Voice isn't just a communication tool. It's a leadership signal — and for many leaders, it's the one they've paid the least attention to. In this conversation, Andrea Levinson sits down with Sally Prosser to explore what it really means to speak from the inside out. Sally shares the story of being thrown into running a TV news bureau in her mid-twenties with zero leadership training — and what she learned from the moment she most wishes she could rewrite. They explore the inner voice, the identity shift required to stop being the keeper of all answers, and the surprisingly physical nature of how authority lands. They also unpack why voice is one of the last irreplaceable human advantages — and why the future belongs to the heart-centred confident communicator.

Five Things That Stayed With Me

1. Voice is physical, not intellectual

The biggest mistake leaders make is thinking speaking is about figuring out what to say, rather than feeling what to say. Your voice lives in your body, not your head. When you tune in to what's rising in your body — frustration, nervousness, excitement — you can work with it before it comes out the top. The daily hum is Sally's entry point: hum in the shower, in the car, anywhere. It gets the breath flowing, the vocal cords vibrating, and reminds you where your voice actually lives.

2. Leadership is the quality of your decisions, not the quantity of your answers

Sally's sister — a leader herself — shared this reframe, and it stuck. The decision to delegate, or to put the action back on the person in front of you, is a higher-quality leadership decision than housing all the answers yourself. When you position yourself as the keeper of all information, you teach victimhood — people learn they can't do anything without you. The art of the "palm off" isn't avoidance. It's discernment.

3. The inner voice is the most important one

Research suggests we have around 60,000 thoughts a day. Around 80% are repetitive. Around 90% are negative — which means we're essentially trash-talking ourselves on a loop. The good news: because those thoughts are repetitive, changing just one of them this month compounds. If you say something to yourself 60,000 times, reprogramming even one thought shifts the tone of your inner voice exponentially. Mirror work and the daily inner voice practice aren't soft — they're high-leverage.

4. Head, heart, and diaphragm — where your voice comes from matters

Care, welcome, and invitation need to come from the heart. Calls to action — "can you send me that by Friday?", "let's move forward on this" — need to come from the diaphragm, from the solar plexus. Most leaders default to speaking from the head for everything. The result: commands that sound harsh when they mean to invite, and requests that sound soft when they mean to direct. Learning to align where your voice comes from with what you're actually trying to achieve is one of the highest-leverage moves in leadership communication.

5. Authority and care aren't opposites — they're two separate dimensions

Most leaders experience authority and warmth as a trade-off: the more collaborative you are, the less commanding you appear, and vice versa. But they're not opposite ends of the same spectrum — they're two independent axes. You can be both at once. The heart-centred confident communicator holds power and warmth simultaneously. The voice is the mechanism. When the voice, body, and intention are aligned, you don't have to choose.

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Quotes Worth Holding

"The voice is physical, not intellectual. It's one of the big mistakes leaders make — thinking it's about what to say rather than feeling what to say." — Sally Prosser

"Leadership is not about the quantity of work you do or the quantity of expertise you share. It's about the quality of decisions you make." — Sally Prosser (quoting her sister)

"The future belongs to the heart-centred confident communicator." — Sally Prosser

"What AI can never do is rise to the emotion of the moment. Your voice is an energetic channel. We've got to trust that we can connect with humans in a way that AI and machines will never be able to do." — Sally Prosser

"Connection over perfection. People want realness. They don't want flawless." — Andrea Levinson

What We Explored

0:00 Introduction: voice, power, presence and why voice matters in leadership

2:00 Sally's edge: running a news bureau in her mid-twenties with zero leadership training

4:36 Breath and embodiment — voice is physical, not intellectual

8:30 "Leadership is the quality of your decisions, not the quantity of your answers"

12:59 The inner voice: 60,000 thoughts a day, 90% negative

18:50 Getting interrupted in meetings: from victimhood to vocal agency

23:20 Head, heart, diaphragm: where your voice comes from changes everything

28:00 The future belongs to heart-centred communicators

33:41 Wrap-up: try the daily hum

About Sally Prosser

Sally Prosser is a voice coach, speaker, and TEDx presenter whose work sits at the intersection of voice, confidence, and influence. She has coached hundreds of professionals to find their voice and is known for making powerful communication feel practical and accessible. Sally is the author of Voiceprint, which explores how leaders can leave a lasting impression through the way they speak — and how the inner voice is the most important one to master first. Her background as a TV journalist and news bureau manager for Channel 7 gives her a rare combination of broadcast-level technique and real-world leadership experience.

