend.” It’s just different. It’s just different.

Rebecca Ching: Can you say just a little bit more? Because I don’t think I’ve heard this before that we have more than one authentic voice. You know, there’s not one authentic voice and then we’re being fake. Because, just as a side story, I remember when I was working in DC or in any other spaces, that some of my friends would come and hang out with me because I lived in DC, I lived in New York City. They’d come visit, and sometimes they’d come hang out in the office for a little bit, and they’d hear me on the phone with clients or people and they were like, “Rebecca, that was gross!” I mean, I really was probably being fake at the time.

Samara Bay: [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: I’m like, “Oh, hello. What do you need? Really? Oh, are you kidding me?” And they know me, and they were doing the gag-me because who are you? And I think this is really interesting to get out of that binary, so can you say a little bit more about having — even just how you touched on that your personal and public voices, they’re authentic but they’re gonna feel and sound a little different. Just say a little bit more about the multitudes of authenticity that we can speak from.

48:16

Samara Bay: Let’s all just think about — let’s just use our great imagination and all think about how we talk to a two-year-old, maybe our friend’s kid that we’re just meeting for the first time, right?

Rebecca Ching: Right.

Samara Bay: Which version of us shows up for them?

Rebecca Ching: Yeah. It’s, “Hello!”

Samara Bay: And then think about the last — yeah, “Hello,” right? Linguists have told us this happens universally, globally. We raise the pitch of our voice. “Oh, hi! How are you?” right?

Rebecca Ching: Yep.

Samara Bay: Which is the same thing animals do to signal, “I am unintimidating. I’m available.” “Oh, my gosh! Oh, that’s so cool!” right? You can see even with my body language I’m getting small. And then let’s use our same imagination and think about the last time we talked to our grandmother. I actually talked to mine this week. She’s 102. She called all worried.

Rebecca Ching: No way! Oh, wow. What a gift.

Samara Bay: But maybe it’s an older figure of any sort in your life, right?

Rebecca Ching: Yeah.

Samara Bay: And then think about how you talk to a lawyer or somebody from health insurance if you complain about a claim.

Rebecca Ching: Mm-hmm.

Samara Bay: Is there a throughline? I’m gonna guess yeah, but are humans clearly just from that evidence alone, able to read a room and bring forth the version of ourself that is appropriate for that room?

Rebecca Ching: Oh.

Samara Bay: Yeah, so this is kind of evolutionary, eh? Right? Like, “Oh! Oh!”

And then, of course to complicate it, because yay humans and nuance, there are also ways in which we show up where it doesn’t feel particularly honest, either in the moment when you can feel it or afterwards where you’re like, “God, I actually negotiated away my personality there. I negotiated away too much of myself.” This is often when we end up in toxic work environments that just don’t feel good over time. It’s like, “Shoot, I negotiated away a non-negotiable.”

50:26

Rebecca Ching: [Sighs] Yeah, I feel that. Those are the moments I feel like I need to take a shower from myself.

Samara Bay: [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: You know?

Samara Bay: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: Just, “Ugh, what did I say and do?” Like compromising.

Samara Bay: Yes, compromising is such a good word. I also like to offer to people that in different moments of our professional career we have different needs, and the very first workshop I ran on this years and years ago was called How to Use Your Voice to Get What You Want, which has a little bit of a bro-y vibe, so I apologize for that. But it is also a send up. The idea though inside of it is, well, what do we actually want? That if what we want is to see if we can play the norms of this work environment, to see if we can do it, to see if we can get that promotion, to see if we can make those friends, to see if this version of ourself is worth holding onto. I don’t know, it’s like an experiment, right? Often, this is what happens in our twenties, maybe our thirties. We’re like, “Move this way? Let’s find out!” And then maybe we find out no, but we did it. But we tried it. And then there’s a different want that sometimes comes up later, which is I actually want at the very end of the day to feel like I have been in integrity with myself the entire day. It’s a different want, and it’s okay. They both are okay.

