A Story About Finding Your Voice and Putting Your Ideas Into The World
Self-coaching through speaking was the next step for Philip.
He had spent time reading other people’s stories. He had written his way towards a clearer understanding of what he wanted his work to be.
Now he had to say it.
This follows Philip’s story Self-Coaching Through Reading and Self-Coaching Through Writing.
The Opportunity
Three months had passed since Philip and his manager had agreed to try a different way of working.
It was beginning to make a difference.
He was spending more time involved in the early stages of learning projects.
He was writing again.
He was developing ideas with his team rather than simply reviewing their finished work.
He had not stepped back.
If anything, he was contributing more.
Then an opportunity came up.
The organisation was holding a regional learning conference. People from across the three counties Philip had been offered responsibility for would be there.
His manager came to see him.
“I’d like you to speak,” she said.
Philip looked at her.
“About what?”
“The work you’ve been developing.”
He hesitated.
“I don’t think I’m ready.”
She smiled.
“You’ve been doing the work for three months.”
“That isn’t the same as speaking about it.”
“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”
What He Had Written
That evening, Philip opened the document he had been working on for the past few months.
He read the words again.
I want to stay close to the work.
I want to create.
I want to write.
I want to develop ideas.
I want to create learning that makes people think.
The words were still true.
But reading them now made him see something else.
They were not just things he wanted for himself.
They were ideas about learning that he had been developing through the work.
He had spent months writing them down, testing them and putting them into practice.
Now someone was asking him to talk about them.
He wasn’t sure what frightened him more.
Speaking about something he cared about.
Or discovering that he had nothing useful to say once he was standing in front of other people.
The Question
Philip began preparing.
His first instinct was to write a presentation.
He opened a blank document and started.
Background.
Context.
Objectives.
Approach.
Outcomes.
He stopped.
He had done it again.
He was writing what a presentation was supposed to look like.
He deleted the headings.
Then he wrote a question.
What do I actually want people to understand?
That was harder.
He didn’t need to tell them everything he knew.
He needed to decide what mattered.
He wrote:
People don’t learn because we give them more information — They learn when something makes them think.
He stared at the sentence.
It was an idea he had been working with for years.
Now it had somewhere to go.
Saying It Aloud
The next morning, Philip read the sentence aloud.
People don’t learn because we give them more information. They learn when something makes them think.
He stopped.
The first part didn’t feel quite right.
Of course people needed information. He didn’t believe that information was irrelevant.
He opened the document again.
Underneath the first sentence, he began writing what he actually meant.
Information could tell someone something they didn’t know.
But information alone didn’t mean they had understood it.
Learning happened when people could make sense of something, connect it to what they already knew and do something with it.
Philip read that aloud too.
This time, the idea felt more like his.
He added another sentence.
Good learning doesn’t only give people something to know. It gives them something to think about.
He read the four sentences together.
Information could tell someone something they didn’t know.
But information alone didn’t mean they had understood it.
Learning happened when people could make sense of something, connect it to what they already knew and do something with it.
Good learning doesn’t only give people something to know. It gives them something to think about.
Now he could hear the argument.
Writing had helped him discover what he thought.
Speaking was making him discover what he actually meant.
On the page, an idea could remain vague.
Spoken aloud, it had to make sense.
He kept reading his words aloud, not to memorise them, but to hear how they sounded.
He wanted to know whether they sounded like something he could actually say.
The Conversation
The next day, Philip tested the idea with two people from his team.
He talked through the four lines he had written.
He told them that he had been thinking about the difference between giving people information and helping them learn.
Then he read the lines aloud.
Information could tell someone something they didn’t know.
But information alone didn’t mean they had understood it.
Learning happened when people could make sense of something, connect it to what they already knew and do something with it.
Good learning didn’t only give people something to know. It gives them something to think about.
One of them looked at him.
“But isn’t giving people information sometimes exactly what they need?”
Philip paused.
“Yes,” he said. “If they don’t have the information, they can’t do anything with it.”
“So what’s the difference?” she asked.
Philip looked back at what he had written.
He realised he had been making the distinction too simply.
“The information is part of the learning,” he said. “But it isn’t necessarily the end of it.”