If this conversation resonated, explore more insights and resources at andrealevinson.com.au

Full Transcript

Lightly edited for readability. The full timestamped version is available on YouTube.

ANDREA: Welcome to Leadership at the Edge. I'm Andrea Levinson. Today I'm really excited to dive into conversation with the amazing Sally Prosser, who is a speaking coach, author, and most recently a TEDx speaker. I'm very much looking forward to watching the replay when that lands.

ANDREA: Today I'm looking forward to diving into the connections between our voice, our power, our identity, and how we show up and lead. I see a really deep connection between how we lead ourselves and how we then lead others. I was a psychologist for a couple of decades — I have a particular lens here. To me, it's always an inside job first.

ANDREA: In a moment I'm going to throw to you, Sally, with a question to kick us off. Before we do that, I want to extend an invitation to everyone listening to lean in with a curious lens and be inquisitive about how what we're talking through might relate to you — your situation, your leadership — and where you might be able to apply it, get into some action. To kick us off, Sally: when have you felt most at the edge in your own leadership?

SALLY: Great to be here, Andrea. Always a pleasure chatting to you. So glad you gave me this question ahead of time because I had to cast my mind back to a scenario I had blocked out of my memory.

SALLY: When I was in my mid-twenties, I was thrown into running a news bureau — a Central Queensland news bureau for Channel 7. I was a journalist having to source, produce, write the stories, manage the bulletin including conference calls and headlines — and also manage the other journalists and camera operators — all with a grand total of zero professional leadership training. So it was a lot.

SALLY: I remember one day I had arranged all these things and was running out the door to get to an interview I was already late for, and someone asked me this completely benign question — something to do with the staff room fridge. And I just lost it. "Figure it out yourself." Left.

SALLY: Not good. But what it showed is how — instead of feeling like "oh my gosh, they're making me do this" — with the wisdom of training and hindsight, it's about having the gift of reframing and going: people are looking to leadership, and how you respond in that moment indicates what kind of leader you are. Looking back, I wouldn't have wanted a boss like me in that moment.

ANDREA: I've got a really visceral feeling of what that must have felt like physically — just spurting out "go sort out the fridge yourself." It's always the really important things. The fridge. The coffee machine. It was always the coffee machine.

ANDREA: I haven't primed you with this question, but I am curious — and you don't need to answer if you don't want to. If you could rewrite that experience, what would you do differently? And I don't necessarily mean what would you say, but how would you get yourself to a point where you felt you could express yourself differently?

SALLY: I'm a very expressive, heart-on-my-sleeve kind of person. Now, being a communication coach, and actually even the very next day after that incident I employed this technique — I learned it from my years of speech and drama training: before answering any question, take a breath in and a breath out.

SALLY: Breath in, breath out. Because already at that time I was feeling that frustration rising. And I do a lot of work with embodiment — the voice is physical, not intellectual. It's one of the big mistakes leaders make: thinking it's about thinking about what to say, rather than feeling what to say. When you're in tune with your body, you can feel that frustration rising long before it pops out the top as something you wish you hadn't said.

SALLY: I would have taken that breath, which would have helped settle that energy. And I probably just would have said, "Oh, ask the building manager" — because actually it wasn't even under my remit how the fridge was working. So I would have calmly delegated it to the right person. We've got to remember as leaders: people are going to ask us things that aren't in our lane. As I say in media training too — journalists are going to ask you questions that aren't yours to answer. Rather than getting frustrated, think: they've come to me like air traffic control. I can direct them where they need to go.

ANDREA: I love that reframe. It has a lot of parallels with something I talk with leaders about around solution vending. Someone comes to you with a problem and our inclination is to be valuable, to show we're knowledgeable — we answer the question. It gives us a bump of satisfaction. They run away happy. We feel happy and valuable. But we're building a cycle where we're overloaded, busy, overstretched, doing things we don't need to do.

