EP 45: How Your Voice Influences Your emotions

Your self-talk and your spoken voice have an effect on how you feel, in episode 45 Sahar Paz speaks with Ashley Sumner, the founder of Quilt, an app that believes conversation is self-care. Season 7 continues with the theme of breaking the status quo and prioritizing the underutilized skills of the past like emotional intelligence and using your voice. The words of wisdom from this episode include: 

Identify in a way you choose to. When you use your voice in a  deeply authentic way and it turns into a cover piece on the New York Times.  

Overnight success versus feeling successful. 

Learn to talk to yourself, about yourself.  

Personal branding and startup success. 

Giving your voice more agency. 

About Sahar Paz:  

Sahar didn't grow up playing house, she played office. At the age of 13, she launched a baby and pet sitting company generating more cash flow than all the lemonade stands in the neighborhood! A natural leader with an active left-and-right brain, Sahar was 25 years old in New York City with a lucrative career in Finance and bored out of her mind. Inspired to share what she learned in the business, she pivoted and dedicated herself to feeding the entrepreneurial voice of teenagers by founding Free Your Star Foundation. The nonprofit partnered with low-income high schools in Brooklyn with credit-earning programs written by Sahar herself. Championing the voice of others to help them understand their emotional intelligence and their personal drivers has always been Sahar’s mission. Her book, Find Your Voice part-memoir, part cognitive behavior guide, epitomizes that pursuit. Published in 2014, her message gained attention within forward-thinking organizations such as HBO, Facebook, Whole Foods, and the Texas Medical Center, where Sahar was invited to deliver keynote presentations. After five years on the road, Sahar became the CEO of Own Your Voice Strategy Firm, a personal branding agency that focuses on placing professionals on stage to speak. Today, she resides in Houston and has given up pet sitting to play with her dog Rico instead.  You can find Sahar on LinkedIn and Instagram @SaharPaz. 

About Ashley Sumner: 

Ashley Sumner is the CEO & Founder of Quilt. Quilt is the supportive audio social app for real-time conversations, built to re-humanize social media with the goal of helping people feel better on a daily basis. Ashley’s startup career started 12 years ago in NYC at a matchmaking company. With an intuitive ability to bring people together, she turned her passion into a career as a community developer for brands such as NeueHouse, Wanderlust, and Breakout ultimately leading to the creation of Quilt, which started as a platform inspiring people to open their homes for intimate conversations and shared experiences and has evolved into this new type of social network, in response to 2020. She now lives in Los Angeles, like every other New Yorker.