The other person asked, “So what makes the difference?”
Philip thought for a moment.
“The point at which someone starts doing something with what they’ve been given.”
He stopped.
He hadn’t written that before.
The conversation had made him say something his four lines hadn’t yet said.
It was doing something his writing couldn’t do on its own.
It was giving his ideas back to him from someone else’s point of view.
What He Had to Say
That evening, Philip opened the document again.
He still had the four lines he had written.
Information could tell someone something they didn’t know.
But information alone didn’t mean they had understood it.
Learning happened when people could make sense of something, connect it to what they already knew and do something with it.
Good learning didn’t only give people something to know. It gave them something to think about.
But now he knew those lines weren’t enough.
They were the beginning of what he wanted to say.
He thought about the conversation.
If information was part of learning, what happened after the information had been given?
What made someone move from knowing something to understanding it?
He thought about the learning he had worked on over the years.
A person could sit through a lesson and remember what they had been told.
They could pass a test.
They could repeat the right answer.
And still not know what to do with it.
He began writing.
Learning becomes different when people have to do something with what they know.
They might have to make sense of it.
They might have to connect it to something they already understand.
They might have to question it.
They might have to decide what it means for them.
They might have to try something and discover that what they thought they understood wasn’t quite right.
Philip stopped.
That was closer.
He kept going.
This meant that creating learning wasn’t simply a matter of deciding what information people needed and finding the best way to deliver it.
The more important question was what he wanted people to do with what they had been given.
Did he want them to remember something?
Understand something?
Question something?
Try something?
See something differently?
Make a decision?
Change what they did?
He read that back.
Now he could see what had been missing.
He had been talking about learning as though the important thing was what the person creating it put in.
But learning also depended on what the person receiving it was able to do with it.
That changed the way he thought about the work.
He added more lines.
If we want people to learn, we need to create opportunities for them to think.
That might mean asking a question they hadn’t considered.
Giving them a problem they had to work through.
Showing them something from a different point of view.
Asking them to connect a new idea with something they already know.
Giving them the opportunity to test what they think they understand.
The information still matters.
But the information is where the learning begins, not necessarily where it ends.
Philip read the whole thing aloud.
For the first time, he wasn’t simply reading sentences he had written.
He was hearing an argument.
It had started with a thought.
The conversation had challenged it.
The challenge had forced him to make the thought more precise.
Now he could see the idea underneath it.
He wasn’t interested in arguing that information didn’t matter.
He was interested in asking what happened after people received it.
And that was the question he wanted to take to the conference.
He kept the document open.
Then, underneath everything he had written, he added one final question:
What are we asking people to do with what we are teaching them?
He read it aloud.
That was what he wanted to talk about.
The Conference
On the morning of the conference, Philip was nervous.
He knew the material.
That wasn’t the problem.
He knew that people would be listening to him as someone with responsibility for learning.
That mattered.
He didn’t want to perform expertise.
He wanted to communicate an idea he believed was worth considering.
He began with a question.
What are we asking people to do with what we are teaching them?
Then he waited.
The room was quiet.
He continued with his talk.
When he finished, there were questions.
The first person asked, “How do you know whether people are actually thinking rather than simply going through the motions?”
Philip talked about the work they had been doing and the difference between asking people to recall something and asking them to use it. He explained that they were still learning how to see that difference themselves.
Someone else asked, “Doesn’t this make learning much harder to create?”
Philip said that it could. But if the aim was for people to do something differently with what they had learned, then creating the opportunity to think had to be part of the work.
Another person asked, “So are you saying information isn’t enough?”
Philip returned to the distinction he had worked out before the conference.
“No. Information matters. I’m saying we need to think about what happens after people receive it.”
He could hear himself answering differently from the way he might have answered a few months earlier.
He wasn’t trying to give the answer that sounded most authoritative.
He was thinking through the question with the person who had asked it.
The questions didn’t weaken his argument.
They made it clearer.
And as he answered them, Philip realised that this was what speaking had added.
Writing had helped him work out what he thought.
Speaking had put that thinking into a room where other people could question it, test it and take it somewhere he couldn’t have taken it alone.
What Speaking Changed
Afterwards, people came up to him.
