Hey, good morning, everybody.

Okay, so this is a little bit different for me. Welcome to an amazing episode of the Unstoppable Success Podcast. I have not gone live by myself in a while, and we’re going to be doing lives probably once a week, so let’s get ready for it.

This is a first.

Thank you all for jumping in live with me this morning. I truly, truly appreciate each and every one of you.

I’ve got my notes in front of me because I wanted to make sure I gave you a really great episode today.

So I want to start with a question.

If your revenue has flattened this year, if growth has stalled, and you can’t quite figure out why, I want you to ask yourself something.

I don’t want you to blame the market, the economy, or even your competitors.

Think about this while we drink our coffee together.

I want you to really be honest with yourself:

When was the last time you actually used your voice?

I mean, not in an email. Not posting something safe.

Actually used this.

Opened your mouth and said something real to your team, to a prospect, or to your own audience.

Stay with me, because there’s a real story behind this. And it’s a story behind a lot of plateaus.

This week handed me a lot of proof in a way I really wasn’t expecting.

If you’ve followed me for a little while, you probably know that some things happened this past week. They happened within four days of each other, and somehow these experiences just keep talking to each other.

Last Monday, I was in the middle of flying my son out to college. We were making the trip across the country to get him into his college dorm.

During a layover between flights, I got a text from my daughter. It was sent to both my husband and me.

She said, “My boss and my boss’s boss just got fired.”

It was shocking for somebody who is an intern and has never experienced a RIF before.

She’s a marketing intern. It’s her first real company experience, and suddenly the two people she has worked with the most—including the person who hired her—are gone.

In all of this chaos, she gets a new boss.

Apparently, he never got the 411 that she was an intern.

In one of their first meetings, the new boss is meeting with everyone. He pulls her in and says—and I truly can’t make this stuff up—“I don’t really think marketing does anything. I don’t really know exactly what marketing does, what the purpose of it is, or, in fact, what you actually do.”

She was flabbergasted.

He would send her and the marketing team the notes and information he wanted to use in sales presentations, and they would create these amazing marketing PowerPoint presentations.

Yet he didn’t know what they did.

Then he said to her, “Why don’t you come up with a list of deliverables and the things that you do, and we’ll decide whether or not we’ll keep you on?”

And because he was kind of on a roll, he tells her, “Oh, and by the way, I’ve kind of heard that you’re a little bit of a social butterfly.”

Again, my daughter was shocked.

But what she said back to him was beautiful.

She said, “I would rather get up from my cubicle and walk over and ask someone an actual question. I want to ask somebody a question with my words rather than send them a message on Teams. They’re sitting right next to me. Let me go ask them. Or they’re right over there. It’s amazing how quiet the office is. Nobody talks.”

So she said, “Fine. Call me a social butterfly. I’d rather know the people I work with.”

We are so into messaging that we’ve forgotten we need to use our voices.

My daughter is 20. I’ve tried really hard to raise my kids to think for themselves and to use their voices.

That isn’t always easy.

But I was so proud of my daughter when she shared this with me. It was one of those proud parenting moments—or even one of those proud leader moments.

A few days later, we moved our son into his dorm. We carried all the boxes, and on Thursday, we attended this beautiful orientation.

We’re sitting in chairs in this massive gym. It was supposed to be outside, but thankfully the school pivoted because it started to pour.

The head of the school stood up and said something that brought the whole week together for me.

He said—and this is the hard part—“Parents, this is going to be hard. You need to let your kids soar. You have to stop hovering, and you have to remember they’re going to make mistakes.”

And guess what?

They need to make mistakes.

You need to allow them to make mistakes because that’s how they learn.

That’s also how your team learns.

If you’re always doing something for your team members, they will never learn to do it on their own.

They won’t find their voice.

When we said our goodbyes at the end of orientation, I’m going to be honest: I was teary-eyed. I wasn’t as calm as I was hoping I would be.

But as my husband and I drove away and started our second chapter as empty nesters, I realized something.

I was proud watching and hearing my daughter use her voice.

I was watching my son take his place in a world that I can’t follow him into.

And then I realized this isn’t just a parenting lesson.

This is the exact thing I see killing growth in businesses.

It’s something I see killing growth in the businesses I work with.

So I want you to really take hold of this.

There’s a pattern.

When you started your business—or maybe when you first got into business—you used your voice constantly.

Every cold pitch.

Every, “Let me tell you what I’m building.”

It wasn’t even a pitch. It was an explanation.

You were telling people because you were so excited about what you were building.

You told everybody.

Every uncomfortable ask for meetings, referrals, and yeses required you to use your voice.

Your voice is what got you off the ground.

Your passion got you off the ground.

Then the business grows.

You hire people.

You hire people to handle calls. You hire people to handle content. You hire people to handle sales.

You’re supposed to be working on the business instead of always being in the business.

But what ends up happening so many times is that we start “hiding” behind email threads, messaging apps, Slack, Teams, Zoom, quarterly decks—whatever it is.

And I’m telling you this:

The plateau often shows up right around the same time the voice goes quiet.

That is not a coincidence.

That’s cause and effect.

