Read the Transcript:

Hello there and welcome to The Live Fab Life Podcast. I'm your host Naomi Nakamura. Before we get into today's episode, I want to remind you that we’re celebrating five years of the show! To celebrate I’m offering a 20% off code for you to use towards a Human Design Reading or Functional Nutrition Assessment. The 20% off code is 5THPODCAST20. It expires on November 9 and is valid for one code per client.

Today’s episode is on finding your voice and it’s a topic that’s deeply personal to me because finding and sharing my voice is a journey that I’ve been on for a long time. In fact, it's a large part of why I started this podcast to begin with.

Earlier this year, I was struggling with my voice - you can hear more about it in Episodes 214 and 215 which I'll link to in the show notes at www.livefablife.com/ 237 for Episode 237.

Let’s break this down because there are a lot of things, I want to touch on this and when there are so many thoughts going on in my head, having Undefined Head and Ajna centers, sometimes what I want to say gets lost in the shuffle. I have a long outline for this episode, so I hope it doesn’t become too exhaustive.

Let’s start by asking, “What’s your voice?” Besides your actual speaking voice, your voice is the words that you share and put out into the world. It's your point of view, your message, your stance on things. It's “your why” - why do you do things?

This episode came about after recording Episodes 234 and 235 on How to Align Your Business to Your Human Design, and then How I Align My Business to My Human Design. Your message, your voice, and your “why” is everything to your business, whether you offer products or services.

But beyond this, because not all of us have our own businesses, knowing your voice, stance, and point of view is important in any work that you do, even if you work for someone else. You need to be clear on what your stance is as you communicate with those that you work with, and in your personal life.

You need to know why you do what you do, and why you believe what you believe, and you need to be able to communicate it to others.

I struggled with this earlier in the year. While I knew my message and my points of view, I was unclear on how to best express it - what tone? I’ll get more into that in a little bit.

So, when it comes to finding our voice and sharing our truth, what part of Human Design do we look at?

This isn’t a trick question. What’s the energy center of communication? The Throat Center!

It’s not only about how we communicate our thoughts, but also about using our thoughts, words, and actions to connect with others.

We had a lot of questions when we did the Projectors Q&A episode centered around relationships that we didn’t get to, but so much of relationships are about communication.

So, the Throat Center is so important. It’s the center of manifestation and if you think about it, it's the hub of Human Design. It's at the central part of the body graph chart, and it’s the most complex of the nine energy centers. It has the most gates, 11 gates that connect to six other centers, the most of any other center, which also means that it has the most possible channels.

Your Throat Center determines not just how you express your voice but also how you're heard.

Are you in alignment with your Throat Center? Every energy center in the Human Design body graph chart is embodied by an organ in our physical bodies. The throat center is embodied by the thyroid gland.

Long-time listeners know that I’ve struggled with thyroid dysfunction, specifically, hypothyroidism, also known as a low-functioning thyroid. In fact, I started this podcast as part of my healing journey to speak my truth. It may seem like a strange, unconventional way to treat thyroid dysfunction, but let’s look at this for a moment.

The thyroid gland is important because it's the master gland in the body. It regulates your hormone function, which touches all functions in the body. Thyroid function is key to energy levels; if you have a low-functioning thyroid as I do, then you tend to feel sluggish and tired often. Thyroid function also impacts metabolism and digestion.

So, how are thyroid issues treated?

It’s treated with food by avoiding the consumption of inflammatory food like junk and sugary foods – foods that impair body function, possibly identifying any food allergies, sensitivities, and/or intolerances. It’s also treated by eating foods that support thyroid and hormone function.

Besides food, supplements can also help repair and support thyroid function.

And then there’s lab work – “test, don't guess, right?

I see my functional medicine doctor once a quarter and before every appointment I have lab work done, including a full thyroid panel, among other tests, to measure how my markers have changed.

I had a low-functioning thyroid for years, then once it was correctly diagnosed, I practiced all the modalities I just shared to restore my thyroid function.

Then there's also lifestyle treatment, and this lifestyle part is what brought me to Human Design.

The lifestyle treatments for thyroid treatment are stress management. Let’s pause here and think about this. “Stress Management” is a broad, broad topic - there's so much to unpack there. It’s not simply saying, “I’m going to manage my stress” and boom, it’s done overnight. There’s so much more to it.

Other lifestyle treatments for thyroid dysfunction are:

Exercise but not too much - Longtime listeners know that over-training was an issue for me

There's sleeping well, another thing that's easy to say, but if a person isn’t already sleeping well, there are clearly some challenges, and there needs to be more support.

And then there’s the lifestyle treatment of, “speaking your truth” which is quite different from the other treatments.

How do we “speak our truth?”