Some agreed.
Some disagreed.
One person asked whether the approach could work in a completely different part of the organisation.
Philip found himself talking about the work for another hour.
On the train home, he thought about what had happened.
He had assumed speaking would be about communicating what he already knew.
It had been more than that.
Speaking had tested his thinking.
It had made his ideas clearer.
It had allowed other people to question them.
And it had given those ideas a life beyond his desk.
The Work Becomes Bigger
The conference led to more conversations.
Philip was asked to contribute to another project.
Then another.
Not because he had become more senior.
Not because he had taken on a bigger title.
Because people had heard him talk about an idea and wanted to explore it.
His manager noticed the change.
“You’ve found another way to contribute,” she said.
Philip thought about that.
“Yes.”
He understood something he hadn’t understood when the regional role had first been offered.
Progression didn’t have to mean moving further away from the work.
It could mean taking what he knew about the work and finding ways for it to travel further.
Reading had helped him see his own thinking differently.
Writing helped him develop the ideas.
Speaking helped him share them.
And the more he spoke about them, the more the work itself expanded.
What Speaking Had Changed
Philip had once thought that influence came from having more responsibility.
Then he had thought it came from being close to the work.
Now he understood that neither was enough on its own.
If he wanted his ideas to have an impact, he had to be willing to put them into the world.
That meant speaking.
Not performing.
Not having all the answers.
Not becoming someone he wasn’t.
Finding the words for what he knew, saying them clearly and allowing other people to respond.
He thought about the three things that had brought him here.
Reading had given him another person’s story to think with.
Writing had given him a way to work through his own thoughts.
Speaking gave those thoughts a voice.
And once they had a voice, they could become part of something bigger than his own thinking.
Speaking as Self-Coaching
Philip hadn’t coached himself by sitting alone and finding a perfect answer.
He had moved through a process.
He had read.
He had written.
He had thought.
Then he had spoken.
Each changed what came next.
Speaking can be part of self-coaching because saying something aloud changes your relationship with it.
You hear what you actually think.
You notice where your thinking is unfinished.
You discover what you can explain and what you cannot.
And when another person responds, you have something new to think about.
Patrick Winston, the MIT professor whose How to Speak became a long-running MIT teaching tradition, argued that success depends largely on the ability to speak, the ability to write and the quality of your ideas.
Philip’s experience made the connection more personal.
Reading had helped him see his own thinking differently.
The ideas mattered.
The writing helped him develop them.
But speaking was what allowed them to travel.
That was the part he had been missing.
He had spent years becoming good at the work.
Now he was learning how to make what he knew useful beyond the work itself.
Self-coaching is learning to guide yourself through your own working life — noticing what matters, questioning what you assume, finding your own answers and deciding what to do with them.
Sometimes you need another person’s story.
Sometimes you need to write your own thoughts down.
And sometimes you need to hear yourself say what you think.
What might you be ready to say if you gave your own ideas a voice?
You can find every book featured in the Book Club Books stories, with links to read and listen to each story, in The Reading List for WorkLife Learning.
The Book Behind the Stories
This story was inspired by my book, WorkLife Book Club Volume One Shoreditch by Carmel O’ Reilly, available to order from bookshops — following members of a London book club as they navigate WorkLife challenges through the wisdom found in the books they read together.
The book that guided Philip’s speaking is Stoner by John Williams
Disclosure
Book links go to Bookshop.org UK, which shares its profits with independent bookshops. You can choose from the formats available. It currently ships to UK addresses only, so these links are for readers in the UK. I hope to find a way to offer something similar for readers elsewhere. If you buy through them, I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you, which helps support this work.
Continue the Work
Read and listen to:
Self-Coaching Through Reading — the first part of Philip’s trilogy.
Self-Coaching Through Writing — the second part of Philip’s trilogy.
Explore Professional Self-Coaching from School of WorkLife — each resource created for one important professional moment:
Work With Me: Individual WorkLife Coaching, Commissioned Learning Resources, Speaking Engagements and Organisational Partnerships.
Support This Work: Your support makes a difference and helps me to continue creating resources that are accessible to everyone. Thank you. Carmel
Listen to the audio version here:
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