86. Your Voice: Your Most Important Asset

Episode 86: Your Voice: Your Most Important Asset

The Career Clinic Podcast

Host: Ronnie Dickerson Stewart

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Episode Overview

Welcome to Week Three of The Career Clinic Podcast January Intensive Series.

This week, we shift our focus to voice, visibility, community, and connection — starting with the foundation of it all: your voice.

In Episode 86, Ronnie leads a direct, honest conversation about why your voice — both literal and figurative — is one of your most important professional and personal assets. Many high-performing leaders are skilled at using their voices on behalf of organizations, teams, and clients, yet hesitate when it comes to advocating for themselves, sharing their expertise, or naming what they want and deserve.

Your voice is not a soft skill. It is a strategic asset — one that creates opportunity, alignment, provision, and choice over time.

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What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

✔️ What it really means to use your voice beyond “speaking up”
✔️ Why leaders often underuse their voice on their own behalf
✔️ How institutional roles can unintentionally mute self-expression
✔️ The cost of silence in your career and life
✔️ Why expertise without voice leads to invisibility
✔️ How voice creates leverage, visibility, and optionality

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The Core Idea: Your Voice Creates Opportunity

This episode makes one thing clear: your voice is how opportunity finds you.

Ronnie reflects on her own career journey — from corporate leadership to entrepreneurship — and names a powerful truth: the same skills that help you rise inside institutions are the skills that create possibility when you step outside of them.

When the institutional veil disappears, what remains is you — your perspective, your experience, your point of view. Learning to use your voice without hiding behind a brand, title, or role becomes essential.

Your voice is how you:

• Identify problems and advance solutions

• Advocate for scope, compensation, and resources

• Share earned expertise

• Create new roles and pathways

• Build credibility and long-term visibility

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When Your Voice Goes Quiet ✍🏾

Ronnie names a hard truth with care: silence has a cost.

When you don’t use your voice, you may:

• Stay invisible

• Remain in roles that no longer fit

• Be overlooked or under-resourced

• Miss opportunities you are fully qualified for

In a moment where generic content is everywhere, earned perspective and lived expertise matter more than ever.

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A Provocation to Sit With

Why are you acting like you’re new to this — when you’re true to this?

This episode invites listeners to examine how they may be:

• Waiting for permission to speak

• Softening expertise to avoid standing out

• Deferring to louder voices with less experience

• Playing smaller than their actual capacity

You don’t need permission to name what you know.

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The Voice Audit 📝

Ronnie offers a simple reflection exercise:

1. Where am I holding back my voice or expertise?

2. What is it costing me — personally or professionally?

3. What might change if I used my voice more fully?

The goal isn’t performance. It’s awareness.

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Looking Ahead

Tomorrow’s episode builds on this foundation as we move into visibility — specifically, how leaders build visibility that supports provision, opportunity, and sustainability.

Voice comes first.
Visibility ensures it reaches the right places.

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Links & Resources 🤎

📝 Ask OhHeyCoach:
Have a question you’d like answered on a future episode?
Submit it here:
👉🏾 https://form.typeform.com/to/ja89DHpT

📩 Join the OhHeyMonday Newsletter:
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👉🏾 www.ohheyjoin.com

🤝 Work With Ronnie / OhHeyCoach:
Executive coaching, leadership development, and career design.
👉🏾 www.ohheycoach.com

📬 Contact:
[e-mail]

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Final Thought ✨

You are not new to this. You are true to this. Your voice has already carried you far — and it will carry you forward, if you let it.

I’ll see you tomorrow. 🤎