Rebecca Ching: We’re of multiple needs and interests, and we get to play and experiment, and this is where I think perfectionism and obviously there’s one way to be and to do, so I love all of this permission, permission to try, try it on, check it out. I always say to my clients, “Let’s collect some data, see how it goes.”

52:09

I’m curious for you because you’ve lived this work that you teach and help others. What still trips you up around giving yourself permission? And how do you reorient yourself to your confidence and clarity? Yeah, so what still hooks you and then how do you recalibrate when you find yourself like, “Ooh, I just gave up too much there. I just wasn’t true to myself and my voice”?

Samara Bay: I’ll be honest, I feel that it often comes up around being an “author.”

Rebecca Ching: Ooh, say more.

Samara Bay: And I wonder if I’ve missed out on opportunities and sort of being taken seriously at scale because I continue to be committed to showing up as kind of me with a certain degree of irreverence and lightness, and I wonder, you know?

Rebecca Ching: Mm, what’s the inner conversation you have with yourself about that?

Samara Bay: Honestly, at this point, it’s really a deepening, a continuing deepening I do with my clients. That’s why I started out my thing, you know? There’s always a new challenge.

One of the moments that was another flash point for me that year, 2018, was the first female president of any Ivy League school was the president of Princeton, which was the school that I happened to go to, although she was there after my time. But I got to go to this really amazing women’s conference that fall, and she spoke at it, and she was being interviewed by another woman who was the dean of something something at Harvard, and all of us were, you know, sort of listening with bated breath as these two massively successful women were on that stage asking each other vulnerable questions, among other things, by the way.

54:10

This woman who was the president of Princeton, her name is Shirley Tilghman, she had raised something like six billion dollars for the university during her tenure. Like, there are some data points. And the woman who was interviewing her said, “When did you feel like you were finally enough?” And, you know, she just sat there, and the whole realization came over all of us, and I remember we were seated Luncheon-style at tables. And so, we all were making eye contact with each other during that and going, “Hmm. Ugh. Oh.”

And, you know, she finally did answer with a story about how she had just been asked to speak at some conference in another country, and it was on her data, on her work, which is biology, and that she thought, “Why me?” It’s really actually a permission story, even though it’s a bit disheartening. But the permission is that perhaps we just don’t expect that there will be some end day when we believe that we are enough and have the confidence. We just get to be people who keep trying and who keep gathering our allies so that the trying feels really good on the inside.

Rebecca Ching: Oh, gosh, that’s good. Oh, that’s really good. I do want to talk about a couple things you identified in your book like speech. I don’t know what the ways of speaking that we often do that are protective, and I’m wondering if you could just unpack them? I’ll name a few. And then just note what they are and when people hear these speech patterns, especially for those of a certain age, especially women over 40, you know, who have learned to view them as negatively.

So let’s just start with hedging. This is one I work with a lot of folks on too. But how do you define hedging and how does that impact how we’re heard and seen?

Samara Bay: So a lot of these terms come from linguistics, and I’m kind of a linguistics nerd, and I’ve interviewed a number of linguists for my podcast that I used to have.

36:27

Hedging is the catch-all term for anything that makes our language indirect instead of direct. So, “No, I won’t,” would be direct, and “Actually, I’m just not totally sure that I’m gonna be able to do that. Would it be cool if I didn’t?” is indirect.

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]

Samara Bay: And of course I give an example like that to suggest, culturally, we have been told direct is better, is stronger, is more powerful. Does it help us get what we want? Not necessarily! Not necessarily. There is a direct correlation between politeness and more words, and anybody who has “proximal power” in this culture of ours, adjacent power, knows how to keep the people in power happy by being as polite as possible, by helping them save face.

So on the one hand, we can get mad at ourselves that we say “like” or “um” or “uh” or “just” or “if you know what I mean,” and on the other hand, I hope we can also love on ourselves hard. One of my favorite things that linguists will tell you is every habit we have picked up we have picked up for a reason. It has served us in certain ways, and the question is, is it still serving us? Are there additional colors we can add to our palate? Are there additional or different habits we can experiment with, right? It’s very exciting and uncomfortable to try saying something direct instead of indirect.