In addition to this podcast, Human Design has been instrumental in helping me speak my truth because speaking my truth comes down to two things for me:

Knowing what my truth is Knowing who I am

How can I know my truth if I don’t know who I am? How can I know my truth if I don't even know what my truth is?

Having a Defined Throat Center, as I do, means having a consistent way of speaking and expressing ourselves. Beyond consistently expressing ourselves, it’s also about how you express the energy of the Throat Center. And this is where I look at what other centers the Throat Center connects to and I’ll get into that in a little bit.

What does Undefined Throat Center mean? At a high level those with an Undefined Throat Center, can be a voice for others. They have flexibility and fluidity in how they express themselves and they can also have a sense of what needs to be expressed into the world, meaning because it’s an undefined center they take on the energy of others - so in that respect, they can be a voice for others as can are vulnerable to being influenced by external energy. They can sense what needs to be expressed and that's a special gift to have.

So, what happens when you’re not in alignment with your Throat Center when you’re not expressing yourself or speaking your truth? What happens to us physically? Well, if the Throat Center is embodied by the thyroid gland, it’s no wonder that I’ve had thyroid dysfunction, and therefore speaking your truth is an important lifestyle treatment for thyroid dysfunction.

Of course, when I started this podcast, five years ago, I didn’t know about Human Design, but I had a deep need to express myself and share my voice. It’s been my way of consistently showing up and saying, “This is who I am. This is my perspective. This is my voice. This is my message.”

My message has expanded and evolved from those early episodes and so has my audience. I’ve heard from folks who have said that they miss me focusing on the topics I focused on for the first 150 episodes of the show. But here's the thing – those topics aren’t only my voice anymore. It’s not my only message. And only speaking about those things so limiting and only focusing on them doesn’t feel like speaking my truth.

Along those lines, as I’ve evolved and expanded, bringing Human Design into the mix, I’ve had to learn how to speak about a whole new thing.

It’s one thing to be knowledgeable about something but it's another thing to find the words and energy to express it confidently. For those of you who listened to Episode 210, the episode that I did on the single channel that I have in my Human Design, the 48-16 channel, you know how and why expanding my perspective and feeling confident enough to speak my voice about it was challenging. And that’s how this podcast has helped me find my voice and speak my truth. And learning about my design, this 48-16 channel that I have, helped me understand why this was hard for me.

So, we must know who we are, we must know what our message and our voice are, but we also need to understand who the receivers of our message are - our listeners. Who is it that I’m speaking to?

When I expanded my message to include Human Design, I already had an established audience from my years of health coaching. I brought my health coaching audience with me as I ventured into Human Design.

So, as I started to speak about Human Design and introduce it to my established audience, I shared my message through a beginner’s lens, speaking simply. To someone more versed in Human Design, I may sound elementary in the words that I use and topics I’ve chosen to speak on and yes, it has been, it’s been an intentional, conscious choice.

I’m not speaking to people who have advanced Human Design knowledge. That's not to say that there aren’t those kinds of listeners, but it’s not who my focus is on when sharing my voice.

So, while we’re on the subject, what is my message? Why Human Design?

Let me share the results of an exercise I recently did:

“I offer Human Design and health coaching to help people gain clarity and awareness in their bodies, minds, and emotions, so that they can feel liberated and empowered with a renewed sense of self-love and self-trust, stepping into a self-leadership role in their lives. Why?

Because in my own health and self-development journey, at times I felt alone because I didn't have anyone in my immediate circles on the same trajectory that I was on. I had to piece together a lot of information from different sources, and I didn't feel that I had a support system.

There were times along the way that I felt angry because I realized that so much of what I’d been taught about health was lies and incomplete information.

When I felt confident enough to step into a leadership role with health and in my life, it naturally extended to feeling empowered to be an advocate for myself, taking back control of my life. I developed confidence in myself and learned to appreciate my gifts and what I have to offer the world.

On my journey to better health, I discovered Human Design. As I learned about my Human Design, for the first time in my life, I felt that it was okay to be me. To embrace who I am - my quirks, idiosyncrasies, and the parts of myself that I don't let anyone else see.

And for the first time in my life, I felt seen, recognized, validated, and appreciated by others, but most of all by myself. Now recognizing and appreciating my self-worth has given me the permission to raise my standards of how I treat myself and how I allow others to treat me.

As a byproduct, I'm now able to see others in a different light through their Human Design, which in turn helps me have more empathy, compassion, kindness, and appreciation for others.”

It took me a while to find the words to express these sentiments and is the first time I've read these words out loud to anyone other than myself.

This is part of why I struggled so much earlier this year with what tone I express myself in, again, as I shared in Episodes 214 and 215.

