The Science Of Speaking Up For Yourself | Elaine Lin Hering
Elaine Lin Hering, a former Harvard Law Lecturer, discusses unlearning silence to improve communication. She covers why we self-silence, miscalculating speaking up costs, her four steps to find your voice, and how to avoid unintentionally silencing others.
Deep Dive Analysis
18 Topic Outline
Introduction to Unlearning Silence and Co-host Bianca Harris
Elaine Lin Hering's Origin Story and Definition of Silence
The Health and Relational Stakes of Self-Silencing
Bianca's Experience with Silence in Professional and Personal Life
Societal and Gendered Influences on Learned Silence
Distinguishing Healthy, Chosen Silence from Oppressive Silence
Unintended Silencing: Personal Examples and Trauma Responses
The Importance of Unpacking Personal Origin Stories
"ToiletGate": A Microcosm of Differing Assumptions
Expressing Needs and Running Small Experiments to Speak Up
Leveraging Sounding Boards for Communication Practice
Understanding Biases in the Voice-Silence Calculation
Applying the Voice-Silence Calculation to Giving Feedback
Building a Culture of Voice and Encouraging Others
Optimizing Communication Flows for Diverse Styles
Elaine's Four Steps for Effectively Speaking Up
Strategies to Stop Unintentionally Silencing Others
Navigating Silence and Voice in Parenting
9 Key Concepts
Voice
Voice refers to how an individual moves through the world and their agency to decide how they will do so. It encompasses not just the words spoken, but one's overall presence and ability to express needs, thoughts, and preferences.
Oppressive Silence
This type of silence occurs when there isn't enough room in a conversation or relationship for an individual's needs, thoughts, or preferences. It often stems from a feeling that one must defer to others to maintain the relationship, lacking personal agency.
Additive Silence
Additive silence is a consciously chosen act of self-care, boundary setting, or creating a meditative pause. It is characterized by personal agency and intentionality, rather than being imposed or feeling like the only option.
Voice-Silence Calculation
This is a mental process where individuals weigh the perceived costs and benefits of speaking up versus staying silent. People often make this calculation poorly by over-indexing on short-term personal costs and under-indexing on long-term collective benefits.
Present Bias
Present bias is a cognitive tendency to focus disproportionately on immediate, short-term costs and benefits. This bias often leads individuals to overlook the more significant long-term consequences of their actions or inactions when deciding whether to speak up.
Self-Bias
Related to the spotlight effect, self-bias involves an excessive focus on one's own thoughts and feelings, leading to the assumption that others are paying more attention to them than they actually are. This can cause individuals to overestimate negative reactions when they speak up.
Culture of Voice
A culture of voice is an environment, whether in a team or a relationship, where speaking up is normalized, encouraged, and rewarded. It is built by consistently demonstrating that candid feedback and diverse communication styles are valued and lead to positive outcomes.
Sounding Board
A sounding board is a trusted person who acts as a mirror, reflecting back what you are saying or thinking without necessarily telling you what to do. It provides a safe space to practice expressing thoughts and requests, helping to gain clarity and confidence.
Connecting the Dots
This concept involves articulating your perspective and sharing the information or reasoning behind your views to help others understand where you are coming from. It acknowledges that everyone has a legitimate but limited perspective, requiring effort to bridge understanding.
11 Questions Answered
The core difference lies in agency; healthy silence is a conscious choice for self-care or reflection, while unhealthy silence is imposed or felt as the only option, leading to suppression of one's needs.
Self-silencing can lead to significant health impacts, including chronic high alert, loneliness, and living as a 'shell' of oneself, preventing true self-expression and acceptance.
In relationships, self-silencing can prevent true intimacy and understanding, as partners may never truly know each other if one person consistently suppresses their needs and authentic self.
While not inherently about gender, societal and cultural expectations often lead women to be more acculturated to silence, being expected to be docile, supportive, or caring, which can suppress their own needs.
People tend to poorly calculate this by over-indexing on immediate, short-term costs (like discomfort) and under-indexing on long-term costs of silence, as well as underestimating the potential benefits of speaking up.
Individuals can start by running 'small experiments,' such as making a simple request in a low-stakes situation (like asking a taxi driver to open a window), to gather data points that show it's okay to ask.
A sounding board is a trusted person who helps by reflecting back what you say, allowing you to practice expressing your thoughts and requests, and gaining clarity and confidence before a real conversation.
