Speak Truth to Empower

Updates| 2025

July 28, 2025•10 min read

Speak Truth to Empower – Power, Silence and Complicity

One of my favourite artists Akala, has a beautiful track called "Knowledge is Power” (language and trigger warning). The concept behind the song is key to the purpose of this article.

Empowerment

"Empowerment is the level of choice, influence and control that an individual can exercise over events in their lives” (paraphrased from the World Health Organisation).

For someone to be empowered, they must have control of their life and outcomes. To be empowered, a person will require the necessary information to make informed decisions about their choices.

Empowering others by modelling quality ethical communication starts with understanding the power dynamics, recognising existing systems of oppression and discrimination which are at play and taking action to address these issues. As the song says, ‘Knowledge is Power’ but what will you do with that power once you have it?

Ethical Practice requires action. By implementing equity-focused approaches, we can enable others to engage and lead in processes and dialogues, which improve access to autonomy, freedom and power for our teams, stakeholders and communities.

Communication

Communication is a basic part of life; we all do it. We have many ways in which we can share, learn and talk with others, especially when we consider the way we use technology, build our businesses or professional presence and engage on social media.

Human communication has become such a multilayered process that although we all speak and process information every day, it appears the integrity of our personal exchanges has decreased. Few people listen to understand, few people speak to be understood and fewer still apply critical thinking skills to their own communication process.

Often individuals half listen while waiting to reply; many people speak to be heard and establish their ‘rightness’. Critical thinking seems to be a rare and illusive skill in many professional spaces. Communication has become more about centring ourselves and less about sharing our message.

So, speaking truth to empower others is a concept which switches the focus back to the message. The process of opening up and communicating with full integrity, understanding the difference between being truthful and being completely open, can be a minefield of integrity. Knowingly telling part of the truth, while omitting key facts, is not being honest and 'not lying' while withholding information is also not honesty.

A good example of questionable communication is food labelling, where we see ‘eco-friendly’ or similar statements on packaging but a little research quickly shows that the producer has no environmental credentials and a poor track record for following even minor environmental regulations.

We have also seen failures in the integrity of communications at the highest levels of leadership, with multiple scandals across political and civil service institutions, from The Home Office's failures throughout the Windrush Scandal to the Department for Work and Pensions’ infinite number of court cases for discrimination against people with disabilities, including their own employees. Often the details of these cases only become public because of a freedom of information request supported by a court hearing.

This means that the existing governance systems are not effective for ensuring integrity of leadership, processes or outcomes. It also highlights how access to accurate information and critical analysis of how such cases impact our human rights are at the heart of so much conflict regarding communication, data sovereignty and accountability.

How can we begin to address these significant societal issues?

DRose branded banner with title '3 Steps to Better Communication'

Step 1 - Listening to Understand

To listen, properly listen, means focusing all of your attention on what you are being told. Not thinking about what you are going to say next or what you are having for dinner. Many of us are preoccupied and rarely give 100% attention to anything we do; the never-ending ‘to-do’ list in our brains can make listening to someone else with our fullest attention rare. This can be particularly challenging for neurodiverse individuals.

A tip is to start with compassion, moving away from ego. Prioritising the other person’s needs over our self-interest. Actively engaging our empathy also actively engages our ears. This action moves us away from performative actions and half-listening habits. By taking a person-centred approach, we can be more objective, less defensive or insecure and more support-focused.

This is particularly true when we are developing our skills as ethical practitioners. Using our empathy and emotional intelligence to better apply equity-based strategies requires that we carefully listen to our teams, stakeholders and customers or community members to enable effective, collaborative and co-designed outcomes.

Step 2 - Speaking to be Understood

We all say we want to be understood; often what we mean is we want people to understand our version of events and agree with us. Modern communication via social media sees various twisting narratives, propaganda, distorted sense of reality, skewed perceptions of success, warped representations of achievements and unhealthy self-image.

Our egos have us narrating alternative versions of our lives, embellished for public consumption. We often avoid sharing vulnerable or negative experiences, moments of poor judgement, self-esteem challenges or perceived failures along our journey for fear of judgement and negative impact on our following, reputation, opportunities or engagement.

