Intimate Voice and Deeper Conversations

Recently, Mark Pilgrim announced he would also have a corporate IBM blog in addition to his personal blog. So on his personal blog he explains the difference this way:

A corporate blog is just like a personal blog, except you don't get to use the word, "motherfucker."

Ah, but there are other four-letter words in business and professional life, and one of them is spelled: L-O-V-E.

I can't help but notice the discussion [1, 2 3] and comments around my Credible Voice post seems to have generated equal interest in intimate voice and authentic voice (per my definitions). The link to Tom Peter's article spurred a lot of discussion as well. Here we see Tom's credible voice drop into a deeper intimate voice and enrichen it.

The ! is balanced out with ? and ......

In a comment Troy Angrignon writes: "Nice to see that a "hardened", "serious" business man can also have his eyes opened to these other ways of being."

Maybe these are the conversations that matter the most to us.

I was rereading sections of The Cluetrain Manifesto last night. Some parts are quite moving. I particularly liked a quote from David Whyte - I was blessed to see him in person about 8 years ago:

The voice emerges literally from the body as a representation of our inner world. It carries our experience from the past, our hopes and fears for the future, and the emotional resonance of the moment. If it carries none of these, it must be a masked voice, and having muted the voice, anyone listening knows intuitively we are not all there. -- David Whyte, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America

And so I will close this week with something that resonated for me - make that the integrated personal and professional me - this week:

"The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in."

His voice dropped to a whisper. "Let it come in. We think we don't deserve love, we think if we let it in we'll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. He said, 'Love is the only rational act.'"

-- Morrie Schwartz, quoted by Mitch Albom, "Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man and the Last Great Lesson", Doubleday, 1997 (via HeartMath email 'quote' newsletter)

Comments

[zach van stratt]

send me some more info, very interesting

[Lamar Cole]

Two restless hearts find tranquility at the crossroad of love.