By building a 'culture of voice' where candid feedback is invited and rewarded, and by lending one's social capital to endorse and amplify the voices of others, especially those who might be marginalized.
Instead of prioritizing one mode (e.g., real-time verbal), relationships and communication flows should be designed to optimize for diverse voices, allowing individuals to communicate in ways that play to their strengths (e.g., written, audio notes).
Parents can foster this by doing a cost-benefit analysis (short-term ease vs. long-term development), listening to children's opinions, and articulating the impact of their actions on others, while still setting boundaries.
Unpacking past traumatic or painful experiences that led to learned silence is crucial because these unresolved issues can unconsciously 'leak out,' impacting current relationships and interactions in unintended ways.
37 Actionable Insights
1. Unpack Past Traumatic Experiences
Engage in the work of unpacking past traumatic or painful experiences, as unresolved issues can unintentionally leak out and negatively impact those around you.
2. Interrogate Responses & Origin
As an adult, interrogate your present responses, such as dissociation, by naming them and understanding their origin story, which helps others accurately interpret your behavior.
3. Reframe Needs as Human
Challenge the belief that having needs makes you needy; instead, recognize that having needs is a fundamental aspect of being human and a starting point for rewiring your relationship with your voice.
4. Notice Your Needs & Agency
Regularly pause to notice what you need and then intentionally decide if and how you want to disclose those needs to others, centering your agency in the process.
5. See Yourself as Negotiation Party
Apply negotiation theory by recognizing yourself as an active party in any dynamic, acknowledging your own needs, goals, hopes, and concerns rather than removing yourself from the equation.
6. Choose Silence for Self-Care
Consciously choose silence as an act of self-care or boundary setting, ensuring it is an intentional choice rather than a forced suppression of your voice to maintain a relationship.
7. Be Intentional About Choices
Cultivate awareness and intentionality regarding your choices, including when to speak or stay silent, and reflect on their impacts to foster better relationships and personal growth.
8. Reflect on Past Silencing
Engage in reflection on how you and others have silenced each other in the past, and use these insights to intentionally choose different, more honoring ways of interacting moving forward.
9. Discuss Past Actions to Change
If you regret how you showed up in a past situation, discuss it to understand what happened and identify what you can do differently in the future.
10. Connect the Dots for Understanding
Recognize that others see things differently; share your perspective and information to ‘connect the dots’ for them, helping them understand your viewpoint and fostering mutual understanding.
11. Start with Your ‘Why’
Before speaking up, identify your deeper ‘why’ – the bigger purpose or value that matters more than immediate fear or discomfort – to provide motivation and sustain your efforts.
12. Make Your Ask Clear
Clearly articulate your specific request or need to others, such as needing a listening ear or advice, so they can understand how to best support you.
13. Embrace Resistance as Information
When encountering resistance or defensiveness, embrace it as valuable information to unpack; ask questions like ‘What concerns do you have?’ to understand their perspective and find a way forward.
14. Conduct Small Speaking-Up Experiments
Start with low-risk ‘small experiments’ in daily life, like asking for something simple, to gather data points that reinforce the safety and acceptability of using your voice.
15. Use Sounding Boards to Practice
Utilize a sounding board to reflect on your thoughts and practice articulating your requests or feedback, allowing you to try out your voice in a safe space and refine your message before a real conversation.
16. Recalibrate Speaking-Up Costs
When deciding whether to speak up, actively counter the tendency to over-index on short-term personal costs and instead consider the long-term costs of staying silent.
17. Counter Present & Self-Bias
Be aware of present bias (short-term thinking) and self-bias (over-focus on self) when making decisions about speaking up, and actively consider long-term costs of silence and potential benefits of voice.
18. Invite Feedback by Changing Behavior
Increase the likelihood of receiving candid feedback by changing how you show up, such as choosing not to be defensive, actively inviting feedback, and communicating your preferred method of receiving it.
19. Publicly Reward Candid Feedback
If you hold a position of power, publicly reward individuals for providing candid feedback, especially when it’s difficult to hear, to foster psychological safety and a culture of voice.
20. Build a Culture of Voice
Consistently demonstrate that speaking up is safe and beneficial, providing concrete examples for others to observe, thereby normalizing candid communication and building a culture of voice.
21. Optimize Communication for Diverse Voices
Recognize that people are wired differently and have diverse communication strengths; design communication flows to optimize for various modes, rather than prioritizing one as superior, to ensure all voices are heard.
