Parle ou péris | Amanda Fakihi | TEDxHEC Montréal

Amanda Fakihi opens her talk with a striking visual metaphor: a grid of circles where each circle represents one month of a human life, based on Quebec's average life expectancy of 83 years. She uses this to provoke the audience into considering how many of those circles they will spend in silence — never saying what they truly think or feel. She challenges the audience to reflect on the last time they genuinely answered the question 'How are you?' rather than defaulting to an automatic, meaningless exchange.

Fakihi then broadens her definition of 'speaking up' beyond personal storytelling. She argues that speech is a political and civic act: it means taking a stand, refusing to normalize the unacceptable, denouncing injustice, and preventing the Overton window — the range of politically acceptable ideas — from shifting through collective silence. She also acknowledges that speaking up includes more mundane but still meaningful acts, like contradicting someone at dinner or correcting a conspiracy theorist uncle with reasoned arguments rather than ridicule.

She introduces the concept of the 'spotlight effect' — a psychological bias where people overestimate how much others are observing and judging them. She argues this illusion causes people to withhold ideas and remain silent in meetings, even when they have something valuable to contribute. In reality, most people are preoccupied with their own concerns.

Fakihi then explores how the voice itself functions as a tool of social judgment. Citing studies in political psychology, she explains that deeper voices are culturally associated with leadership, authority, and competence, while higher-pitched voices are not. She uses Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the fraudulent biotech company Theranos, and Margaret Thatcher, who hired a vocal coach to lower her voice, as examples of women who deliberately manipulated their vocal timbre to gain credibility in male-dominated spaces. She argues this bias is dangerous because it conflates form with substance.

This leads her to the Dunning-Kruger effect — a cognitive bias where less competent people overestimate their abilities while more competent people underestimate theirs. Together, these biases explain why public and professional spaces are often dominated not by the most qualified, but by those most skilled at self-promotion and persuasion.

To counter this, Fakihi introduces the Aristotelian rhetorical triangle as a practical tool. Ethos refers to credibility — what makes an audience trust you before and during a speech. Pathos is the emotional dimension — knowing your audience and activating specific emotions to move them to action. Logos is the rational dimension — constructing logical, evidence-based arguments. She emphasizes that the key is dosage: without ethos, you arouse suspicion; too much pathos without logos risks manipulation; too much logos without pathos produces cold, disengaging speech.

The talk closes by returning to the circle metaphor. Fakihi asks the audience to imagine having only 100 circles left — about 8 years — and whether they would finally dare to speak. She frames silence not as comfort but as a renunciation of existence, concluding with the call: 'Speak not to crush, but to avoid perishing.'