From Hiding to Being Seen. Find Your Voice and Speak With Confidence

Juliette KaramanTouch and Intimacy Expert

In conversation with Lucy Devi Hall, a sound engineer and speaker mentor who helps women find their voice, speak with confidence, and feel safe being seen on stage and on camera. Lucy has worked as a sound engineer at Sky for twenty two years. We have known each other for about fifteen.

What Lucy Brought

Lucy told the story of walking out in public with her natural Afro, after years of straightened hair and weaves. A simple trip to the shop. What came up in her body was enormous, and it showed her how much old experience of racism, of shame, of hiding, was still live in her system. She came home, stood in the hallway, and realised something she said out loud on this episode: she had been doing it to herself, and she was giving it all back.

Such a visceral response to taking one single thing off the safety blanket. The fuck it moment, then hiding behind the cars on the way there, not wanting to be seen. It is so visceral, and most of us have no idea it is still running in our system.

Lucy's frame for it is that we put things on top of our voice. Racism. Patriarchy. Misogyny. Self hate. Being compared to a sibling. Layer after layer goes on top, and the work is seeing them clearly enough to take one off.

I wanted to add to it, because a little weft or a weave can be exactly that, an addition, and you can know it as one. This is not me. I do not hide behind it. Then there is Botox, and fillers, and everything else, and the thought underneath all of it: "if only I get to that point, then I will be happy." We do not recognise those as the masks. By taking them off we get more sensation in the body, and that can be hella uncomfortable.

The Generational Hold

Lucy's auntie took her to get her hair straightened. So it went in subconsciously, young: this is what you should look like.

We have all heard a version. Don't wear that. Stand up straight. My mother used to tell me to suck in my tummy and my bottom, which means you walk around clenched for half a lifetime, and then the body says, this does not feel comfortable. We are abiding by what other people taught us.

From the sound desk, Lucy sees the same thing with volume. The majority of women, she has to make louder. There was a woman on a stage recently she could not believe the quietness of, sitting there thinking: you learned that, somewhere. Two women in an audience were handed a microphone and both of them, almost immediately, moved it away from their mouths. They wanted to speak. The body moved the mic anyway.

Where I Keep Landing With Couples

This is exactly what I see in partnership, and in the couples who come to me. "He always does that, and he never does this, and he's doing that." They are tracking so much of what is going wrong with him that they have no cognitive awareness of what is happening in their own body.

Very often they will say, "I'm angry here," or "I'm annoyed." I say, that is an emotion. What is the body sensation? "Well, I'm angry. He's overstepping my boundary." Yes, that is a story, and it is a beautiful story, and I want you to look at what is actually happening in your body. Is there a tightness? A contraction? An expansion? Is there heat?

They look at me like I am speaking another language. Then they do it for thirty days, the same thirty days, and they start to recognise that they are safe and that they can say these things out loud, because voicing it helps. In my couples work it is usually about three months before the light properly comes on: "oh my god, this is what you mean by what I feel in my body."

What they tend to say next is the thing. "I've been so focused on what's going wrong outside that I haven't focused on what's inside."

"That is an emotion. What is the body sensation?"

Congruence Is What Makes a Room Lean Forward

I speak on stages. I get on, and there are a lot of eyes on me, and often I will say that out loud. Whoo, okay. I jumped on here excited and roaring to go, and now I am looking at all those faces looking at me, and my bottom just clenched. This is a little bit intense.

Everyone laughs, because they can all imagine exactly what that feels like.

That is the beauty of the speakers you lean forward for, the ones you find yourself rooting for. There is congruence between what they are saying and what their body is doing. There may well be craft in there too, the pause, the pace, the rise and fall. The pull comes from the congruence.

Then there are the people on stages and on social media who are boring as fuck, because they have trained their keynote to within an inch of its life and disconnected from the body to do it. The mind goes elsewhere. What am I feeding him later. For me this is the same thing we do in sex.

The Time I Could Not Speak

I was teaching in a coaching programme, and my sister had just passed away. I got on the stage to teach the states of orgasm, and I could not speak. Tears coming down my face, looking at every single person in the room, and it went so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. Everyone was feeling me.

That is nervous systems starting to co-regulate, feeding each other.

When I did speak, I have no memory of what I said. I do know that people, fifteen years later, still come up to me and tell me it was a beautiful transmission, because they understood the rawness of where I was.

With the rise of AI video there is a slight disconnect we can all feel, even when it is mimicked perfectly. Something reads as slightly off, and our minds and bodies go: is that real? Can I connect with that? Realness is the one thing we are all looking for, whether it is in front of a camera, on a stage, one to one with a partner, or alone with your own body, with the hair and the mask and the makeup off.

What Happens When It Goes Wide

When this podcast went viral I thought, this is cool. Then, whoa. Okay. I am not sure I want to go quite that viral.

Same on social media. A reel of mine, the one where Alex is touching my jaw, went far wider than I expected, and the DMs arrived. "God will strike you down."

I wanted to help people. Do I want this part as well?

That is the bit. You open, somebody tells you a few things, and that is where you close off again. Or you decide, quietly, maybe it is not safe to be seen. Maybe it is not safe to have my voice out there.

Try This: Thirty Days of Sensation

This is the practice I asked for in the episode, and it costs you a minute at a time.

When something lands in you, catch the sentence your mind offers first. "I'm annoyed." "He always does this." Let it exist, it is accurate as a story.

Then ask the second question, which is the one almost nobody asks: what is the body sensation?

• Is there a tightness, and where exactly?
• Is there a contraction, pulling in and down?
• Is there an expansion, something widening in your chest?
• Is there heat?

Say the answer out loud. Out loud matters, because voicing it moves it through the throat and out, and the body hears you treat it as real.

Thirty days. The same thirty days. Expect to feel ridiculous for the first week.

The stage version is the same practice with witnesses. Before you start speaking, name what just happened in your body to the room. My bottom clenched. My hands have gone cold. Watch how fast a room comes with you once you have done it.

Two Questions Before You Close This Page

Lucy says it does not take another qualification, another certificate, another perfect funnel. Sometimes it is a hand reaching out, saying, I can teach you this part.

So: where would you want your voice to be heard, specifically? Which room, which conversation, whose face in front of you.

Then picture it a year from now, unchanged. Same microphone moved away from your mouth. Another twelve months of being turned up by somebody at a desk you cannot see.

The twelve months are the part I would mind.