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How to Speak Your Mind: Own Your Voice to Shape the World book cover
New book

How to Speak Your Mind: Own Your Voice to Shape the World

Elaine Lin Hering headshotElaine Lin HeringFormer Faculty, Harvard Law School
Release dateDecember 29, 2026
PublisherPenguin Life
About the book

Own Your Voice to Shape the World

A paradigm-shifting book looking at the pervasive influence of silence and how we can begin to dismantle it in order to find our voices at home and at work

Having a seat at the table doesn’t mean that your voice is actually welcome. Knowing something is wrong doesn't mean it's easy to speak up. In fact, there are incentives for many of us to stay silent. Why speak up if you know that it won’t be received well, and in fact, often makes things worse?

In How to Speak Your Mind, Hering explores how we’ve learned to be silent, how we’ve benefited from silence, how we’ve silenced other people, and how we might choose another way. She teaches how to recognize and unlearn unconscious patterns so we can make more intentional choices about how we want to show up at home and at work. Only by unlearning silence can we more fully unleash talent, speak our minds, and be more complete versions of ourselves… and help other people do the same.

With compassion, clarity, and understanding, Hering guides readers through real-life examples and offers a concrete road map for doing this vital and challenging work.

Meet Elaine

About Elaine Lin Hering

Elaine Lin Hering works with leaders on one of the most persistent and costly problems in business: why people avoid saying what needs to be said. She helps organizations understand how silence, whether driven by fear, power dynamics, culture or habit, undermines innovation, slows decision-making and keeps teams from performing at their best.

Her central insight is direct: most organizations do not have a talent problem, they have a silence problem. Leaders often tell people to speak up, yet fail to address the real and perceived costs of doing so. "The common advice to just speak up falls flat if we fail to recognize the silence we've learned," she argues. Employees stay quiet when they worry they will be dismissed, penalized, or labeled difficult, and critical information goes unsaid.

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