The Key in the Cords
Earlier this week, I sat for a vocal audit with a woman named Tracy Goodwin. Tracy runs Captivate the Room where she works with CEOs, coaches, and speakers on their voice, and she has a gift I've never heard anyone else describe. She hears seven distinct layers in how a person speaks, from the overthinking mind, all the way down to old wounds, to the authentic voice underneath all of it.
In about five minutes of ordinary conversation, not even about this topic, Tracy named things in my voice that took me years of other work to name myself. Fear of judgment. People pleasing. A bracing against my own feelings, holding my breath instead of letting it move through me as sound. She connected some of what she heard to trauma I've acknowledged before, but never quite this way, never through the lens of what it had done to my actual voice. The next day, I recorded what may be the most unguarded, mask-free video I'd ever made.
She also named two things that felt like homecoming rather than diagnosis: a Sage quality she called my vocal superpower, and a wry, playful wit she said is starting to come forward. Both landed as true. This episode is about what it means to finally hear yourself the way someone else can hear you, and what changes once you do.
If her work speaks to you, you can find Tracy at Captivate the Room.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
At the beginning of this week, I had an audit, and in that audit I was shown what I was hiding. I was shown what I was not wanting to see, or show, or share. I know when we hear the term audit, most of us take a quick deep breath in, but this audit was actually one I was really looking forward to. It wasn't an appointment with the IRS. It was a vocal audit with a woman named Tracy Goodwin.
Tracy has a website she calls Captivate the Room. She works with CEOs and coaches and speakers and all kinds of people with their voice specifically, and Tracy has a unique ability I have never heard anybody else talk about. Tracy hears seven different layers in our voice. She describes this as a behavioral framework that reveals the subconscious stories and emotions and protection patterns hidden beneath the surface of how we speak.
In this audit, she goes through these seven different layers and absolutely nailed what was going on with me in so many different areas of my life. The first layer she talks about is the mind, where we overthink, and oh boy, that's one I'm quite adept at. Layer two she describes as time, and it's past-based projection. The third layer she calls traits, or patterns, things like people pleasing and perfectionism. The fourth layer is surface masks, all about performance, which is something I've talked about a lot here. The fifth layer is deeper masks, protection, what is shielding you from vulnerability. In the sixth layer, she hears the wounding, old hurts, or silencing, or survival patterns. And then in the seventh layer is where she can hear your authentic voice, your essence, your true voice.
Resonance being a key piece of the work that I do, this just so rang bells. It was resonant for me. I know that when truth lands in my body, it's because I feel it deeply, and what I'm feeling is the resonance of that truth. So it follows that if our voice is carrying something other than that, it would reflect a misalignment in tone. Because of Tracy's own personal history, she developed a gift of being able to listen and assess what was going on. She said that while we can be working on many different levels, doing all kinds of different work, what she maintains is that what often is the root level, the thing that betrays whether or not the work has actually landed in our bodies, is what the voice itself conveys.
So here's what she nailed in me. I hear my voice cracking as I talk about it. One was fear of others' judgment. People pleasing, this tendency she described that comes in the form of hesitation in my voice, in that I don't want to bother anybody, and that comes from a lack of feeling of belonging. She said I'm functioning in brace mode, that I don't let air out with sound because air fuels our feelings. And while I typically think of myself as somebody who easily feels, what I am imagining she was hearing or detecting was that there's almost a surface level squeaking out of feelings, but underneath, just as she described it, a holding of my breath, a bracing against the deeper feelings underneath. She read protection from judgment, the needing to get it right, asking for permission, a constant state of checking to see how I'm doing with others, and a radical effort to not be too much.
All of this came from five minutes of dialogue that we were having, not even about this topic. And while these can be universal codes for people, it was just too right on to be a mistake.
One of the things that surprised me about what she said, because I have talked a lot about owning my worth, and I have been doing a ton of work around that, was that it's not that I'm trying to prove my worth, but to own my authority. She spoke of a client who had been spanked frequently as a child, and that for this client to own her power, she had to navigate that traumatic experience in order to own her own authority, in order to speak up. And when Tracy spoke of that, there was definitely emotion in me. I sat with the part of me that experienced that physical level of trauma that involved more than just spanking. And of course, of course she would be terrified of speaking up. I've acknowledged and recognized this on other levels, but somehow orienting this around the idea of how it affected my voice unlocked something. The next day, I made a post on Instagram that truly felt like the most real, most authentic, most mask free video I've perhaps ever made.
The power of recognizing, we've talked a lot about the body keeping the score, how we hold trauma in the body, but again, I've never heard anybody speak to how we hold it in our voice. I asked Tracy, in unlocking this, is this the chicken or the egg, in terms of shift, and she responded that it is an essential part of ultimately freeing ourselves in this way.
Two of the other pieces she mentioned for me were my needing to be what you want me to be, and trying to control my environment. I laughed out loud at that one, because the OCD around my house is pretty incredible.
And there were two really positive things that she said that are places where I am now pivoting and focusing my attention, in terms of inviting more of these qualities to come alive, to feel freed. She said that my vocal superpower was that I am a sage. As a six line in Human Design, I know that that is a part of my design, the role model, the storyteller, and she didn't know that. But to hear her be able to identify that from this seventh layer of my voice was quite impressive. The other thing that she left me with at the end was that in my voice she hears a lot of fun. This is an aspect that recently has been coming forward, a wry sort of impish wittiness that I'm excited to have more free reign.
I know Tracy is in the process of putting together a salon where she does a ten-week process with people in a small group, and if you reach out to her, I will put the link in the show notes soon. This is early July 2026. I can only imagine the incredible depth of benefit you'll receive from this offering, from this work with her. She is a powerhouse.
