NBC’s “The Voice” & The Voice of Your Business

I’ve been transfixed by NBC’s new talent show, “The Voice,” since its premier a few weeks ago. Especially because it highlights an aspect of creative entrepreneurial life that really deserves some attention right now.

Your voice. The voice of your business, savvy creative entrepreneur that you are and are rapidly evermore becoming. The importance of your voice in your creative business’s online presence is exactly why “The Voice” has me so captivated. I want your voice to be just that captivating to your right people.

Image courtesy of blog.zap2it.com.

If you haven’t seen “The Voice,” here’s a quick recap of how it works: pre-screened singers {read: definitely talented, skilled, and practiced} perform for an audience, full-out, while celebrity musical artists serving as vocal coaches {Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green, Blake Shelton, and Adam Levine from Maroon 5} listen with their backs turned. When they’re convinced that they’re hearing a Voice — someone whose inborn talent and unique vocal quality could carry them all the way to superstardom — they hit a big red button which makes their chair spin around to face the stage. Only then do they encounter the talent face-to-face. The contestant then pairs up with the spun-around coach, and if more than one coach spun around, it’s the coaches’ job to plead their cases and the contestants’ prerogative to choose whom to work with for the remainder of the season.

What I love about ‘The Voice” is how it puts the focus on the sparkling talent of the artists, not on the already fame-ordained coaches’ judgment. The voice and its never-heard-quite-like-this-before qualities are front and center.

As creative entrepreneurs with online brand platforms and a consistent digital presence across various social media venues, our voices are front and center. We lead with them everywhere we go online, as people read our blog posts, open our e-newsletters, or catch a RT of us on Twitter. Visual brand identity, including headshots of us, are essential to the holistic presence, yes — but the voice and the message and the story it carries is what resonates across time.

I almost cry every time one of the judges on “The Voice” hits their button and spins around to face the talent. That moment is so real for me. I think of how it must feel to be up there performing and to see someone physically turn around to witness you filling up the whooooole space with your talent and your energy. That experience is something I want to be a part of facilitating for my people, too. {In a different context, of course.}

Something to witness in “The Voice” and in your own creative business life: we all have right people — people who come alive when they hear us speaking {or writing, as it were}.

Not every judge spins around for every artist. Sometimes it’s only one who can hear the power and the potential there in a way that compels them to buy-in, to get on board, to help usher that voice to the next phase of its development and to its rightful audience.

Your right people witness you like that, too. When you upload a new video to your channel or you Tweet your latest blog masterpiece, not everyone responds, do they? But your right people are always ready to hear what you have to say and they love the way you say it. They hear you. They recognize what’s gorgeous there. They see the strength inside the unique package that is you and your brand identity.

As a creative entrepreneur, the voice of your business is your signature. It’s your particular flair, your turn of phrase, your eclectic cache of phraseologie. It’s what you don’t say as much as what you do say. It’s your tone, your style, and your message — all rolled into one.

What I want for you is this: that you create content for your creative business from a voice that feels like the purest, strongest, most full expression of you, meeting your right people right where they are. I want you to experience your right people spinning around to watch you moving in the fullness of you because they can’t get enough of your irrepressible voice. It’s you. And I know it’s waiting for you to free it.

In June, I’m releasing Freeing the Voice of Your Business, a multimedia product designed to help you own the conversational space that’s rightfully yours as a creative entrepreneur working digitally. To be among the first to learn more, sign up here for Inklings, my weekly e-newsletter.

For now, I leave you with a favorite clip from Week 1 of “The Voice.” The singer is Vicci Martinez and she’s rocking out one of my current favorite songs, “Rolling in the Deep” by the inimitable Adele. And Vicci doesn’t imitate — she brings her own style to it. Pay particular attention to the bit between Adam Levine and Christina Aguilera that starts around the 2:55 mark. It’s the whole ‘right people’ thing. Enjoy.