As inclusive leaders, we can be our most effective by accepting our own flaws and being comfortable with our true authentic selves as a key to unlocking meaningful communication. The truth of our lived experience is not only valuable but a force for connecting people. Honesty with ourselves enables us to be open with others. Nothing hidden, no ego, no shame, no fear and an improved sense of self help to build confidence, learning and productive relationships.

Accepting ourselves and embracing our individual flaws actually reduces our discomfort and insecurities and becomes a protection from external criticism. It is also an effective part of the Resilience Toolkit which will be discussed in a future article.

Step 3 - Critical thinking

Using critical thinking skills is an essential part of making decisions and ethical practice. Each choice we make, each day of or lives requires critical thinking. The process of gathering, analysing and assessing the available data to identify the most advantageous outcome based on our specific criteria.

In a world of information overload, determining the value, importance and application of data, information and what we know or understand has far-reaching implications. Employing critical thinking to assess how we communicate can be challenging and invasive. But the rewards from building on our ability to use critical thinking to identify integrity in the information we consume, while assessing and regulating our responses, are exponential.

It is essential to look inside. As in step 2, honest self-reflection, becoming comfortable with our selves, learning to be ok with being vulnerable, all help us to apply critical thinking from a more objective and professional perspective. Using a simple tool like the DRose TRAACER Toolkit to assist critical thinking and decision-making processes can support leaders to ensure inclusive, equitable and objective processes have been followed.

Giving Feedback

As leaders, we are often required to give feedback to our teams and other stakeholders. Giving good quality feedback is a valuable communication skill which can be developed for mutual benefit. Before giving feedback, consider these 3 factors -

make sure your feedback is accurate, factual and true; be objective
focus on helping the individual; be specific
deliver feedback using emotional intelligence: be person-focused

Embedding these considerations in your ethical practice approaches will support effective change management and growth.

Speaking truth to empower

What we say has power. The words we use create the landscape in our minds and the minds of those around us. To be an effective communicator, our purpose and intention should be immediately clear to our audience. Letting people really know you, being self-aware and getting comfortable sharing your vulnerability, is strength. Empowering others to fully understand you. Honest communication which lets people know who you really are, what you really want and enables informed decisions to be made. No hiding, embarrassment or ego posturing required.

When our intention is the empowerment of others, we need to be transparent about the power dynamics at play. Centring the other person or people, establishing collaboration and co-design systems which ensure routes to empowerment are sustainable and long-term. Using our platform and privilege to create pathways and space for those whose voices are less heard.

The power of language

There are many theories about human communication; as a practitioner and trainer with a background in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) approaches, I encourage practitioners to get familiar with the concepts of CBT and Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), to support professional development and a deeper understanding of the power of effective communication.

Cognitive Behaviour approaches teach us that ‘what we feel impacts what we think, which in turn determines how we behave’. Our emotional state will inform our thought patterns and we will behave accordingly.

Neuro Linguistic Programming shows us that ‘what we think and speak, we create’. Our thoughts and language set the tone for our experiences and daily life.

Further resources will be shared on these topics via the DRose Academy Resource Hub.

Communicating with integrity

To communicate with integrity is the goal. By establishing clear intentions, we have set the foundation of effective communication. What we intend when we speak sets the vibe. Our words have power, so when our intention is to deceive, the world becomes more complicated.

For effective, ethical and productive communication, we have to speak with integrity, from a place of authenticity, with genuine regard for the person we are speaking with and with positive intentions for the mutually beneficial outcome from our communication.

Speaking Truth Reflection

Ethical communication, silence and responsibility

Speaking truth is often framed as courage. In practice, it is more often a series of small, uncomfortable ethical decisions: what we name, what we soften, what we omit and what we choose not to challenge.

In my experience, silence is rarely neutral. As a parent carer, educator and practitioner working within unequal systems, I have learned that silence can protect comfort, status or relationships but it can also enable harm to continue unchallenged. Speaking truth is not about saying everything, all the time. It is about recognising when silence becomes complicity.

Reflective Practice

Speaking truth is not always loud.
Silence is not always ethical.

Ethics in Action invites you to reflect not only on what you say,
but on what your communication allows to continue.

We have developed a reflective practice tool to support your development and accompany this article. You can download the resource by clicking here >>> Speak Truth Reflective Tool