No obstacle: Voice didn't stop her
Here's a tale to show that no obstacle is too high when it comes to career success. It's about my friend Ann, who has a really deep voice. It isn't a sexy deep voice; it sounds more like Oscar the Grouch with a sore throat or Darth Vader on Prozac.
Her voice, which is a result of a birth complication, is a disability that she must deal with daily and for the most part, has overcome. While I know this now, I didn't always see things that way.
I knew Ann in grade school where I confess to having had evil thoughts:
1. Why is she first chair in saxophone and I'm last chair in oboe? She has the right mouth for wind instruments, and I don't. It's not fair.
2. Why is she class president and I'm not even getting invited to boy-girl parties? How can someone with such an awful voice be so much more popular than I am?
When Ann and I ended up on the high-school track team together, we became close friends. I spent so much time with her that I stopped noticing that her voice was different than other people's. It seemed normal to me.
But there were constant reminders: Restaurant customers stared when they heard us talking. Often, salespeople did not hear what she wanted because they were so stunned by the sound of her voice. Ann never lost patience, never seemed uncomfortable. I never knew how she did it.
In the track world you meet tons of kids from schools all over the state, and when Ann walked by, I heard lots of them say: "What's wrong with her voice?"
When I asked Ann if she felt weird about how she sounded, she'd say no. "A deep voice sounds authoritative," she'd tell me.
Ann flourished in college. She learned to be extra nice to people because they usually would be extra nice back. She became very loyal to friends who stuck by her because so many others shied away after hearing her speak. Naturally, she knew she was different, but since good grades could help her overcome prejudices, she excelled in school.
After college she went to a top advertising firm. I assume that her voice was not a problem during job interviews, or at least that interviewers believed Ann could overcome her voice impediment enough to impress potential clients.
But then she was assigned to a manager who hated her and he became her bete noir. He berated her intelligence, made sexually explicit comments around her, and generally let her know he did not want her around. In truth, his actions amounted to harassment. But harassment is usually considered to be wielded by powerful men over women who are less powerful. I found it hard to believe that anyone would harass Darth Vadar girl. But her harasser had leverage, so Ann had to leave the company.
Once you leave a high-profile company without recommendations, you can forget going to another company in the same industry. So Ann returned to where she flourished: school. She took programming classes, and a classmate liked her so much that he got her a job. His software firm needed someone who knew advertising and someone who knew programming, and the company liked the idea of Ann wearing two hats.
Although the company went under in the tech meltdown of 2002, Ann found that she had developed a new specialty, which is in a very narrow niche that she now dominates and doesn't want me to identify in this column because she didn't want me to write the column in the first place. But the bottom line is that things are good for Ann now. She weathered many storms and is successful despite her disability. Her tips for others who are struggling with some kind of impediment are applicable to all of us:
1. Convince yourself you're great. Then convincing other people is much easier.
2. Don't blame other people for your failures. Take responsibility for your life and move past people who don't help you.
3. Have patience with yourself if you don't choose the right career on the first try. Trust that you will find a place that's right for you, and keep looking.
4. Don't make friends with a writer. They will always use their friends' lives as fodder.
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