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But maybe we do it, I don’t know, one day a week. We’re like, “I’m gonna find as many ways today as possible to say to the barista, “The Splenda’s out,” instead of, “Uh, excuse me, if you don’t mind, is there any more Splenda?” Just experiment! I don’t know! When the stakes are low, right? Or not. Or not. But I come from the theatre world, and one of the major takeaways when you’re learning acting is choices. Choices are power. Just know how many choices you have.

Rebecca Ching: Ooh.

Samara Bay: So this is about adding a few more choices to our toolbox, right?

Rebecca Ching: Right, and from a nervous system perspective, the more choices we have, the less we feel trapped, and no living creature does well when they feel trapped, so I love this. I love this.

Samara Bay: That’s so real. That’s so real. And even practicing literally that directness thing, it’s just interesting. It’s there a version of each of us that is more direct? Yes is probably the answer, and then the question is is the discomfort that comes up an initial reaction to new, or is it a deep-felt sense of this is wrong? We don’t know ‘til we try it, and then we try it, and then we say, “Oh, well, actually that felt a little powerful,” or, “You know what? I love that I speak in wiggles instead of straight lines.” We also get to decide that.

Rebecca Ching: You know what I love how you’re answering this, because so many of the people would respond to this in my mind focusing on how others are responding to their directness, and you’re asking us to go, “How did that feel for you? What does that feel like? How does that feel aligned?” And I think that’s an important nuance to name versus, “Okay, I’m gonna be direct over hedging, and how are people taking it?” versus, “How did that feel? Do I feel aligned? What data did I collect?” So I really appreciate you bringing it back to how we feel as we’re doing these experiments versus always looking for others to give us permission. So thank you for that.

1:00:08

Samara Bay: I always like to say that the goal of this new version of public speaking is that we care out loud in a way that the care spreads, but the other goal is that it feels good on the inside. That’s the real revolution.

Rebecca Ching: Yes!

Samara Bay: Because if we’re constantly negotiating away caring how much it does or doesn’t feel good on the inside, we’re not gonna have fun.

Rebecca Ching: Mm.

Samara Bay: And there is a necessary part — and I think it’s necessary, even if we’re talking about something harmful, there’s a necessary part of centering our own wellbeing, which sometimes comes out as joy, that sometimes just comes out as wellbeing, right, that has been lost in this long history of the fear-based public speaking.

You know, another term that gets used, and I only use it delicately is decolonize. But this is decolonized public speaking and what colonization does is say your voice and your story is something you should not trust.

Rebecca Ching: Ooh.

Samara Bay: So the decolonize approach is going, “What would it take to actually trust my own voice and my own story?”

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, and that’s where the power is.

Samara Bay: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: When we trust ourselves, look out!

Samara Bay: Yeah, otherwise power is posturing.

Rebecca Ching: And that’s not even posturing. That’s power over, that’s —

Samara Bay: Yeah, but I mean posturing like we have sort of puff ourselves up to be like —

Rebecca Ching: Puff up, yeah.

Samara Bay: — “So I’m [Clears Throat] powerful now,” instead of being like, “Ooh, I believe. I believe in my bones I deserve to take up time and space. I know I have an actual gift to offer, and I know I am willing to offer it with my heart and soul.” You know, that’s real power.

Rebecca Ching: This is the work on repeat. All right, a couple more terms I want to hear you talk about. What’s a vocal fry.

1:02:04

Samara Bay: Vocal fry is, in an ideal scenario, in the platonic ideal of speaking, we have a thought that connects to our breath, exactly the right amount of breath for the thought (fun fact) and it comes out of our mouth. Thought to to breath to sound waves out of our mouth. In the real world, our throats, which were in that original scenario, a completely passive passage, our throat gets involved to, as I like to call it, stop us from getting in trouble —

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]

Samara Bay: — or just tamp down on our instincts, which is the same thing, right? So once our throat gets involved, what I mean is the muscles in our throat, although also our vocal cords, as you can tell with my story. Oh, I can tell you — we should circle back on what actually led to me getting those vocal nodules. But in any case, we all actually (I’m just gonna say all) have a lot of practice using our throats to manage how we seem. It often starts when we’re little and somebody in our household basically says, “Calm down. Keep it together. You’re being inconvenient.”

