Right-Sized Resonance
How we hear the message is just as important as the content
If you’re reading this, there’s a great chance that you’ve already been exposed to ideas and practices around how to change limiting and negative thoughts. You’ve been therapized and coached into understanding the damage these thoughts can cause, and you’ve done the work to recognize them when they emerge from the shadows. You’ve probably even read an article or done a few exercises to replace those thorny thoughts with beautiful affirmations designed to align you with your potential. All the elements are there, you’ve got the framework and the tools … and yet … those negative messages don’t disappear with the ease you’d expect.
It took a few, big life events for me to become ultra aware that it’s not just a matter of having the right content to replace the undesired with the desired. It’s also about having a form of delivery that quite literally speaks to you. Let me explain …
My father’s funeral was transformative. But not in the way that you might think. It wasn’t just that the shape of my life had changed forever, or that I saw my father reflected back to me in a unique way once so many loved ones came together to remember him. It was hearing the song that we used to mark his passing that truly resonated with me. As his pallbearers carried his coffin to close the service, Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” blasted loud and clear, reverberating deeply against the heavy walls and crisp floor.
As soon as the song came on, there was an intense shift in the collective emotion of what we were feeling as a group. Our individual feelings of grief became one, and that oneness gave us such a sense of overwhelming connection and strength. The lyrics, the actual content, were indeed very representative of the way that my father lived his life, and I’m sure that was the hook that got people really paying attention. But it's the way that Ol’ Blue Eyes paces the words, ramps the tone, and crescendos the emotion that was responsible for what we all felt when we heard this. This song evoked an emotion so powerful in a moment of such intense loss. We were moved as individuals into a shared experience. Today, when my messy and distracting feelings of grief emerge, as they do and should, I’ll stream “My Way” and immediately it invokes measurable strength and comfort. It emboldens me with my dad’s presence and the comfort of everyone else who shared my grief in that moment.
I often consider this experience of transforming pain into strength, and how I can incorporate it into my practice of coaching others. Here is the secret sauce that I have discovered: At the root of most healing experiences is something that evokes deep emotion in people, and the emotion that is evoked is the vehicle for the transformation or change that a person is seeking. I’ve become mildly obsessed with uncovering what it would take for an individual to evoke this catalyst to change inside of themselves. As a coach, I recognize the obvious and more subtle ways that each client’s situation is different from the other. As connection and communication unfolds in our work, I am able to uncover those elements and craft a solution that evokes this emotion and facilitates change. But over time, I want to teach clients to be able to evoke this for themselves. And I believe that it’s the tone, the right resonance, the form that is needed in order to achieve this.
This insight - that it’s as much about the form and how we hear things as it is the actual message - motivates how I choose to start many of my speaking engagements. I almost always start a talk to a larger audience with “Man In The Mirror” by Michael Jackson or “Fix You” by Coldplay. There is a deep emotional quality to the delivery of the already deep message, and when the group hears this, I believe it opens them more to the message. They experience emotion because of the elements that this music ties together. The overused phrase “that resonates with me,” comes exactly from this shared insight about the importance of delivery. In short, what I’ve learned through working with people over the past twenty years is that in order for us to truly internalize change, there must be a resonant quality paired with the content of the message.
As a coach and a therapist who has worked with a lot of people who have limiting beliefs, I don’t use the same tone with all of them. Instead I determine what tone they need, and I do this so that they can then incorporate that tone in their own brains and practices. My work of communicating with people, in ways that move them forward is an evolving art form, not a fixed, “one size fits all” formula.
Getting at the root of what is missing when my client desires transformation looks a lot like this: We identify what negative thoughts/unhelpful narratives need to change. We establish together the new, healthier “script” or “mindset” that they will need to create and recondition. And we assess what “voice”or tone we will have to use in order to make this message convincing, believable, and truly evoking. Sometimes it’s the soothing voice of an unconditionally loving mother, or the wise tone of a monk sitting on top of a mountain, or that best friend rooting for you with a megaphone, or a powerful coach with eye-of-the-tiger kind of convictions. But, the important thing is to help each client realize that those voices are trainable and accessible inside of them.
Here is an exercise that you can use to find the tone that strikes the right cord for you:
First, identify how you physically feel when a message resonates with you. Start with a song, a podcast that you like, a conversation that you had that really left you feeling good. What feelings come up for you? Do you feel relaxed, safe, inspired, on the brink of tears, motivated, passionate, peaceful?
Once you’ve identified a source of feeling and analyzed what feelings come up for you, next think of a specific person who produces those feelings inside of you. This could be a public figure, an artist, a trusted friend, a current or previous coach.
Here in this article, we won’t go into all of the scientific factors that might explain why this person and their delivery are so spot on at evoking this feeling for you. But once you have your person, choose an element of their delivery that you can coach yourself on and adopt. It could be the literal tone of their voice, it could be a mannerism or specific gesture, it could be the volume of their voice and how it changes.
Once you’ve determined the type of tone or energy that is actually going to create long-lasting conviction around what needs to change, practice saying your message to yourself using that form. Do it when you first get up in the morning, and before bed at night. In front of the mirror or any time that you’re experiencing doubt. Create your resonance loop and break on through to the other side.
