Speak with authority! Speak so others not only hear; but listen and take us seriously!

Not only is it important for our personal relationship lives, but for our professional lives as well. It’s hard enough at times for women in the marketplace to be taken seriously as recent studies indicate is still the case. Although we’ve come a long way, baby - we’re still limited by two glass ceilings. The one that the marketplace places there and the one we place there in our minds.

While promotions and career advancement are wonderful and certainly important - acquiring the voice of authority will last us a lifetime - long after we’ve retired and moved onto to other exciting things that the journey has for us.

As I’ve thought about this subject and how to offer tidbits (or ’snippets’) of info that is helpful - I find it difficult to come up with a “list” of things that you can practice and acquire.

The voice of authority isn’t a skill we learn - it’s a state of being we achieve!

When I read the Gospel stories of Jesus walking with the people and teaching them about himself and the kingdom - I pick up some sense of how it must be to ’speak with authority’.

First, he knew his subject ‘intimately’. Today, we would say it this way - “he knew what he was talking about” and it came through loud and clear to the folks with whom he communicated.

He spoke without hesitation. He spoke without any hint of doubt about what he shared. He was confident in the message.

Secondly, he communicated by telling stories using common day examples that they easily understood so they could grasp the essence or meaning of what he was sharing. He did it in simple terms, with simple language in such a way as not to demean them, but to make certain they had clarity about the message.

Third, he was never intimidated by the ‘big shots of his day’ who joined the throngs that followed him. He knew there were those among the crowd that looked for every opportunity to ‘expose’ him; ridicule him and his message or blatantly confront him in public in order to humiliate him. We might say it thusly, “He called a spade a spade”.

And he did it maintaining his own integrity and leaving the integrity of the other intact. That is as long as the other had integrity to leave intact!

Basically, he spoke, taught, shared, communicated from a sense of his true identity and the wholeness of his inner concept of who he was.

The same is true for us! There’s absolutely no reason we can’t achieve the same sense of ourselves; the same level of inner self-concept; a comfort with who we know we are; an intimate knowledge of what we know and how to express it to others and an inner awareness of our own personal and professional integrity.

Jesus didn’t get there overnight! And neither do we. It’s a journey into self-reflection; self-understanding; self-examination and self-discovery. It’s coming to know what we’re capable of; what we have to offer; what we are good at and what needs ‘refining’.

And it’s coming to terms with those aspects of who we are that aren’t as pretty as others - the aspects we like to deny. However, it’s only after coming to terms with them and our capacity for denial that we reach a comfort level with the entirety of ‘us’.

A humorous example from my life: there are just some foods that I can’t eat and talk at the same time. About the time I’m asked a question while chewing on one of the ‘forbidden-to-eat-and-talk foods’, and as I’m about to announce, “I can’t eat this food and talk at the same time” - tiny particles of the ‘forbidden-to-eat-and-talk food’ flies from my lips.

And it doesn’t go unnoticed!

I have come to a point in life that when this happens, I simply announce, “what can I say - I’m a slop at heart!” And everyone laughs while I explain my dilemna of trying to talk with a mouthful of certain foods, etc., etc.!

I certainly don’t mean to make light of what it takes to get to the point in life where not only do we speak with authority - but those who hear us recognize our authority. And respect us for it.

It’s never about how loud we speak. It’s never about the size of the words we use or the way we tilt our head or hold our hands.

It’s about coming to that self-comfort level that anything we say, we know to be true.

At that point, others come to know it as well!