The Right Distance: How Your Voice Shapes the Space Between You and the Results You Deserve

Why you're stuck despite your effort, and how to get heard and rewarded. Best suited for: high achievers, strugglers, and anyone tired of being unseen.

Have you ever had the feeling that, despite your hard work, you aren’t getting the results you want? It often begins with a mounting frustration, revealing a growing gap between who you are and who, somehow, you’ve become as life unfolded.

The misalignment creeps up in a variety of flavors: a difficult boss, lack of acknowledgement, scarce reciprocity in relationships, little drive in teams, departments, or entire organizations you lead with all your might. The frustration bites executives, managers, entrepreneurs, team members, and the like, sparing no one.

You’d think that at some level, power, money, and prestige should bring extra control, freedom, and satisfaction. But that’s not what I’ve witnessed working in human development, coaching, facilitating, consulting, teaching, and writing stories that help people find their voice and use it.

In all these instances, that very voice struggles to find space or resonance. What used to work no longer does. So what’s going on, and how do you fix it?

My journey, like anyone else’s, has provided moments of alignment and misalignment, a perfectly normal rhythm requiring awareness and adaptation to life's ebbs and flows.

For most of my adult life, driven by naïveté and a lack of experience, I genuinely thought that working diligently, pushing myself above and beyond, showing kindness and honesty to those I met on my path, was going to be enough to be acknowledged, appreciated, and properly rewarded. These values have been and still are the compass of my life.

In many ways, my strategy worked. I had colleagues who valued me, bosses who supported my growth, romantic relationships where love flowed both ways, and friends I could call brothers and sisters. But if I’m honest, even then, I often wondered why I had to push so hard to get what I had. The price kept rising, and I kept slowly drifting away.

The one thing that drove me bonkers was watching others race ahead at light speed, almost effortlessly — or at least that’s how it looked to me — while I was doing all the right things and moving at a glacial pace.

I couldn’t understand why people with modest talent and little effort could forge ahead full force. I have never wanted to be like them, but at some point, you begin questioning your approach.

It’s never a great thing to compare ourselves to others, but I couldn’t help wondering: did I have to be smarter, braver, meaner? Did I need to make wiser choices, pick better people, gain more knowledge, expand my skills? Change my mindset? What was it?

I even began to believe, in an effort to console myself, that ‘nice people’ — whatever that means — may not always get what they want, but at least they’re not morally bankrupt. Your conscience stays clean, and that counts for something. So I pressed on, head high, stubborn as Don Quixote.

Over time, and much to my surprise, I noticed I wasn’t the only one experiencing compromises that slowly become uncomfortable yoga positions you can’t hold much longer. Stripped of all the performance and polish, we’re conflicted creatures whose lives are far from perfect.

Throughout my career, I have seen so many wonderful professionals making or saving loads of money for their companies, hard-working individuals who gave everything they had, yet often found themselves overlooked and under-recognized.

If you’re the type of person who takes pride in what you do and enjoys being helpful, chances are that at some point you’ve struggled to know where your responsibilities end and someone else’s begin.

Results don’t come from constant overextension, and relationships don’t require giving until you’re empty. When people are involved, success is a shared responsibility, whether you are leading teams, organizations, or families.

There are times when your voice needs to be loud, and others when silence lets others step up. For the hard-working perfectionist, a no can feel like a wall, but sometimes, it’s the door.

Fear is the greatest enemy of your voice. It’s a chameleon that you can barely distinguish from its surroundings. What if they don’t like me? What if I lose my job? What if I end up alone? Fear always points to scarcity, deprivation, and loss.

We silence ourselves to avoid repercussions, to protect what we have. Only you can decide when to raise and hold your voice. But if fear speaks louder than you do, your values, your dignity, and your pride will slowly erode until your life feels unrecognizable.

Success isn’t just the result of hard work. You can be brilliant at what you do, but if your voice isn’t heard, nothing moves. The moment you understand how communication shapes relationships and how boundaries sustain them, everything changes.

Why Your Voice Matter

The voice is one of the most precious things we possess, a way of revealing the entire inner world no one else can see. It can move people, calm them, wake them, stir change or offer refuge.

The voice is too important to leave unheard. That’s why in Breakfast with Stephen, I give you practical strategies and timeless insights from the greatest minds who have ever lived, so you can free your voice, be authentically yourself, and communicate clearly at home, at work, and in the world.

You'll learn specific techniques for setting boundaries without burning bridges, scripts for difficult conversations that preserve relationships, and frameworks for knowing when to speak up and when strategic silence serves you better.

This space is for the CEO rallying a company into its next chapter, the manager keeping a team grounded, the entrepreneur scaling complexity, and the professional who wants greater satisfaction at work. And because the voice lives in every corner of life, it is also for anyone who has ever felt overlooked in a relationship, silenced in a family, or unseen in the world.

Some articles will be sharp and practical, tools you can use right away. Others will be reflective, inviting you to pause and see your life through a different lens. All of it is meant to help you reclaim your voice in a way that feels real, grounded, and uniquely your own.

In over two decades of working with leaders and organizations around the world, I’ve seen again and again how the voice makes or breaks success.

With your voice, you can do extraordinary things: communicate strategies, motivate teams, influence people, negotiate deals, resolve conflicts, and boost purpose.

At the center of mastering your voice is the ability to manage relationships through effective communication. I simply call this concept 'the right distance,' the physical, psychological, and emotional space between two people that allows both parties to grow.

Think of it like this: too close and you suffocate the relationship with neediness or control; too far and you create disconnection and missed opportunities. The right distance means knowing exactly how much space to give and take so both people can thrive.

The right distance is a dynamic process we live through multiple times a day in our personal and professional lives, from the person who cuts you off in the line to an overbearing client difficult to manage.

Developing relationships through your voice takes time and daily effort. It’s an ongoing process that becomes easier once you grasp this simple idea. With practice, you’ll know when to speak, when to hold back, and how to use your voice so that it strengthens rather than strains every relationship you’re in.

There are gentle voices that barely carry, and ugly ones that echo far.

PAUSE. LEARN. MOVE ON.

Most relationship struggles begin with misaligned expectations and unspoken needs. We assume too much, speak too little, and wonder why things feel off. When our voice stays hidden or hits the wrong note, the space between us hardens into distance, and the drift begins.

Psychologists call self-authorship the shift from being shaped by our surroundings to shaping them through our choices. Robert Kegan saw it as a milestone in adult development, the point when you stop living by default and start speaking from conviction.

We begin to recognize when our words are shaped more by fear of loss than by clarity of intent. We catch ourselves agreeing just to keep the peace and instead learn to name what matters without apology. We stop assuming that giving more will guarantee love, recognition, or results, and begin holding others accountable for their share.

Little by little, our voice becomes not a reaction to the pressures around us but the anchor that sets the terms of how we move through them, and from that anchor, boundaries reveal their real purpose in regulating distance, the rhythm that lets both sides breathe. When the distance is right, trust becomes possible, and with trust comes influence.

You can reach Stephen at stephen@alygn.company