So one thing that the throat does is stop us from having a full breath of air come out of us. So if we were to say, “Here’s my big idea!” we might sound really, really present and really, really like we can’t take it back. But if we get our throat involved, we can say, “Here’s my big idea,” and it signals, “It’s my big idea but I don’t know. What do you think? I’m not really that attached to it,” and that’s vocal fry. So [Sounds Vocal Fry].

The stereotype is that it’s a Southern California thing. The reality is it’s an everyone thing. We all have likely done it when we’re tired. It’s the vocal cords vibrating slower, so there’s a relaxed kind of vibe of like, “Ah, I don’t know. I don’t even want to do it.” But the psychological, more interesting version of it is when we sort of have an idea that we begin to push forward and then we energetically take it back at the end. “Here’s my idea! But I mean, I don’t know, what do you think?” and vocal fry is a brilliant way of being like, “I’m taking it back a little bit in case it doesn’t fly.”

1:04:36

Rebecca Ching: It’s not fully committing. Yeah, that makes sense.

Samara Bay: It’s also a lovely shorthand for if you have a lot of nerves and you care a lot and your enthusiasm is high and you want to hide that, if you sound vocal fry-y, you sound blasé, detached, kind of take it or leave it. So you can imagine that for young women this is a really useful skill to seem kind of powerful, really.

Rebecca Ching: What is upspeak? 

Samara Bay: So connected, upspeak is going up at the end of a sentence instead of down even when you don’t have a question. An easy example is my name is Samara, which you can tell when I say it, both means the statement, “My name is Samara,” and also, “Did you hear me? It’s a weird name. Have you ever heard it before? Do you need me to repeat it?” right? It’s doing double duty. My name is Samara but there is this thing that happens when it’s just a habit where everything goes up at the end, and your listeners are used to hearing when you go up that it means you’re in the middle but not at the end.

Rebecca Ching: Oh, my gosh.

Samara Bay: So then you’re like, “But did we reach the end?” and it’s confusing to the ear, you know?

Rebecca Ching: And what’s the protective role of upspeak then, and how does that impact how we’re viewed?

Samara Bay: I’ll say this. One thing I love, having researched upspeak, is that it is collaborative. When groups of women talk without men and when groups of men talk without women, linguistically, generally-speaking, obviously (there must be exceptions), they do so differently.

1:06:09

Men tend to take turns playing expert. Women interrupt each other all the time, talk over each other, but are collaboratively building towards the thing. One way to suggest that we’re in a chat with a bunch of women and jam session, anyone pop in at any time, is what I just said, anytime, right, it’s an up that suggests this is open for debate or this is open, this is open totally, this is not closed. It’s a pretty generous act, and it really is a way of signaling, “I don’t know, what do you think?” You know, “I do know but I’m open. I’m open. I’m open.” Up means open. Down means closed. This is a big generalization, obviously, but so there are benefits to it.

And then another one is that they were also energetically not putting a period on it, which is similar to the vocal fry.

Rebecca Ching: And one more. What’s vocal hiding?

Samara Bay: I use that as a term for all of these things.

Rebecca Ching: Got it.

Samara Bay: We sometimes want to say something but also not say it in case people don’t agree. And so, we have all these tools at our disposal that we’re using already. We just don’t know! So I’m just naming it, and also obviously that sometimes vocal hiding is exactly right, you know? And then the question is when do we come out of hiding. When do I say it in such a way with enough breath that I come out of my throat, and I make it clear with not just the words but the how that I’m willing to be risky and be seen.

