Unmuting Yourself: Finding Your Voice and the Courage to Be Heard
Kimberly LaForte has built a career around helping women do something many assume should come naturally: use their voices with confidence. Through Vocal Honey™, she teaches women that authentic communication isn’t about becoming louder, more polished, or fearless. Instead, it’s about understanding the nervous system, releasing old patterns of self-protection, and allowing one’s voice to evolve alongside personal growth.
Her work blends communication coaching, neuroscience, and emotional awareness, helping women navigate everything from boardroom presentations to difficult family conversations with greater authenticity.
What makes LaForte’s message resonate is that it comes from lived experience. Before coaching others, she spent years battling intense fear around public speaking despite being thoroughly prepared and highly capable. Today, she uses that journey to help women recognize that confidence isn’t reserved for the naturally outgoing—it’s something that can be cultivated, one conversation at a time.
Finding the Voice Beneath the Fear
For LaForte, discovering her own voice wasn’t the result of one transformative breakthrough, but countless moments of conflict between what she knewintellectually and what her body believed emotionally.
Time after time, she found herself excited and prepared to speak, only to feel overwhelming fear when attention turned toward her. She remembers presenting at work, creating content, sharing opinions with family, and stepping onto stages, each opportunity accompanied by a nervous system that seemed determined to convince her she wasn’t safe.
One experience became a turning point. After taking beta blockers for about a year before presentations, she prepared to address 150 coworkers when her manager noticed her taking the medication. Laughing, the manager revealed her own prescription, declaring they were “beta blocker besties.”
While the exchange was lighthearted, it stirred something deeper.
“I don’t want this to be my normal,” LaForte remembers thinking. “I don’t want to belong to the club of women who believe we have to be medicated just to use our voices.”
Rather than continuing to manage anxiety, she became determined to understand its source and transform it. That search eventually became the foundation of Vocal Honey™, where she now teaches women that the goal isn’t eliminating fear. It’s changing their relationship with it.
The Quiet Ways Women Silence Themselves
Many women who seek out LaForte’s coaching don’t consider themselves lacking in confidence. They’re successful professionals, business owners, executives, mothers, and community leaders with impressive accomplishments.
The challenge, she says, often appears in much subtler ways. It shows up after meetings, when a woman replays conversations and thinks, I should have said that differently. It appears through over-preparing, avoiding follow-up emails, hesitating to negotiate rates, or saying yes when she really means no.
According to LaForte, self-silencing rarely announces itself dramatically. Instead, it quietly teaches women to prioritize others’ comfort over their own authenticity until the habit feels normal.
“When you’re connected to what you’re saying and your body believes it as much as your words do, that’s when people lean in.” - Kimberly LaFort
Understanding “Voice Blockers”
Central to LaForte’s work is what she calls the Show-Off Wound™: the idea that many women learned early in life that full self-expression carried consequences. Perhaps they were criticized for speaking too much, laughed at for asking questions, dismissed for expressing opinions, or experienced rejection after telling the truth.
Years later, a workplace presentation or difficult conversation may subconsciously trigger those same protective responses, leading women to apologize unnecessarily, soften their opinions, rush their words, overuse filler language, avoid eye contact, or over-explain themselves to make their ideas more acceptable.
“These aren’t character flaws,” LaForte emphasizes. “They’re adaptive responses created by a nervous system trying to keep them safe.”
The encouraging news, she says, is that those responses can be rewritten. As women create new experiences of being seen, heard, and accepted, the nervous system learns that visibility is no longer dangerous.
Small Practices That Build Confidence
Confidence doesn’t require dramatic life changes, according to LaForte. Instead, it develops through consistent, low-risk experiences that expand a person’s comfort with being seen.
She recommends telling a story during conversations rather than simply exchanging information, recording yourself speaking on your phone even if no one else ever sees it, and practicing Honeywiring™, her visualization technique that mentally rehearses successful conversations or presentations before they happen.
“Most people cringe at first, but that’s how you become more familiar with your own voice, your expressions, and your presence. The more familiar you become with yourself, the less threatening visibility feels.”
LaForte says, “Confidence isn’t about waiting until you feel fearless. It’s about teaching your nervous system that it is safe to be fully seen and fully expressed even while your heart is beating a little faster.”
Rather than viewing nervousness as evidence of inadequacy, she encourages women to see it as information.
“It simply means your nervous system is telling you this level of visibility is new,” she explains. “Today, if nerves show up, I don’t panic. I let them come along for the ride.”
Reclaiming Boundaries Without Guilt
Setting boundaries remains one of the greatest challenges many women face because disappointing others can feel emotionally unsafe. LaForte encourages reframing boundaries not as rejection but as honesty.
Rather than simply saying, “I can’t do that,” she suggests connecting the boundary to the relationship itself: “I want to make sure I can show up fully when we’re together, so I need to leave by 7 tonight.”
She also uses an unexpectedly memorable visualization: ordering spaghetti and meatballs. Most people would do so calmly, confidently, and without apology. That’s the same energy she encourages clients to bring when discussing prices, giving feedback, saying no, or establishing healthy limits.
The Voice Evolves Throughout Life
Whether coaching young professionals, mothers, entrepreneurs, retirees, or women navigating menopause, LaForte observes remarkably similar patterns. Circumstances change, but the underlying struggle often doesn’t.
Many women reach a point where they realize the voice they’ve been using no longer reflects who they’ve become. Perhaps they’ve gained decades of experience but still speak with the uncertainty they developed in their twenties. Others have outgrown old beliefs but continue communicating from outdated identities formed through survival rather than authenticity.
The work, LaForte says, is updating the voice to match the woman standing in the present.
Becoming More Yourself
Among the many transformations LaForte has witnessed are women negotiating raises, speaking publicly for the first time, repairing family relationships, advocating within their communities, and establishing healthier boundaries.
For LaForte, reclaiming one’s voice isn’t about becoming louder, more polished, or fearless. It’s about becoming so grounded in who you are that telling the truth no longer requires abandoning yourself.
Everyday Ways to Strengthen Your Voice
Throughout her coaching, LaForte encourages women to make voice development part of daily life rather than reserving it for major moments. Rather than focusing solely on words, reflection invites us to examine the emotional energy behind our communication. Helpful practices include:
one. Notice when you apologize unnecessarily before sharing an opinion. Pause before adding qualifiers like “I could be wrong...” or “Sorry to bother you...”
two. Journal about moments when you felt yourself shrinking.
three.Practice saying boundaries aloud before important conversations.
four. Sit quietly for five minutes each day visualizing your future confident self and ask, “What would she do next?”
five. Reflecting on questions such as: What voice did I have to adopt to feel loved, accepted, or safe? If I already knew I was fully accepted, how would my voice sound?
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