Amplifying Your Voice For Leadership And Authority

In this blog, we tackled the big question: what does it actually mean to amplify your voice — and why do so many smart, accomplished people still refuse to?

The answer? It's not about stage skills. It's not about charisma. It's this: most people are amplifying something unclear and from a place of fear.

Meet Mette Johansson (MBA, PCC, CSP, GSF) — Danish, globally nomadic (12 countries, 25 years in Asia, 15 in Singapore), Founder of Keynote Women Speakers, author of Narratives: The Stories That Hold Women Back at Work, PCC-certified coach, and the woman who once lost her shoes mid-speech and kept going. If that's not quiet authority, I don't know what is.

Here's a fun fact: TED speakers spend an average of 38 hours preparing for an 18-minute speech — and 70% of that time is refining the message, not rehearsing the delivery. The voice problem is actually a clarity problem.

Tip 1: Amplifying Your Voice Has Nothing to Do With Volume

Mette's definition is the one worth writing on your bathroom mirror: "Amplifying your voice is about being confident that you have a message to share — experiences and knowledge that can make the world a better place." The moment it becomes about the message, it stops being about you. And the moment it stops being about you, the fear has nowhere to live.

✅ Ask yourself: "Am I speaking because I want to be seen — or because I have something this room needs to hear?" The answer will tell you everything.

Purpose is the only volume knob that matters.

Tip 2: Confidence Is Not What You Think It Is

We've been sold a fantasy version of confidence — loud, relentless, unbothered. Mette offers a far more useful one: knowing what you can do and what you can't. Confidence isn't the absence of limitation. It's the honest reckoning with it.

✅ Stop performing certainty. Start practicing specificity — about your value, your message, your lane. "I'm okay the way I am, and here's what I can offer" is more powerful than "watch me pretend I have no gaps."

Healthy confidence sounds a lot more like self-knowledge than bravado.

Tip 3: The Asian Silence Is Real — And It Was Installed Young

This one is personal for me. I was at a sales dinner with my team's Australian leader, he turned to me mid-conversation and asked for my thoughts. I had nothing. I literally asked him to skip me. Not because I was stupid. Because I had never been trained to think my opinion was worth the airtime. Mette named it: the education system across much of Asia teaches kids to listen, not contribute.

✅ Notice the difference between choosing to listen and defaulting to silence out of fear. One is wisdom. The other is a survival strategy that's outlived its usefulness.

You weren't born quiet. You were trained that way.

Tip 4: Personal vs. Private — Know the Difference

This distinction from Mette is one of the cleanest frameworks I've heard for why people overshare, undershare, or stay completely mute. Personal is purposeful — it's your values, your experiences, the things that made you. Private is for your partner, your closest friend, a bottle of good wine. People confuse the two and either say too much or nothing at all.

✅ Before your next talk, panel, or difficult conversation, ask: "Is this personal or private?" Personal strengthens your message. Private belongs elsewhere. Draw the line deliberately, not in the panic of the moment.

The most connecting thing you can share is the experience everyone has had but nobody says out loud.

Tip 5: Stop Building Cookie-Cutter Speakers

At Keynote Women Speakers, Mette flipped the training model entirely: start by showing people what they're already doing well, then build from there. Not "this is wrong, fix this, now do it this way." The traditional feedback model — which, Mette pointed out, was often designed around what felt natural to men — creates identical speakers who sound polished but hollow.

✅ Whether you're developing yourself or someone on your team: lead with what's working. Specificity in praise is not coddling — it's the fastest route to genuine confidence.

Telling someone what they're doing wrong when they're already terrified is just cruelty with a coaching label.

Tip 6: Mumbling Into a Microphone Is Still Mumbling

It took me three months of coaching and countless "but what are you actually trying to say?" conversations to build a 12-minute speech. Three months. Because I kept amplifying something that wasn't clear yet. Mette put it plainly: you don't have a delivery problem until you have a clarity problem. Get the message sorted first. The stage stuff comes after.

✅ Spend more time asking "what's the one thing I want this person to leave knowing?" than on your opening line or your slides. Get ruthlessly clear on the core. Everything else is decoration.

An unclear message delivered with confidence is just confident noise.

Tip 7: You Don't Have to Be Brené Brown to Be Vulnerable

Different stages call for different speakers. Lecture-style, data-driven, deeply emotional — there is room for all of it. Mette's point: vulnerability in public speaking isn't a style you adopt, it's a spectrum you find your place on. The mistake is thinking you have to perform emotion to connect. Sometimes the most connecting thing is simply admitting you didn't have all the answers.

✅ Find your version of openness — one story, one real moment, one admission that you've been where your audience is now. You don't have to cry. You do have to be honest.

Connection doesn't require a breakdown. It requires truth.

The Wrap

Here's what this episode kept circling back to: the voice problem is almost never a voice problem. It's a clarity problem, a purpose problem, a "what do I actually stand for" problem. And until you sort that out, all the speaking coaching in the world is just polishing a speech you haven't written yet.

And seriously — what's the point of amplifying your voice if you haven't decided what it's amplifying for?

Mette, thank you for 25 years of lifting women up across Asia, for the clarity of your frameworks, and for reminding us that you're okay — just the way you are is still one of the most powerful things you can say to a room.

Now go forth, my friends — get clear on your message, get honest about what's personal versus private, and then open your mouth and say the thing.

🎥 Watch the full episode of The Own Your BS Show with Mette Johansson here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R0fNVb91V0&t=52s

This is Cindy Tien, EQ Maven, CSP - Empowering teams to Break through Blind Spots & Turn Hurdles into Hallmarks.

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