Rebecca Ching: Thank you for unpacking some of these in the ways that we — I like that, that vocal hiding’s like the umbrella (that’s helpful) of some of these terms. And we’ve had, at the time of this recording, a pretty powerful shift in the zeitgeist of our country. There’s been a change in who is on the top of the democratic ticket and a change in the tenor of speaking and how we’re feeling.

1:08:19

Walk me through your thought process on what you’re seeing Vice President Harris doing with her campaign speeches and anything that is really landing with you as she’s coming into her own greatness and helping all of us connect with that too.

Samara Bay: It’s such a delight. I mean, her and Tim Walz are (I’ve sort of been joking) speaking in the Permission to Speak playbook, just straight out of it, just textbook. Textbook Permission to Speak. A major part of it, which I’ve hit on a bit in this conversation but I’m gonna be more direct about now is mischief, a sense of inner twinkle, a sense of delight, a sense of presence enough to really be inviting yourself into the space, listening to the other people in the space who are not necessarily talking but who are present, and adjusting based on what feels right. And we’re watching her do that. Even as some of the words, obviously, are scripted. But even so, even inside of that, right, when she gets to a bit that we all know, she’s pausing, letting us all enjoy that we know exactly what’s coming next, Taylor Swift-style, right? If you know this bridge, sing along. And we’re there with her while she’s there with us, enjoying that we are sharing that moment. That’s actually happening, and she’s not steamrolling that. She’s not pretending that it’s not happening. She is breathing with us, and it’s magical.

1:10:05

It’s the kind of thing that she actually did really well even four years ago when — I talk about this in the book — when she accepted the Vice-Presidential nomination. But we were in a room — we — she was in a room with no one because pandemic, and there was a serious lack of that kind of organic feedback. She did a great job of breathing through it anyway, but wow, is this electric on a different level. And then the words themselves, right? I mean, I have a whole chapter on strength and warmth, which is a really valuable dance between those two energies that I think is essential to the confident tone.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah. Say a little bit more.

Samara Bay: It’s the kind of thing that gets discussed a lot in leadership and business spaces, especially for women, right? The way that it is often framed — so, of course, I put my mischief hat on — is that it’s an impossible balance to strike but you better strike it, or else people will think you’re a B, right? So I’m already like the impossible balance to strike thing does not serve any of us. But I understand that most of us if we think, “Well, our strength dial can go from zero to ten and our warmth dial can go from zero to ten, and this is not about our inner strength or our inner warmth, our ability to be any of these things, but rather our way we seem.

Rebecca Ching: Oof.

Samara Bay: I realized, and there’s so much data to suggest, that if we’re balanced, if we’re a five and a five — we will be better hurt if we’re a ten and a ten. And as soon as one of our dials is a little higher than the other, well, there are a lot of words in the English language for that, but also, if we allow ourselves to just go over a little bit of evidence that comes to mind, most of those undiagnosed. Do I come across as warmer than I do strong? Well, do people tend to say, “Oh, my God. She’s so sweet,” or do we tend to come across as stronger than we do warm and get told things like, “If you came across as less angry, you’d [Indiscernible].”

Rebecca Ching: Hmm.

1:12:23

Samara Bay: And then the question is, “Okay, what do we do with all that,” right? One thing we can do is just find our people and primal scream and be like, “This is annoying,” right? Resentment is completely understandable. And other things we can do is versions of reinvesting in, “Well, you know what? Everybody that I love has a beautiful strength and warmth, everybody that I admire.” It’s the kind of new regime values. We kind of all want to come across as. I want to be powerful, and I want to be loving, so what can I do that doesn’t feel icky on the inside to up the one that’s a little bit low?

Maybe for strength, you could perhaps come across a bit stronger. Maybe I’m just offering this because this tends to work in workshops. There’s something about the archetype you have in your head right now about strength that is not working. It’s a type of maybe coldness, maybe masculine, silent that you don’t want to be. Well, that will be getting in the way if you try to be “stronger,” right? So maybe there are more generative ways of thinking about strength, this about people who move up who are strong, thinking about the archetype of a goddess or of a grandmother.