A good example, even for me, is when I moved across the country. I was telling everybody what I did in my business.

Then, as my business kept growing, I stopped telling everybody what I was doing.

I was working so hard in the business that I forgot to work on the business.

Things slowed down.

I hit a plateau.

You have to find ways to consistently use your voice.

There are three places where I see founders go silent, and each one quietly caps their growth.

I want to share those with you.

Number one: inside the company.

What I see happen is that, as a leader, you stop standing in front of your own team and sharing the words.

Maybe you’re doing it only in an email or messaging app.

You send updates instead of giving updates.

And this is really important:

When there is silence at the top, it trickles down.

The space doesn’t stay empty.

It gets filled with uncertainty.

It gets filled with rumors.

It gets filled with doubt.

People would rather have a story than nothing at all.

If your team cannot tell you what marketing does, why the sales team exists, or where the company is actually headed this quarter, that’s not just a communication gap.

That’s a leadership gap.

Get in front of your people.

I’m going to say it again:

Get in front of your people.

Not just on Teams.

In person, or at the very least, on video with your camera on.

Weekly, if you can manage it.

Monthly is an absolute minimum.

This isn’t about going over every nitty-gritty financial detail.

But you have to make sure nobody on your team is quietly wondering whether their job even matters.

People need to feel like they matter.

They need to feel important.

And if things aren’t going great, we need to let people know.

Number two: the ask.

This is relationship capital in its most literal form.

You build this beautiful network over the years, and then you stop directly asking for the introduction, the referral, or the next conversation.

You might be waiting for the phone to ring instead of picking it up yourself.

That silence—that waiting—is one of the biggest plateau killers I see in service-based businesses.

Relationships do not convert to revenue by themselves.

They convert when you ask.

When you use your voice to ask.

Relationships do not convert to revenue by themselves.

They convert when you ask.

Now, number three: your own visibility and your brand.

This might be something a lot of people don’t want to hear, but so many founders who plateau are putting out safe, polished, forgettable content.

It’s forgettable.

The ones who break through are saying something real.

They’re using their own voice.

They’re taking an experience and sharing it.

And they’re doing it even when it feels a little uncomfortable.

We have to get out of that comfort zone.

Safe content protects you from criticism.

It also caps how far you can go because nobody really remembers safe.

I’m not saying you need to attack people or become inflammatory.

This was a lesson I had to learn, too:

Less is more.

But when the “less” is powerful, when it’s your voice, when it’s pointed and real, it can go far.

And you become visible.

Here’s why I call your voice your safety net.

It’s not about protecting you from harm.

It’s about the fact that when you actually use it, it catches you.

My daughter’s voice caught her in that cubicle.

And that can be the difference between being managed out of a job and being taken seriously.

Your voice does the same thing in your business.

It can catch a stalled pipeline.

It can catch a team member who has quietly stopped trusting you.

It catches you before the plateau turns into decline.

And just like I can’t make the hard calls for my son once he’s on that campus, I cannot make the calls for you either.

Nobody can use your voice for you.

You have to be willing to actually use it.

I want to share something else here.

I’ve looked at many of the comments parents have shared in community groups on social media, and there has been another consistent theme:

As parents, we need to let our kids find their voices.

If you’re living in a room together for the next 180 days, you need to create some kind of agreement about how you’re going to live together.

Because otherwise, you may get walked on.

You need to find your voice.

If your roommate is hanging a towel somewhere and it keeps making your stuff wet, let them know.

Use your voice.

For two people to live or work together, they have to talk and communicate.

If your roommate does something that bothers you and it festers inside because you don’t use your voice, it’s going to get bigger.

It creates negativity.

The same thing happens on a team.

If something is festering and nobody uses their voice, negativity grows.

Misery loves company, and before long, it can create a negative workforce.

We don’t want that.

We want positivity.

So if something is bothering you, you have to find the courage to have the uncomfortable conversation and use your voice.

Here’s what I want you to do today.

Pick one of the three:

Your team.

Your network.

Your own visibility.

Pick the place where you’ve maybe gone a little quiet, and do one uncomfortable, voice-forward thing today.

Stand up in front of your team.

Make the ask you’ve been avoiding.

Post the thing you’ve been sitting on that might be a little provocative or challenging.

Do one of those today.

If this is hitting something for you—if you know you’ve gone quiet somewhere in your business and you’re not sure how to start using your voice again—I have complimentary CEO strategy sessions open this month.

Comment “READY” here.

Or, if you’re listening on your favorite podcast player, go to JaclynStrominger.com, message me, and connect.

I’ll get you the link, and it will also be in the show notes to book your strategy session.

And if this was useful, please do me a favor.

Send it to a leader you know who has gone quiet.

They probably don’t even realize it.

I want to truly thank each and every one of you for listening to me this morning.

I’ll see you next Tuesday in the newsletter and back here next week.

I’m Jaclyn Strominger, and this is the Unstoppable Success Podcast.

You’ve been listening to the Unstoppable Success Podcast with Jaclyn Strominger.

Subscribe, share, and keep building your unstoppable life.

We’ll see you at the top.