The struggle came down to not wanting to be the person to tell you what to do, what you “should” be doing. I hate the word “should” because it implies that there's an expectation of how things are “supposed” to be done. And isn’t that the antithesis of bio-individuality and Human Design?

So, I really struggled with how do I share what I know in a way that will resonate. How do I share my voice? How do I speak my truth? This is what I experienced at the end of 2021, and early 2022. So, it wasn’t surprising that it was around that time that I started having thyroid issues again.

As I shared in Episodes 214 and 15, I worked through some of this with my friend and friend of the show, Julien Elizabeth.

But in addition to the work we did together, I also looked at my Defined Throat Center and what gates are active in my Throat Center.

When I work with Reflectors, because Reflectors don't have any defined centers, they also don’t have any channels, we look at their active gates, which is what I’ve been doing, not just in my Throat Center but in all my energy centers.

In my Defined Throat Center, I have four active gates:

Gate 16: The Gate of Talents is about sharing learnings from my personal experiments and experiences which ties directly with my 1 / 3 Profile lines.

Gate 31: The Gate of Influencing Future Direction, which essentially is about leadership.

Gate 35: The Gate of Speaking About Personal Experiences

And hasn’t that always been the tone of this podcast? I kinda lost sight of that along the way. I've always tried to make this podcast about real people's stories. So, yes I’ve had subject matter experts and whatnot on the show, I’ve also had guests who aren't even on social media at all or who have smaller audiences or even who were personal contacts - family and friends of mine, because they had powerful stories that I felt would resonate with others - real people stories, my own stories included.

Gate 45: The Gate of Directing Others

When I put these gates together, I lead and influence when I express my voice, sharing my learnings and experiments from personal experiences.

I didn’t see myself as a leader or influencer because of how I’d been conditioned to believe how leaders and influencers are “supposed” to be.

I didn’t see that leadership could be practiced through sharing personal experiences, but now I understand that it’s the way that I’m meant to express myself, share my voice, and speak my truth.

So, bringing things full circle, I shared how this episode came about after talking about looking to the Throat Center for copywriting in Episodes 234 and 235. So let me share some things that help me with this.

In those episodes, I shared how I have an Undefined Head and Undefined Ajna centers, and looking at blank Google Docs is daunting and overwhelming.

So, having someone interview me and ask me questions about what I do, why I do it, who I do it for, etc, etc. and having the conversation recorded has been tremendously helpful with copywriting. The words that come out of my mouth become my copy, often word-for-word, because they’re MY words – my unique, authentic voice.

I did this in one of my coaching sessions with Julien. She asked me things like, “Tell me what it is that you do?”, “What is the message that you want to get out there?”, “Why is it important to you?”

As I just answered her questions, I was like, “Wait, are we recording this because this needs to be my copy!”

Since then, I've been the question-asker for some colleagues and friends and found it helpful too. So, if you have someone that can interview you and ask them to help you out!

And if you don't have someone, speak into a recording app, as I do for every episode. The first, rough draft of every solo episode, this one included, is recorded in the app, Otter, which is a voice recording app that puts everything into transcription. I brain dump and word vomit, getting all the fumbling words and random thoughts out.

Then I take the transcription, clean it up and use it for recording, and for the transcription that’s included in the episode’s show notes. It's helped me practice how to be more efficient and selective in the words and phrases that I use to express myself.

Along these same lines whenever I read anything, anything at all, I’m looking for inspiration, what resonates with me from other brands and industries that have nothing to do with what I do.

In the last episode, Episode 236, Anna Lois Davies and I were talking about how we’re both aesthetically inspired, and she shared how she’s inspired by editorials and so I'm the same way. I get inspired just by looking at a website or something on Instagram, reading a book - anything that resonates, and I quickly jot it down because there's a reason why it stood out to me.

Alright, let’s bring this to a close because despite having an outline and doing a voice dump on Otter, I feel like this episode was kind of scattered, so I hope it helps someone, maybe you, get clearer on becoming connected to your voice and being able to express it. I once read something like 72% of the population has a Defined Throat Center and we also know thyroid dysfunction is not an uncommon thing. There’s a reason for that and there’s a reason why it’s so common in women as we’ve been conditioned not to share our voice and speak our truth.

I hear this from a lot of older women too which makes me sad because they’ve felt this way this whole life and so I wanted to spend an episode talking about this, the genesis of it came about from the episodes on aligning our business to our designs.

Before I sign off, don't forget about the 20% off a Human Design Reading or Functional Nutrition Assessment celebratory promo using the code: 5THPODCAST20. It's valid until Wednesday, November 9, and is GOD for one USE per client.

I hope you have a great day and I will see you right back here again next time. Bye!