There was a woman at a workshop recently who said, “Or the ocean!” And I was like, “Or the ocean!” [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs] Respect the water, yeah.

Samara Bay: Respect the water, right? What if my strength is the strength of the ocean?

Rebecca Ching: That’s amazing.

1:14:00

Samara Bay: And on the warmth side, right, how much more can we radiate how much we care about the people in that space? Even if they don’t even necessarily “deserve it.” But we choose to connect our values to, “I am willing to out-love the people in this space,” and let’s see what happens.

Rebecca Ching: One of the things that I appreciate you’ve done in this conversation, and you do in your book and clearly you do in your work is this ongoing updating. Even just using what you just talked about, “What is the archetype of what I believe strong is, and is that serving me? Who told me this? And what do I need to shift in that area so that I can not feel icky, not because something’s not fitting or I’m externalizing my permission.” So thank you for modeling that in this conversation. I have so many more questions but that might just be for a future conversation.

Samara Bay: [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: Before we wrap up, I have this tradition of asking just some fun, quickfire questions. Are you ready?

Samara Bay: Okay, let’s find out!

Rebecca Ching: All right! What are you reading right now?

Samara Bay: Ooh, I’m gonna be honest, I am reading this fairy romance series that everybody told me I had to read called A Court of Thorns and Roses. It’s delicious and quite escaping, and I will say, deeply violent, more so than I thought I could handle, and I have considered putting it down. But it’s really about dreamers inside a barbaric world.

Rebecca Ching: Wow. Very on brand. What song are you playing on repeat right now?

Samara Bay: [Laughs] My child has turned me into a Swiftie, as you probably could tell from multiple references, and I just discovered the song of hers called “Marjorie.” 

Rebecca Ching: Oh.

Samara Bay: From the pandemic album, about her grandmother, with this incredible line. Her grandmother was an opera singer. This incredible line: “Her closet of backlog dreams and how she left them all to me.”

Rebecca Ching: Dang, I know. And I am a late-blooming Swiftie too with you. What is the best TV show or movie that you’ve seen recently?

Samara Bay: I’m not a big watcher, I have to say, which is silly because I have worked in the industry for so many years but, I mean, definitely finished Bridgerton. Definitely finished Bridgerton. [Laughs] to that it needs me to give it a — [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: Yeah. Yeah, I think we all blew through that. Not all but anyone who was into it.

Samara Bay: Yep.

1:16:36

Rebecca Ching: I’m a gen X-er, so I always like to ask people either what their favorite eighties piece of pop culture is, and if they don’t connect with that, what’s their favorite piece of pop culture from their generation.

Samara Bay: Okay, I’m an eighties baby, a few years younger than you. I’m like the cuspy X-ennial. [Laughs] But I will say when I think of the eighties and me in the eighties, I really loved Kids Incorporated. The New Mickey Mouse Club followed by Kids Incorporated. If I could get in both half hours without my parents saying to turn off the TV, I was really lucky. [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: You were livin’ large then!

Samara Bay: Living — by the way, I just used vocal fry for another reason, which is comedy. Often it’s a great way to be like, “Anyway. I am ridiculous.” We all do it! We all do it.

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs] We all do it, oh, my gosh. I’m gonna be analyzing this. [Laughs]

Samara Bay: Lovingly, I hope, with deep compassion.

Rebecca Ching: Yes. No, just to kind of reflect. So what is your mantra right now?

Samara Bay: My word of the year is ease because I’ve never prioritized it.

Rebecca Ching: Ooh, and you picked 2024? I love it, overachiever.

Samara Bay: By the way, it’s going great! [Laughs] Ask me how it’s going. Agh! But it’s a really interesting thing to loop back into, right, while also living in real life, yeah.

Rebecca Ching: For sure. What’s an unpopular opinion that you hold?

1:18:00

Samara Bay: I mean, vocal fry and upspeak is just fine, thanks.

