Need to find your voice? Speak to Natalia

By Mark Tungate

Natalia Forster drew on her career experience to launch VOICE, a unique business therapy lab for individuals and brands. She’s not a consultant – it’s far more personal than that.

You only have to dig a little into the stories behind the world’s most valuable brands – from Apple to Vuitton – to find that they were built by singular individuals. People with a vision. Or, as Natalia Forster would put it, a “voice”.

Natalia’s new business therapy lab, VOICE, is based on the observation that no two human voices are alike. Find your true voice and you’ll find your unique role in the world. For you as a person, or for the brand you’re building.

But getting to the essence of who you are may require outside help.

The last time I interviewed Natalia, she was managing director of GUT in Amsterdam. She’s still based in Amsterdam, but now she’s running her own business. Ironically, a vision that was born in silence some years ago.

A voice lost and found

“About 15 years ago, I was having an existential life crisis and my then yoga teacher suggested I should try Vipassana. So I investigated a bit and saw that Vipassana is an ancient meditation technique for taming the wildest beasts that attack your mind. But also understanding that your body is data, which is information you can access and learn to use properly.”

She jokes that “any normal person” would have hooked up to YouTube and experienced the whole thing in their living room.

“Not me. I went straight to Salgótarján in the hills of Hungary, which was an epic mistake because it looked like a prison. It felt like a prison. Long story short, I spent 10 days in what they call ‘noble silence’. It’s horrible, because you’re left alone with your thoughts and whatever bubbles up in them.”

When she was finally allowed to speak again, her voice sounded different. It had a new texture, at the same time stronger but purer. Natalia went to ask the teacher what was happening. “And the teacher replied: ‘That is your real voice.’”

Subconscious creativity

The implications of this settled in the back of her mind as she continued her busy advertising career. Shortly before GUT, she was working for a fast-paced startup in the finance sector.

“One night I dreamt that I was being interviewed by Forbes. And I told the Vipassana story and explained that I’d founded VOICE. That’s the first time I ever heard the name. But I told them that whether you’re a brand or an individual, only when you reconnect with your essence can you find your authentic voice.”

She woke up and wrote the idea down. Three weeks later, an ex-client contacted her saying, “I ready for a change. What should I do? Can you give me any advice?”

Natalia saw this as a divine push. “I didn’t have a methodology yet,” she admits. “But I started scribbling it down right there and then.”

This became VEMM (VOICE Essence Map Method), a proprietary framework that invites participants – individuals, leaders, or brands – on a journey of self-discovery. The idea is to unearth experiences and values that reconnect people with their “essence”, which might then underpin an entire business strategy.

The idea was put on hold when Natalia took the position at GUT (“I had to be the MD of the hottest agency in town!”). But later, as these things do, its time had come. “I was at a crossroads where I was thinking: ‘Should I take a leap and do something that might allow me to leave the world better than I found it?’”

How to change a path

VOICE is up and running and has already helped several clients, including a financier who became an artist and an entrpreneur who rebuilt her entire brand strategy from scratch.

But how does it work, concretely? Either virtually or in person, Natalia spends time with you over a 2.5 hour session, which is recorded. First, she listens deeply to your thoughts, ideas and doubts. Then she asks specific questions.

“From the answers, I can already get a sense what we we need to unlock. And we continue on that path until we get into your ideal work situation: brand, business, corporate or personal. And we deep dive into that. Then you go. But I sit with the recording. I listen closely to everything you said – then I start writing.”

This is nothing spiritual, she stresses. “It’s based on 25 years of experience, strategy, and growing brands. I have the ability to join the dots to get to an insight, and build an entire ecosystem around that.”

Which is exactly what she does when clients have left the room. “I identify their essence during the session. And from there I come up with the outcome, which is a blueprint – the ecosystem for your brand, personal or business, and how you could launch it using the one thing that’s impossible to replicate.”

A team of individuals

For many people, she’s been able to crack new businesses out of the sessions. She’s about to take on team clients too. Particularly in the era of AI, she feels that human individuals – and the characteristics that make them valuable – are in danger of being sidelined by businesses.

“There are always credentials on decks that talk about putting people first and the importance of talent. I’ve been there. I’ve run these places. It is about people, but it’s also not. It’s about those quarterly numbers. So you stop seeing the people – and you lose talent when you don’t see them.”

Taking care of talent is about more than “giving them a gym pass”, she adds. “I mean taking care of them as in understanding how to speak their language.” Sometimes it’s our own fault, she admits, because we mask our identities to fit in. “And I don’t know that fitting in is such a great idea.”

It should work the other way around. “As a company, try to see and make space for the diversity of your voices, and then you’ll find a model that’s genuinely unique and attractive.”

So what’s the one thing we can do, as of now, to find our voice? Reconnection seems to be the key. As we all know, our thoughts are drowned out by the chatter and interruptions we deal with every day. “But your real voice, your essence, is thriving in there somewhere. We’re just not trained to hear the message.”

She quotes Walt Whitman: “Re-examine everything you’ve been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.”