The best investments you can make in 2024

If your inbox is anything like mine, you’re probably bombarded with messages to ensure your success in 2024. I suspect there are very few messages worth reading.

This is different.

I’m not selling you anything, and I didn’t use some cool AI tool to write this. I’m here to share some candid career advice, gleaned from his more than 20 years in executive-level roles and his 10 years of listening carefully to people who have navigated major career and life changes. We provide

In 2024, we encourage you to take advantage of a critical asset that we all have but are severely underutilized.

our voice.

Speech, for our purposes, is not what you hear when someone speaks. Voice is our truth and essence. Unlocking our voices requires challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions we all have and turning up the volume of what we discover.

Consider Pascal, who participated in my second study.^n.d. Book, dance with confusion. Pascal identifies himself as gay, and he said coming out was a transformative moment in his life. For a long time, Pascal lived as a straight man, even though he knew he was gay. “Coming out was a transition from exhaustion to relief,” he said. Pascal’s fatigue resulted from meeting expectations that in many ways diverged from his own truth.

“I was always dancing on the brink of being found out. It took me a long time to realize,” Pascal said. “And we needed to be prepared to act on that.”

Although Pascal’s situation is different from each of us, his story provides important lessons about voice that we can all learn.

Voice is not a single, monolithic asset that you either have or don’t have. He has two elements in his voice. Our awareness of the voice and our willingness to live in alignment with it. Pascal began to become more conscious of being gay. That perception was separate and apart from his willingness to act on it.

Many of our experiences within and outside of business help us become more aware of our own voices. Unexpected layoff. Family health crisis. Erratic behavior by senior management. The arrival of a new baby. promotion. farewell.

Awareness is just the beginning. Living with a deeper understanding of our truth requires choices.how much you Do you want others to experience it too? For a long time, even though Pascal knew that we were gay, he acted as if he were straight. He has worked hard for many years to establish credibility in his career in the financial industry. Initially, he wasn’t ready. He feared that his choice would jeopardize his career prospects. That perspective has changed.

Why do you care so much about your voice? My research and studies have convinced me of an indelible truth. That is, our voice is our deepest and most trusted success factor.

We use many labels to talk about the absence of voice. Code switching. Contextual identity. Posing. hiding. Being in an environment that denies our authentic expression can potentially even lead to discrimination.

As we head into 2024, try to recognize your voice and act on it.

Sounds easy, right? it’s not. We receive countless verbal and nonverbal cues that try to override, mute, or otherwise diminish our voices. It takes a lot of effort just to get started.

This year, I encourage you to take steps every day to more fully understand your voice and learn what it feels like to live in alignment with it. Let your newfound voice guide you in the direction of your dreams.

Here’s what I know: True acceleration in your career, and in life, happens when you close the gap between recognizing your voice and acting on it. A weary world awaits the incredible momentum that can only come from activating your voice. Happy 2024!

If you want to learn more about audio, listen to my podcast. destination unknownor read my latest book. dance with confusion.