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs] And who or what inspires you to be a better leader and human?

Samara Bay: So many people. Now I just feel like I want to name names. I’m gonna say one person: Shannon Watts.

Rebecca Ching: Oh. With you.

Samara Bay: She’s the original founder and organizer of Moms Demand Action for gun safety, but also, she became a pal in the last few years. She interviewed me for her book. She brought me on her podcast. And I’m not saying this because of me actually. I’m saying this because she’s such an example of actually lifting other women. She goes out of her way, and you know she’s got the massiveist network, and she’s doing it for all of us.

Rebecca Ching: Agreed.

Samara Bay: You know? There’s a little dangerous thing that happens. You know, people say don’t meet your heroes. I don’t want to believe that. That’s way too cynical. But I will say that women who are running their own businesses and whose values don’t always actually align with the way that they run their business is a bit heartbreaking for me, and I just love collecting people who are really just doing the thing all the way down.

Rebecca Ching: Agreed. Agreed and fortunate to have her on the podcast and learn from her too. She is an incredible leader. Thank you for naming her but also just the call in for all of us to follow in that way and what we can do with and for each other.

How can people find you and connect with your incredible work?

Samara Bay: Well, obviously, get the book if you are interested in the topics. They’re available everywhere! Follow me on Instagram if you want to send me a DM in response to any aspect of the book. But the main thing I’m up to these days, which is a lovely collection of humans on the internet, a sort of “community” — I feel like that word get overused, but a community is over on Substack, which literally I’m on because of Shannon Watts who pulled me aside in November in that girl, you have spinach in your teeth kind of way and was like, “Why are you not on Substack?” and I was like, “I don’t understand what Substack is!”

1:20:22

And now I do, and I’ve been writing weekly, and it’s really been a lovely spot for me to evolve the ideas from my book. So my Substack is called How to Show Up, and you should show up there!

Rebecca Ching: Awesome. We’ll make sure to put links to all of that. Thank you so much for this incredible conversation, for your book, and for the work that you do. I’m really excited for more people to be exposed to the permission that we all have access to in how we speak and how we show up. So thank you so much!

Samara Bay: Thank you! I loved talking to you. I really appreciate you!

Rebecca Ching: All right, before you go, I want to make sure you have some important takeaways from this Unburdened Leader conversation with Samara Bay. Now, in Permission to Speak, Samara doesn’t focus directly on relational trauma but many of the insights that she shares align with how relational trauma can shape how leaders express themselves, and we talked a lot about this in this conversation.

I just want to add relational trauma, which often involves wounds inflicted in relationships, right (it’s just family dynamics or authority figures) can deeply impact a leader’s voice and confidence in speaking up. And Samara writes about this, and we talked about this too that we have a long way to go in creating more space for those who are neurodivergent to show up and speak in ways that are true to them without having to mask and those who come from different cultures where speaking up breaks the rules of dominant culture.

Now, I’m curious for you, what fears come up when speaking up? And how do any past relational wounds or trauma impact how you speak up? And what does support look like as you seek to speak up more with power and confidence and move through your past relational wounds?

1:22:10

Samara’s work recognizes the lasting effects of trauma and the societal pressures that shape how we suppress our voices, especially marginalized voices. Her message (and she really, really just shared this beautifully with us today) helps us reclaim our power and up our ability to speak up with authenticity despite deep-rooted fears or doubts caused by past relational experiences. And for all of us, this is the ongoing work of the Unburdened Leader.

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Thank you so much for joining this episode of The Unburdened Leader. If this episode was particularly meaningful for you and you got a lot out of it, I would be so honored if you could hop on over to wherever you listen and give the show a rating and a review and, even better, if you can share it with some folks that you think may really benefit from this particular conversation and this podcast as a whole. This would really help us get the word out about the show, and that means so much!

You can also find this episode, show notes, and free Unburdened Leader resources along with ways to sign up for our Unburdened Leader email and ways to work with me at www.rebeccaching.com. And this episode is produced by the incredible team at Yellow House Media!

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