ANDREA: And often when I suggest asking a question back, or encouraging the person to come with a solution, the first response is: "Oh, but it just comes out — I just say the thing." Which is exactly where your breath-in, breath-out pause becomes powerful.

SALLY: Yes, and I call it the great art of the palm off. A lot of leaders feel that to be useful, they have to have the answer for everything. But with that strategy, leaders just end up taking far too much on — and also teaching victimhood, I say, because it teaches people they can't do anything on their own and that the leader is the holder of all the answers.

SALLY: When I'm doing corporate communication training with leadership teams, one of the things we work on is being able to answer what's in your lane, but confidently giving people the ability to self-serve. So even if someone said, "Oh, what about this?" — instead of "I'll look into that and get back to you," you might say, "That's a great point. Put it in an email and send it to me." And often that person won't even take that action, because they've found an easier route or realised they don't care as much as they thought.

ANDREA: One of the reasons this is so challenging — and I can relate to this in my own leadership — is that a lot of us come from being individual contributor professionals, valued for our expertise. And there's this layer of professional competence where your knowledge is your power. To admit you don't know, or that you're not going to give an answer, is a very anti-self-identity thing to do.

ANDREA: So we need to almost shift what we see our role as, first and foremost.

SALLY: Yes. In my workshops I say: the most annoying type of person is the person who has the answer to everything. And my sister, who is a leader, shared something with me that really stuck. She said, "Leadership is not about the quantity of work you do or the quantity of expertise you share. It's about the quality of decisions you make."

SALLY: The quality of a decision to delegate, to put the action back on the person speaking to you — that is a higher quality decision than feeling like you have to be the keeper of all the answers. And it's such a big shift, especially for leaders who've gone into a position because they were a subject matter expert. I call it the Frozen technique: you've got to let it go. When you step into leadership, a lot of it is letting go of the detail and the housing of information you once held in a different role.

ANDREA: My take on the Frozen technique — different Frozen reference: Frozen 2 — is knowing the one next right thing. I have this visual of Anna crawling through the cave in the darkness, just one step at a time. Not figuring it all out. Just the next right step.

SALLY: I love that. And I'm walking the Camino de Santiago in September — the Camino del Norte across the north of Spain, 33 days, 15 to 25 kilometres a day. There's a phrase I've come across in my research: "The Camino will provide." It's like: the path will provide. And it's a really good leadership lesson, because so often leaders want to know what the 10 steps ahead are. But if you just know what the next step is, the path will reveal itself. Otherwise you sit in paralysis hoping the whole entire path will come before you — which it rarely does.

ANDREA: And I see this so often. This idea of "I need to have it all figured out, in my head, and then I'll deliver the answer on a silk platter to everybody." Which puts a lot of pressure on us — when more often than not it's not just an us problem. It's a collective, relational challenge.

SALLY: I talk about it in Voiceprint — the inner voice. That's the most important one. There are stats along the lines of: we have 60,000 thoughts a day. About 80% of those are repetitive. About 90% of those are negative. Which means we're trash-talking ourselves on repeat every day. That is terrifying. But it's why you have to work at it. Confidence is a practice. It's a feeling.

SALLY: I do a lot of mirror work with my clients — you look in the mirror and you say, "You've got this. You and me are going to slay the day. Today I choose an ally, not an enemy." It sounds quite humorous if you're not used to this kind of work. But when you hear a stat like that, you need serious intention to overcome all of those negative thoughts that come in automatically.

ANDREA: It's wild. But it also means — because it's so repetitive — if you take just one thought and change it this month, you reprogram it thousands of times. You say it to yourself so many times in a day that it's exponentially shifting the tone of your inner voice. Whereas we often think, "Oh yeah, I could change that one thing I say to myself, but it's just that one time." It's not. Not even close.

ANDREA: I'm really curious about mirror talk. I'd love you to give us an example. But first — a story that I think is related.

ANDREA: I did a charity bike ride. Three days, 300-something kilometres, Byron to Brisbane. I did it despite not owning a bike, never having ridden with cleats, never having ridden in a peloton. Wild in hindsight. We're going up the biggest hill of the ride and someone at the front of the peloton says, "We haven't even started climbing yet." So we're going up and up. I'm at the back. Amazing riders everywhere. Half the people have finished. I'm struggling up — and I get to that point where you're going so slowly you can barely stay balanced.

