In this episode of The Lauren Edmunds Podcast, Lauren explores the concept of the “13th voice”, the idea that people often need to hear something multiple times and from different perspectives before they are ready to truly understand and embrace it. Drawing on her experience as the owner of a special needs school in Johannesburg, Lauren highlights how this principle applies to parenting, education, and supporting children with remedial or special needs.
TRANSCRIPTION
Reading Time: 7:18 minutes
Summary
The Power of the 13th Voice
I want to discuss how we perceive and interpret information, as well as when we fail to hear or understand it.
And this is relevant for almost every circumstance, but in my field in particular, when we’re dealing with people’s children and our children, we are only able to hear when we’re ready to listen.
Think about that for a moment. If you are not in this space to hear some feedback, let’s brush it off. You’re going to think that it’s not for you, or you’re going to disagree. When you’re in the space to receive feedback, you tend to agree. Now that can work for you and against you.
But when it comes to what I’m doing, I recognise that parents have a lot of stuff that they need to hear about their children because when they’re with me, they’re struggling.
The brain’s resistance to change
And it’s hard to take it all in. The human brain isn’t designed to be shaken up that badly that often. And the brain is always looking for a new normal. And when it finds a normal state, it doesn’t want to let in new information. And that’s typical for my brain, your brain, and every person’s brain.
The “13th person” concept
So, I talk about the 13th person, and it’s an arbitrary number; I chose 13 because it is one of those. It’s a prime number, you know, lucky 13, Friday the 13th. It’s pretty symbolic.
But so it’s irrelevant that it’s 13. It’s the symbolism that a person needs to hear things several times. Let me say 13 times before they’re willing to listen to it in the way they need to hear it. And we can’t back away from being the voices they need to reach the 13th person.
I’ve had people, kids, and parents come through my school. I know I haven’t been the 13th voice; I could have been the first or second voice. I’m the 12th voice, and the next place they go to becomes the 13th voice.
Surrounding parents with voices.
Because I understand this, when parents are with me, whether in my organisation, the school, or within my sphere, I try to place voices around them. Not saying what I’m saying, just speaking so that we get a lot of voices around the family and the things that they need to hear and are ready to listen, then they can hear them.
But if they’re not being spoken, then there’s no chance they hear them.
So, keeping information away from parents — things you’ve observed in their child, things you’ve noticed, and opinions you might have —means not sharing those with the parent. This is robbing them of the opportunity to hear things enough times.
It’s not about being right.
And it doesn’t mean that what we’re saying is right. So, we’re not aiming for a specific outcome and repeating it 13 times. It’s not about that. It’s not about the same person necessarily saying it 13 times.
Often, it’s 13 different people in different circumstances saying it in other ways that give the sort of aha moment that parents need and their children need.
The value of curiosity over certainty
So we don’t do anybody any service by keeping our opinions to ourselves. Equally, we don’t help anybody by creating or turning our opinions into facts. It’s far more valuable to reflect on, “I found this interesting,” or “I observed that,” or “This is curious for me,” or “I was thinking this.”
And what we’re doing is we’re not being definitive, so we’re not setting a child down a very particular path that could be the wrong path. We’re opening up the whole forest to the kid, and we are taking paths left and right. We come across a big oak tree that stops our path, and we figure out a way around it.
Finding the child’s path
Find the child’s path through the forest, not necessarily to the other side, because the forest, metaphorically, is the child’s map of their life.
And we need to be kind and generous in that process, but we also need to speak what we see and what we think, because ultimately the child belongs to the parent for their whole life. And when we, as therapists, educators, and other people in the child’s life, come in, we are there for just a season.
And we need to be cautious with our words, but not so careful that we say nothing.
See something, say something.
To see something, say something, applies here as well. Not to make a judgment, not to give a definitive answer, but to be curious and to give a thought, because you never know how somebody else’s brain might connect some thoughts, and they might go, “Oh, I see that now. Sure, if I just change this little thing, let’s see how it might help my son or my daughter.”
So keeping quiet is not a great idea. Saying it definitively is a bad idea. We want to be curious and open to thoughts and ideas as we explore.
Even diagnoses are not final.
Even diagnoses are not definitive. Children can work out of diagnoses. They can change their diagnoses. They can reduce symptoms that are associated with a diagnosis.
So, I’m far more interested in a child’s outcomes and what they’re doing in real life, as well as how they’re feeling and what they’re capable of.
The power of community in change
And we can’t go any further than we initially thought. We can’t get past our expectations if we’re not being curious. And we’re not sharing that curiosity and that interest because as we share it as a community, things get unlocked.
And when we finally get to that metaphorical 13th person, that’s when things start to happen. But we can’t get to the 13th person without the voices of the first, the second, the third, and the 13th.
Often, we go back to that first voice and we go, “Oh, how dare they have said that?” And frequently, the first voice sounds so combative and so mean. And we go back to that, we think about that person, we believe, “Oh, they were so terrible.”
While that could be true, quite often it’s just because you’re hearing it for the first time, it’s the person who broke the news to you. And then the second, third, and fourth voices, if they are confirming something for you, eventually get you to the point where you’re like, “Oh, wait, wait, wait, something makes sense.”
Not confirming — unlocking.
Not necessarily to confirm voice number one. We’re not trying to do that. We’re trying to unlock as many doors and open as many windows in this forest, mixing metaphors, as we can.
Hear everything around you. Don’t necessarily take it all in. And if you feel like you’re not getting through to somebody, know you might just be one of the voices.
And if you’re wrong, that’s also OK, because it steers us away from things we don’t want to explore or paths we don’t want to take, or ideas that might be misguided.
Final thought: listen and speak
But listen and speak. Communication is vital to all of this.
