I talk to my husband differently than I talk to my best friend.

Differently again to my family. And differently again to someone I’ve just met at an event, standing near the snack table, quietly calculating exactly how long is socially acceptable before I can go find my drink, my phone, and a wall to lean against.

For a long time I thought that meant something was wrong with me. Like there was a real version of me hiding somewhere underneath all the adjusting, and once I found her, I’d finally be consistent.

I don’t think that anymore. None of those versions are fake. None of them is the mask and one of them the truth. They’re all me, responding the way any socially aware person responds to different rooms. That’s not inconsistency. It’s just what it looks like to be a full human being who happens to have social anxiety and also, somehow, a business with a face attached to it.

And it’s the exact thing that trips people up when they go looking for their brand voice.

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“Just be authentic” was never going to help

Someone, at some point, told you to just be yourself. Which sounds lovely and means almost nothing, because which yourself?

The one who’s warm and a bit silly once someone’s gotten past the first half hour of you being quieter than they expected? The one who stays up too late fixing something for a client because she genuinely can’t leave it half-right? The one who vapes on the back step, swears when she stubs her toe, and has never once in her life been the most confident person in a room?

All of that is me. None of it, on its own, is “the” voice. And spending years trying to write like the loudest, most polished version of myself — the one Instagram seems to reward — just made everything sound like it belonged to someone else.

I have social anxiety. Once you know me, I’m kind, and I’m funny in a dry sort of way, and I’m genuinely good company. I have never lit up a room by walking into it. Nobody has ever called me the life of the party, and if they did, I’d assume they meant someone standing behind me.

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Multi-passionate isn’t a flaw. It’s just true.

There’s a kind of person — maybe you — who’s good at several things and cares about several things and has spent a stupid amount of energy trying to fold all of it into one tidy niche, because somebody once said the riches are in the niches and you took it slightly too literally.

You’re a coach and a writer. A designer and a photographer. Someone whose actual expertise spills across three adjacent things that refuse to fit under one Instagram bio. And every time you sit down to write about your business, you either flatten yourself into a version you don’t fully recognise, or you try to cram all of it in and end up sounding like four small businesses sharing one logo.

Neither is the fix. You don’t pick a favourite facet and quietly retire the rest. You go looking for the thing that stays the same underneath all of them — because something always does. My husband gets a different volume than my best friend does. But underneath the volume, both of them are getting someone kind, a bit dry, fairly private until trust is earned, and completely unwilling to fake enthusiasm she doesn’t feel. That part doesn’t move depending on who’s in the room. Only the loudness does.

That steady part — not the tone, the actual instincts sitting under the tone — is your brand voice. It was never a register you pick. It’s whatever’s still true no matter which room you’re standing in.

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Voice and register are not the same thing

This is really the whole article, so let’s sit here a second.

Your voice is who you actually are underneath it all — what you value, what you find funny, who you go out of your way for, what you can’t stand. It doesn’t shift depending on the room.

Your register is how loud or soft or formal that voice comes out, depending on who’s listening. A work register, a friend register, a meeting-someone-new-for-the-first-time register. All legitimate. None of them a betrayal of some more “real” you sitting behind the curtain.

Most people hunting for their brand voice are actually hunting for the right register — the right tone, the right amount of polish — when the thing worth finding is what stays constant underneath all your registers. Your captions can be looser than your proposals, which can be looser than a talk you give on stage, and none of that is inconsistency. What has to hold steady through every one of them is the actual voice. Otherwise it starts to feel like a slightly different person shows up each time, and people notice that, even if they can’t say why.

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How I actually found mine

I didn’t find it by trying to write more “authentically.” I found it by noticing what didn’t change.

Across every version of me — the quiet one at the party, the sillier one with my best friend, the one who overexplains things to my husband because I want him to really get it, the one who shows up composed for a client call after crying in the car five minutes earlier — a few things never moved. I’m kind, even when I’m tired of being kind. I go the extra mile for people I care about, work included, whether or not it’s efficient. I have the same sense of humour whether I say the joke out loud or just think it. And I would rather be honestly unimpressive than perform a version of confidence that isn’t real.

That list, once I actually wrote it down, was the whole answer. Not a persona I built. A pattern that was already there, running quietly under every version of me I’d ever shown anyone.

The register I picked for my business — dry, a little understated, occasionally sweary in a way that feels earned rather than for show — isn’t my loudest or most polished setting. It’s just the one where the least gets lost in translation.

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Knowing it and using it turned out to be two different projects

Finding the pattern didn’t make it easy to say out loud. I still write a caption at full volume and quietly sand it down before I post it. I still go quiet in rooms where I actually have an opinion, and tell myself afterward I just wasn’t in the mood to talk, when the truer version is that some old, well-worn part of my brain decided the risk wasn’t worth it.

I have a Psychology Honours degree. I understand, intellectually, exactly what’s happening when I hesitate over the post button — the nervous system doesn’t distinguish especially well between social risk and actual danger, and going quiet is just an old protective response overreacting to a century it wasn’t built for. Understanding that changes nothing about whether it happens. My amygdala has never once been impressed by my own research.

So most days, this is still true: I know what I think. I know how I’d say it if fear weren’t in the room. And then fear is in the room, and what comes out is smaller than what I meant. I don’t think that ever fully goes away. I think it’s an ongoing negotiation, not a problem with an ending — and most days now, I do the thing a little scared, rather than waiting for the scared part to leave first.

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You’re allowed to be a whole person on your business account

Here’s what I think people actually need permission for: you don’t have to resolve yourself into one flattened, easier-to-market version to have a strong brand voice.

I go above and beyond for clients, sometimes past the point that’s sustainable or billable, because the instinct is real and I haven’t figured out how to switch it off. I also swear. I vape. I manage social anxiety instead of performing my way past it, and I am not, and will probably never be, the most confident person in most rooms I walk into.

None of that contradicts the rest of it. It’s just all there at once, the way a full person’s traits usually are. You don’t need to pick the three most palatable ones and retire the others quietly to a drawer. You need to find what’s actually constant underneath everything you already are — not your loudest self, not your most polished one, just the real one — and let that be what people meet, consistently, wherever they find you.

That’s a lot more sustainable than a performance you can’t keep up forever. And it’s far more recognisable to the people who are actually meant to work with you — because they’re responding to a real person, not a persona built to be palatable to everyone.

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Where the line matters most

Once you know the difference between your voice and your register, the question becomes where each one shows up.

Your website carries your voice in whatever register makes sense for a stranger meeting you cold — a little more composed than a caption, maybe, but never so composed it stops sounding like a person wrote it.

Your Instagram can run looser, closer to how you’d actually talk to a friend over coffee, as long as the same values and the same sense of humour are underneath it.

Your client emails can be warmer than either, because by then, trust is already sitting in the room with you.

What should never happen is a website that reads like a different person wrote it than the one behind your Instagram, or client emails that sound like a stranger drafted them. That gap — not a difference in tone, but a difference in who’s actually speaking — is what makes a brand start to feel hollow, even to people who couldn’t tell you exactly why.

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If you’re still looking for it

Sometimes people can’t find their voice not because they lack self-awareness, but because nobody’s ever sat with them long enough to separate what’s real from what’s performance. That’s the work I actually do inside The Messaging Lab — a psychology-first way of finding the thing that’s constant underneath all your rooms, and turning it into language you can actually use on your website, in your content, and with your clients, without flattening yourself into someone easier to sell and harder to recognise.

Explore The Messaging Lab →