ANDREA: I got off the bike because of a sign that said "1 kilometre." In my head: "We've only done one kilometre. I cannot do another six." That internal voice drove a choice. That is probably my one biggest regret from that amazing charity ride.

ANDREA: Turns out that sign meant one kilometre to go. We were almost at the top.

SALLY: Oh, Andrea. What a fantastic story to show how the same stimuli can produce different results based on how you interpret it. A big one in my world is: "I'm so nervous." And my response is: that's fantastic. That's energy. I can harness that. I'm going to use that. Whereas a lot of people think nervousness means they're not prepared, or they're not a good speaker. The same signal. Completely different outcome, based on the internal story.

ANDREA: And in hindsight — if I had been less caught up in the chatter in my head, I could have used my voice. I could have asked the one experienced rider who was with me: "How much longer do we have to go?" I could have sought some information rather than making an assumption. We do that a lot in leadership.

SALLY: So much. Working with lots of executives in board meetings and high-level meetings — usually this is coming from a woman who says, "I get interrupted. I start speaking and then he shuts me down, because they don't respect me." I say: I don't know if many people intentionally want to shut someone down. Often the intention of the interrupter is that the speaker hasn't vocally signified they have the floor — or they've vocally signified they need help.

SALLY: Have you ever interrupted because you're feeling like, "Okay, this person is struggling here, so I better jump in and help"? So the interruption often comes from a place of help, not hindrance. When people hear that, they go, "Oh, I never thought of it like that." And then we can say: okay, how can we vocally signify that you have the floor? How can we use some structure so it's clear when you're starting and when you're stopping?

ANDREA: You're going from a place of "this is happening to me, I don't have anything tangible I feel I can do to change it" — we're helpless in that situation — to: a little twist of the kaleidoscope, we shift perspective, we're seeing the same thing differently, and all of a sudden there's something we can hook into. We've got some agency.

ANDREA: Favourite word, agency.

SALLY: That's why I teach voice from the inside out — it's really about owning your voice. And there's a little technique in Voiceprint called the inflection of suggestion. It's an example of how such a small change in the voice can really change the impact you have as a leader.

SALLY: We're often told that going up at the end of every phrase is not a good thing — and that's true on complete statements, where it's asking for validation. But if you're using an inflection that's too straight and flat in a moment when you're looking for collaboration, it comes across as a command rather than an invitation. So instead of: "Okay, this is what I'm thinking for this course of action." — you can say it with just a little kick up on the end: "So this is what I'm thinking for this course of action?" — which opens up the floor for others to respond. Collaborative and inviting rather than commanding.

SALLY: I share that example because it is quite technical and nuanced — but it shows how, when you really command your voice at this level, the tiny tweaks you can make over time add to a real difference in your impact as a leader.

ANDREA: I finished listening to the audiobook of Voiceprint the other day and I can highly recommend that format — that inflection piece is a beautiful example of where it's so useful to hear the difference rather than just read it.

ANDREA: I want to explore this tension in the workplace around psychological safety on the one hand — creating space for emotions and humanness, not creating psychosocial harm — and on the other hand holding authority, holding people accountable, commanding a room. We often see those things as polar opposites. And the reframe I gave someone recently was that they're not opposite ends of one spectrum. They're two separate continuums. You end up with a two-by-two. Which means we can be both at once. How can we do that? What does that look like when we're speaking or in conversation?

SALLY: This is what it's all about — speaking in alignment, speaking authentically. And one of the biggest differences is the position your voice is coming from in your body.

SALLY: If you want to show care, welcome, invitation, collaboration — it really needs to come from the heart. From here. So instead of: "I'd like to welcome everyone here today" — which comes from the head — it's: "I'd like to welcome everyone here today." Subtle but different.

SALLY: The calls to action — speaking about power — need to come from the diaphragm, from the solar plexus area. "Can you send me that email? Let's move forward on this." Anything that's a call to action needs to come from here.

