Stop Trying to Find Your Brand Voice

It's 7 am.

You shuffle over to your kitchen table and turn your laptop on. "Today will be different," you promise yourself. "Today, I'll write something awesome."

You take a sip out of your favorite oversized coffee mug (the one with the mustache), open a new Google Doc, and sit there. You blink at the screen in tempo with the cursor. Your mind is as blank as the page staring back at you. After a few minutes you type out a sentence fragment, then immediately tap your fingernail on the delete key.

You're frozen.

Not because you don't have ideas - my god, you could fill the state of New Hampshire with your ideas - but because you're afraid of how you're going to sound. Of the way you'll be perceived. You're nervous that your brand voice will be twenty kinds of wrong.

Want to know a secret?

Your brand voice isn't something you can find, discover, or otherwise manufacture. It comes from your perceptions, your values, your experiences, your priorities, your childhood, your education, your relationships, and your insecurities. Your worldview.

It also comes from the way you express your worldview - the words you use, and the way you use them. Remember this formula:

WORLDVIEW + LANGUAGE = VOICE

Your language sculpts your voice over time - but only if you start using it. You have to start sharing your ideas and your message to figure out what kind of language you like to use, and how you like to string your words together. Your brand voice will evolve with your language, but your worldview is (roughly) constant and will continue to fuel your ideas.

So I'm officially giving you permission to stop stressing about "finding" your brand voice, and start building it instead. (Tweet that!) When you let go of that pressure to use the "right" voice, you'll be amazed how quickly you start filling up your Google Docs.

Tell me in the comments: have you struggled to build your voice? Where do you feel stuck?