22. Discuss Communication Preferences
Actively discuss and accommodate individual communication preferences, such as phone calls over video, to make it easier for people to be candid and optimize for voice.
23. Adapt Communication Methods
Adapt your communication methods to accommodate others’ preferences and life stages, rather than imposing your preferred method, to reduce barriers to communication and foster intimacy.
24. Create Personal Operator’s Manual
Develop a personal ‘operator’s manual’ that outlines how you show up and your preferences, providing context for others to better understand and interact with you.
25. Treat Manual as Hypotheses
Approach your personal ‘operator’s manual’ as a set of evolving hypotheses about yourself, remaining open to change and ongoing conversation rather than presenting it as rigid terms and conditions.
26. Understand Others’ Speaking Difficulty
Avoid unintentionally silencing others by recognizing and not underestimating how difficult it might be for them to use their voice, and inquire about their relationship with silence to foster empathy.
27. Lend Social Capital to Others
Use your social capital to endorse and amplify the voices of others, especially those who may be marginalized or struggle to be heard, thereby disrupting biases and encouraging others to listen.
28. Clarify Consultation vs. Decision
When engaging with others, be explicitly clear about whether you are consulting for input or if a decision has already been made, to avoid unintentional silencing and foster respect.
29. Set Boundaries Against Harmful Behavior
It is appropriate to set boundaries and silence harmful or disrespectful behavior from others, as this honors both your own dignity and the dignity of those around you.
30. Make Rules Explicit
Avoid the trap of implicit rules by explicitly stating your expectations and boundaries, clarifying what is and isn’t acceptable in a given situation or relationship.
31. Inquire About Others’ Needs
To care for and lead people well, actively inquire about what others need and how you can support them, rather than making assumptions or failing to recognize their needs.
32. Negotiate Spouse’s Characterization
When discussing shared experiences, negotiate with your spouse how they are characterized and how they experience that characterization, clarifying roles in decision-making (consulting vs. vetoing).
33. Listen to Children’s Opinions
As a parent, listen to your children’s opinions, even when inconvenient, to provide them with data points that validate their voice and needs, fostering their ability to communicate over time.
34. Articulate Behavioral Impact
To maintain household harmony while fostering voice, articulate the impact of others’ behavior on you (e.g., ‘your stomping makes it hard for me to answer’) rather than silently tolerating it.
35. Seek Support to Unlearn Silence
Recognize that unlearning silence is group work; actively ask the people around you (your ’team’) how they can support you on your journey to find and use your voice.
36. Share Household Routines
If one partner disproportionately handles household routines, the other partner should actively partake and share responsibilities to prevent one person from feeling silenced or overburdened.
37. Join Free Meditation Challenge
Sign up for the 7-day New Year’s Meditation Challenge with Joseph Goldstein from Jan 5-11, which is a masterclass in Buddhist meditation suitable for both beginners and experienced meditators.
7 Key Quotes
To me, voice is how you move through the world and the agency to decide how you're going to move through the world.
Elaine Lin Hering
The difference between silence that is additive or oppressive is agency.
Elaine Lin Hering
Staying silent has real health impacts, right? This epidemic of loneliness, of having your alert system on chronic high alert because you have to edit out parts of yourselves in order to be accepted.
Elaine Lin Hering
I may be married to you, but I may never know you. And if I never know you, how could I really love you?
Elaine Lin Hering
If we're not doing our own work to unpack the traumatic experiences, the painful experiences, the ways that we've been impacted by the lives that we lived, it all leaks out anyways, and not in ways that we intend and often having unintended impacts on the people around us.
Elaine Lin Hering
We often as human beings over-index on the short-term costs to ourselves... and we under-index on the long-term costs of if I don't have this conversation now, what's going to happen in five days, in five months, in five years, what's the long-term impact?
Elaine Lin Hering
Resistance, pushback is actually information if we can unpack it.
Elaine Lin Hering
1 Protocols
Four Steps for How to Speak Up
Elaine Lin Hering- Start with why: Identify the bigger reason for wanting to have the conversation or use your voice, which matters more than immediate fear or discomfort.
- Connect the dots: Articulate your perspective and share how you see things, acknowledging that your perspective is legitimate but limited, to help others understand.
- Make the ask clear: Clearly state what you need or are asking for, so others can effectively support or respond to you.
- Embrace resistance: When faced with pushback or defensiveness, engage it as information by asking about concerns or what would need to be different to move forward.