SALLY: When there's confusion, I see it with clients: "But if I speak from here, I'm going to come across too harsh." And so they speak from the head for everything — which means calls to action come out sounding like suggestions. We say, "Oh, so you know, if it'd be great if you could do that for me" — and it sounds like a good idea, not an instruction.

SALLY: Most people are using their voice a tiny part of its range. Once we explore that range and align our intention with where the vibrations are coming from — that's when we can be in our power and be kind and collaborative at the same time.

ANDREA: I love that. And as work is changing, with AI and more virtual leadership — one of the edges we're at collectively is the need to bring more of our humanness and our human skills to the workplace. If we are to be successful in a way that doesn't deplete us — if we want to genuinely love our work and have it love us back — we need to lean into those human skills.

SALLY: "Successful in a way that doesn't deplete us" — I love that. And I believe it starts with loving your voice. While technology is improving rapidly, the technology of the human voice is being forgotten. I really believe the future belongs to the heart-centred confident communicator.

SALLY: There are already AI figures that can do better presentations than most humans. But what AI can never do is rise to the emotion of the moment. Your voice is an energetic channel that carries the emotion of the moment — and we've got to trust that we can connect with humans in a way that AI and machines will never be able to do.

SALLY: And you know what? Even with my podcast — I'm finding the episodes where I stumble a bit, where I say something a different way, those are the ones that perform better. Because people are more and more interested in: are you actually a human?

ANDREA: When we can show our own vulnerability, our own humanness. Let's not lower our standards — we still need to have standards — but allow ourselves to explore our growth edges and be okay with that slightly messy, slightly skinned-knee version of ourselves as we play and practise. We don't need to be perfect right out of the bat.

ANDREA: Connection over perfection. People want realness. They don't want flawless.

SALLY: You're right. It's the messy magic of our voice. We're not always going to say the thing we wanted to say in hindsight. We've got to have that self-compassion, that self-love, that self-forgiveness: we did what we could in the moment with the resources we had. And then as we look back, we can say — okay, where can I upskill? And do it with kindness. That's why I believe so much in the value of voice work: it's so good for the soul and the voice.

ANDREA: That links us right back to the next right step. We don't need to figure it all out. And if we think about the dynamics of relationships — how we build connection and trust — it's never a one-and-done. We always get a do-over. Maybe we could have landed something differently, but with what we know now, we can go into another conversation, ask a question, get some feedback.

ANDREA: I'm going to ask you, Sally, to share one thing leaders could play with or try this week. Given what we've talked about — voice, embodiment, authenticity, connection — what's one easy thing that someone could play with?

SALLY: Speaking is a physical sport. So it's about getting into your body. One of the best ways to do that is an exercise I call the daily hum. In the shower in the morning, in the car on the way to work — just hum. It gets the breath flowing. It gets the vocal cords vibrating. It reminds you that voice is of the body. And doing that every day, you'll immediately start to notice a difference in how you feel the resonance in your own body. When you feel that, it shifts the resonance other people feel when they hear your voice. The daily hum.

ANDREA: I love that. The warm-up. And what you talk about in the book around protecting your voice as an asset — for longevity, that takes some effort, some exercise. Like the daily hum, which I've actually been doing since I read the book and it absolutely works.

ANDREA: For everyone listening — thank you for leaning in with curiosity. Two things floating around in my brain from this conversation. I love what you just shared, Sally, around speaking being a physical sport — and that flows into how we take care of ourselves to be able to articulate, to show up fully. There's a connection there with AI, which is entirely disembodied. And the relationship we have with how we speak to ourselves — the inner voice — can be a really powerful way to connect differently with people.

ANDREA: I shared the bike ride story. You talked about mirror talk — talking to yourself in the mirror with words of kindness, not criticism. And I suspect if anyone wants to know more, they can reach out to you Sally, or find it in Voiceprint.

ANDREA: I'm really curious — for everyone listening, what resonated? Drop it into comments. And in doing that, remember that the way you express a takeaway or something you're mulling over has impact on other people reading it as well. There's a gift in what you share.

ANDREA: Sally, it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being so generous and bubbly and authentically yourself today.

SALLY: My absolute pleasure. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. Have a beautiful day.