This is the first of two posts on finding your voice as a speaker. 

When I was at a low point a couple of months ago, some kindly friends took me out to see a show, Photograph 51, about the X-ray crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin, and her efforts to contribute to the decoding of the molecular structure of DNA in the era of Watson and Crick.  (Shout out and heartfelt thanks to Sally and Joe for doing their level best to cheer me up.) A theatrical show is always a busman’s holiday for me and this show was no exception.  It was all about finding your voice in a world which doesn’t much care whether you do or not.  In this case, the show focused on Franklin’s difficulties as one of the few women in a very male, very sexist world of chemists and biophysicists – the scientific rat race of her day to be the first to figure out the double helix.

Sally and Joe could not have known that the show had a very special resonance for me because my father was a junior scientist trying to make his name in that same race, and he worked closely with Franklin.  He made the trip to England as often as he could because Franklin “took the best pictures.”  He was a few years behind Watson and Crick, and focused on RNA, since they were known to be hard on the trail of DNA.  Alas, another team beat him to it, but nonetheless even as a young boy I got a sense of the excitement at that time surrounding the enormous strides in basic scientific knowledge that unlocked so much progress in so many areas.  The race was on, and names were being made, and mere weeks could separate the geniuses who won the Nobel Prize from all the rest.

And I have a very hazy memory of meeting Dr. Franklin once, as a very young boy, and not having any idea of her struggles in a male-dominated field.  I just heard that she took the pictures that made my dad’s work possible.  So she was a wondrous figure of scientific prowess in my eyes.  Of course, I knew nothing of the gender politics; I was too young to understand.

But as the play dramatizes so effectively, Franklin was shut out of the Nobel Prize and denied the respect and status she deserved partly because she was a woman and partly because her role was defined as that of a technician, whereas the theoretical scientists were considered more elevated in their roles as thinkers.  In that era, it didn’t pay to be a doer.

And she paid for her technical prowess and artistry with X-rays with her life:  she died of cancer at 37, unquestionably from exposure to radiation from her work.

What does that tell us about finding your voice, whether as a speaker or in any other endeavor?

It’s work only you can do.  The journey to finding your story and message is yours alone.  No one else can make the journey for you and hand you your voice at the end.  But also, no one can take your voice away from you unless you let them.  I’m often asked, by people beginning the journey to becoming a thought leader and speaker, “do you think what I’m saying is original enough?”  It’s natural as you begin the process and start to see the outlines of your field, and learn the contributors who have preceded you, to worry if you have anything new to say.  But my response is, “Only you can tell your story.”  So the world isn’t going to help you, and it may indeed make it hard for you, but it also cannot stop you. Only you can do that.

It’s in the hard places that the essence of your story is to be found.  We tend to want to shy away from the difficulties and present only the triumphs and the successes we have experienced.  But for the rest of humanity, those moments are the least interesting parts of your story.  We want to understand how you struggled, because that’s what truly sets you apart and defines who you are.  We already know how the story ends, or you wouldn’t be standing in front of us talking.  What we want to know is, how did you get here from there?  Because we’re all on that journey too, and we all face predicaments, doubts and discouragement, and we want to know how you got through those tough times.

Don’t let the perfect story be the enemy of the good one.  Photograph 51 dramatizes Franklin’s struggle with her need to be absolutely certain of her findings before she could feel comfortable sharing them with the world.  In the end, the play tells us, her need for perfection held her back and prevented her from getting the credit she deserved while she was alive.  It’s the perfect metaphor for a public speaker, because your speech will never be perfect.  You can always refine it, change it, rehearse it some more.  But don’t let that prevent you from getting it on stage.  The difference between the successful and everyone else in the public speaking world is that the successful ones take the critical step – out of the wings, onto the stage, into the light.  With all their imperfections on display – and all their uniqueness too.

Don’t be that person who never shares her unique voice with the world because the time is never quite right, or you’re never quite ready, or you’re not sure of your reception.  We need all of us.  We need you.

I’ll conclude this two-part blog series next week.