Finding our voices

Grant and Kelsi please the crowd

Grant never sings anymore. The truth is I don’t remember him singing an entire song audibly since he was about five years old. Back then, I actually had to shush him once because he was belting out the music above all the rest of the children. But since then he’s refused to sing in church. In fact, he'll rarely even pick up a hymnbook. 

So, you can imagine my shock the other night when I saw him on stage, cool as could be, singing a duet with his friend Kelsi whom he’s known forever. While she played the guitar, the two of them sang away as if they’d been doing it every day since they were kids. They’re no rock stars, I realize, but their voices blended well and they sounded great to me. Where had Grant been hiding that voice? 

Singing voices are a breed of their own, I suppose, but this experience made us wonder just what helps people find their own voices.

Sometimes, people speak out of necessity. My little brother, for example, didn’t say a word until he was well into his second year of life when slipping off my mother’s lap, he cried out in desperation, “Help! Help! I’m falling!” Another case of first words being strung together in a complete sentence comes out of Mooreland, Indiana, where a girl known as "Zippy" was almost three years old before she finally began to talk, and then not until her father threatened to throw away her bottle. “I’ll make a deal with you,” she said in a perfectly clear voice. Shocked, her father listened while she continued, “If you let me keep it, I’ll hide it when company comes and I won’t tell no-body.” No deal for Zippy, unfortunately, but fortunately she found her voice.

Haven Kimmel (AKA "Zippy")

I, on the other hand, had no trouble finding my voice very early in life. I attribute this to a family culture of lively conversations, which instilled in me a deep-seated belief that even my young, untested thoughts were welcome and valid. So, it came as quite a surprise to me when my kindergarten teacher, who happened to be new in town, tried to silence me. She asked about my family, and I announced proudly I was the twelfth of 13 children. Having no clue that for years all my older siblings had also attended the same elementary school, she assumed I was making up a big story, as children that age often do. Accused of lying, I protested—loudly, I’m sure. Even still, this woman wouldn’t believe me until she shared my outrageous claim in the teachers’ lounge where she was quickly set straight by several adults. 

Later, she had to ask for my forgiveness, but we both had things to learn. I was too young to understand that people don’t always believe children with big voices (and stories), and she was too new to the school to know what kind of person she was dealing with. As a Tanner, I just wasn’t accustomed to being told I couldn’t speak out. Even at four years old, I would have lots of things to say that year, and—teacher or not—she wasn’t about to stop me. 

I did have to learn to turn down the volume, though. Born with a naturally loud voice (inherited from my dad’s side), I not only had to reduce my decibel level but I also had to learn when to not use my voice, and when to listen to others so they could find their voice. I was reminded of this recently when I watched the movie Shadowlands, the story of C.S. Lewis’s adult life as a professor at Oxford University. A magnificent thinker and writer, Lewis made a habit of asking probing questions but usually with the intent to insert his own answers into the ensuing discussions. Not until he experienced real romantic love for the first time did he expose himself to honest, personal scrutiny. This vulnerability, this new willingness to let another give him a fresh perspective of himself, both frightened and befuddled him. Could it be he didn’t really have all the answers? 

Shortly after marrying, Lewis lost his wife to cancer. Up until then, his own brilliant intellect had been enough to help him reason his way through life’s complexities, but now he found himself nearly defenseless against uncharacteristic emotional pain and hopelessly perplexed by unanswerable questions. To his credit, after losing his wife, he changed. He changed the way he thought and, perhaps more importantly, he changed the way he taught. Instead of predetermining the path his lectures would go, he chose to genuinely listen to his students, helping them find their voices while they helped him discover the truth.

Professor and author C.S. Lewis

I imagine Lewis’s pedagogical turnaround was no small thing at an institution such as Oxford. After all, for centuries education has promoted the time-honored tradition of professors lecturing and students listening, almost reverentially. This approach has not been unique to education either. Typically, those with the most credentials, experience, fame, connections, or money have been awarded the biggest voices. 

Now, however, the rules are changing dramatically because millions are finding their voice and making it heard, and this shift is changing the world, says Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer at Facebook. Last week Sandberg returned to Harvard Business School, her alma mater of 17 years, to deliver the commencement address in which she recalled what the world was like not that long ago:

“It used to be that in order to reach more people than you could talk to in a day, you had to be rich and famous and powerful. You had to be a celebrity, a politician, a CEO. But that’s not true today. Now ordinary people have a voice, not just those of us lucky to go to HBS, but anyone with access to Facebook, Twitter, a mobile phone. This is disrupting traditional power structures and leveling traditional hierarchy. Control and power are shifting from institutions to individuals, from the historically powerful to the historically powerless. And all of this is happening so much faster than I could have imagined when I was sitting where you are today – and Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old.”

Sheryl Sandberg gave the commencement address
at the Harvard Business School 

It’s true. Today, by simply speaking up, commonplace citizens are literally starting revolutions. Through technology that invites them to talk, share, and comment, otherwise quiet or shy people have found their voices, and they are sharing their opinions freely and widely.

Of course, the world will never be short on people with big voices, but sometimes even these people, due to unexpected circumstances, come to find a more genuine voice. Such was the case for Neil Selinger, one of America’s premier plaintiffs’ securities lawyers. Practicing in New York for 30 years, Selinger decided to retire at age 57 in order to tutor at the local high school, volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, and pursue his interest in writing at a nearby college. Shortly thereafter, he was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), which meant he would eventually have no voluntary muscle movement or coordination. In just four years, he would die. 

Here was a man who, as an attorney, was no stranger to using his voice; however, after becoming ill, he found new purpose and meaning in his words. He still considered writing a discipline, but now he wrote to share his innermost thoughts and feelings and to candidly expose his life's struggles and joys. This required shedding his lawyer's voice. Said Salinger, “As my muscles weakened, my writing became stronger. As I slowly lost my speech, I gained my voice.”

Neil Selinger at home with his wife after contracting ALS

Big or small, all voices these days should have a shot at being heard. Just a few decades ago when I was in college, making long-distance calls home was very expensive, and we still had to pay to send a written communication. Consequently, I didn’t often hear my parents’ voices and they rarely heard mine. In contrast, Grant leaves for college in just a few months, and although I won’t be hearing him sing, I’ll count on hearing from him through phone calls, emails, text messages, Facebook posts, tweets, or however he chooses to be heard.