Where ROAR! comes from

 Before you read: this post touches on childhood sexual abuse, which may be upsetting for some. Nothing is described in detail. Please be kind to yourself.

My purpose is to give a voice to the voiceless. It's why ROAR! Coaching & Consulting exists: to make it safe for people to speak up, one conversation at a time.

Silence is expensive.

The risk nobody raised. The mistake nobody reported. The exhaustion everybody wears as a badge of honour while the real struggle stays hidden.

It took me until 40, and a bully bringing me to my knees, to realise I'd found my authentic purpose when I was twelve years old. I shared my story of the first time I roared in my 2021 TEDx Talk, Have you found your ROAR!?

It was a hot summer's day in December in Bredasdorp. I was twelve years old, working in the garden with my dad, helping tie the grape vines to the wooden beams over the stoep (our veranda). I suddenly had a deep knowing of what had happened to me, and I heard a voice loud and clear: go to his house now.

I knew my younger sister was there and that she was in danger. I immediately went to his house, where he begged me to allow my sister to stay just a little longer. I stood up tall, looked him straight in the eye and said a firm NO. We are going home NOW.

Later that evening, my sister and I were downstairs in my parents' bedroom. She was playing with her toys, and I was taping the Top 40 countdown on my canary yellow double cassette tape recorder. In those days the entire point was to hit 'stop recording' just before the presenter started talking over the ending of a song.

I can't remember at what point I decided to sit my sister down to explain why I had to tell our parents. Initially she panicked (she had valid reasons, but that's her story to tell). After some careful explanation about why what he did was wrong and why it had to stop, she nodded and carried on playing.

I called my parents, they came downstairs, and I told them about the abuse we suffered at the hands of our neighbour, a man who was like a grandfather to us.

Abuse is abuse (full stop)

Sexual, physical, emotional, financial. A child at the hands of a trusted adult. A boss who holds your career in their hands. And the bully inside our own heads.

The form changes. The mechanics don't. Power gets misused. The person on the receiving end is made to feel they brought it on themselves. And then, silence.

Silence protects the abuser and isolates the victim. The invisible scars cut deep.

I could speak because I belonged

People admire my bravery when I share my story, and I understand why, but I didn't feel brave in that moment. There was no hesitation. I knew deep down in my core that it was the only right thing to do.

That knowing didn't come from me alone. I was twelve. Something larger was moving through me, an inner power I didn't know I had. Perhaps you've felt it too: a certainty so strong that doubt has no room to stand.

I spoke up because I felt safe. I knew my parents would believe me. And I was right. There was no hesitation on their side. I didn't doubt for a second that they'd take my side. It never crossed my mind that they'd question my account or ask me what I'd done to invite it. I knew, in the same mysterious way I knew to go to his house, that I'd be believed and protected.

It was a terrible shock for all of us. But once it was spoken aloud, we could start the healing process, together.

That is belonging. It's what made my first ROAR possible.

Think about the last time you spoke a tough truth out loud. Who or what made that possible?

How lions roar and what we can learn from them

Recently, in preparation for a new keynote, Safe to ROAR, I caught myself wondering whether a lion's roar and a human's roar come from the same place.

For me, an authentic roar, where we speak our truth, originates from the solar plexus. In simple terms, the fire in our bellies.

But it's a little more complex than that.

A lion's roar is made at the larynx. The voice box.

What makes it extraordinary is the shape of the vocal folds. In most animals they're triangular. In lions they're flat and square, cushioned by fat, which lets them vibrate under enormous pressure without tearing.

Researchers Ingo Titze and Tobias Riede found something I love: the roar comes down to the physical properties of that tissue, not to signals from the brain. The body does it, not the head.

The sound reaches around 114 decibels. It carries up to eight kilometres.

And here's the thing about lions. They never go searching for their purpose. They're born knowing it. The roar announces it across the savanna: I am here. This is who I am. This is mine to protect.

The fuel of the roar is air pressure from the lungs. As a lion roars, muscles running all the way down to the base of the rib cage contract. The larynx drops. The passage lengthens. The whole chest becomes an amplifier. The sound is shaped at the throat. It's powered from the deep body.

Every singer and voice coach knows this is true of us as well. Real vocal power doesn't come from the throat. It comes from breath support, from the diaphragm, from the core. A shout forced from the neck strains and thins. A true roar rises from below.

So the solar plexus earns its place after all. It's the seat of the breath that powers the sound. In ROAR! terms, I call it standing in your power.

Why we go quiet

When we don't feel safe, the body clamps. The breath goes high and shallow, the throat tightens and the voice comes out thin.

Have you heard that voice before, as someone else's or as your own?

When we feel safe, the breath drops. The body opens. The true sound arrives.

My coach Katy Slabber, who wrote the invitation to the reader in MOAR!, describes our energy as a toroid: a self-renewing loop that flows outwards, circles back and returns to its source transformed. In her words: 'When we silence our truth, we collapse the toroid: the current of life becomes trapped within us. But when we dare to roar, even softly at first, the circuit reopens. What leaves the heart returns to it, refined. Energy becomes coherence. Voice becomes vibration. Healing becomes motion.'

Even softly at first. Loudness, as Katy says, isn't the point: aliveness is.

Nobody is coming to save you

I didn't know any of this at twelve. I only knew that something rose through me that afternoon and carried me into a room to say the hardest words I've ever said.

Now I understand it a little better. That power wasn't rare and it wasn't mine.

That same power is sitting in you right now, waiting on your breath. Waiting on you giving yourself permission to roar. Nobody is coming to save you.

Lions are born knowing their purpose. So are we. The difference is that we forget. Life piles layers of shoulds and supposed tos on top of us until our soul's purpose is buried so deep we stop hearing it.

Lions never forget. Our work is to remember who we were born to be. That’s why authentic purpose is the first element of my ROAR! Blueprint: know who you are and what truly matters to you. Everything else builds on it.

My purpose is to give a voice to the voiceless. It started with my sister. It became my life’s work.

Katy captures it perfectly: 'That is where the real roar lives, not in the noise, but in the resonance of truth remembered.'

No lion roars alone

A lion never roars into empty space. It roars because there is a pride to hear it, and a pride that roars back.

The same is true for us. None of us finds our voice in isolation. We find it in the conditions other people create around us. And we create those conditions for ourselves and others, whether we mean to or not. I could speak at twelve because of the pride I belonged to.

You already have a powerful roar. So do your people.

As a parent, a partner, a friend, a colleague, a leader: are you building a pride worth roaring for?

For South African readers

Get my books ROAR! How to Tame the Bully Inside and Out and MOAR! How to Play to Win Without Burning Out.

ROAR! and MOAR! are available in bookstores nationwide, most notably Exclusive Books.

Signed copies are available directly from me.

If you would like a signed copy sent directly from me, email marilise@marilise-de-villiers.com (R350 per book, plus R50 postage)

#ROARforMOAR #MakeWorkMagic #ConsciousLeadership #SafeToRoar #FindYourVoice