Pol Obradó: Find Your Voice
Pol Obradó, a finalist in the 2025 4Voices Public Speaking Competition for Teenagers, spoke at the Toastmasters Fall Summit in Barcelona on 23 November 2025.
At 4Voices, our mission is simple: to ensure young people are truly heard.
Teenagers carry ideas, concerns and hopes that can shape the world we are building for them.
But only if we listen.
One of our outstanding finalists from the 4Voices Public Speaking Competition earlier this year – 17-year-old Pol Obradó – from Escoles Garbí Pere Vergés in Badalona, took to the stage with our co-founder, Carrie Frais, at this year’s Toastmasters Summit in Barcelona.
And the audience listened.
Here is the transcript of Pol’s powerful speech ‘Find Your Voice’, a reminder of the impact young voices can make right now.
You can also watch Pol’s speech on our YouTube channel here.
Us, teenagers, are often told to “find our voice”, but no one really explains what that means. Does it mean our literal voice or is it about finding and transmitting our message?
I feel like what it means is: enjoy your voice, use it, play with it, discover it, experiment with it, embarrass yourself, express yourself. And nowadays we’ve got so many ways to express ourselves: social media, music, podcasts, art… or the most powerful one, saying something face to face (or millions of faces), but also the scariest one.
Whatever way we choose it doesn’t matter. What matters is speaking up. But it is easier said than done.
It doesn’t always feel safe to say what you really feel. You might be judged, misunderstood, or cancelled. Is it really worth speaking honestly even if people won’t like us? To speak up we must get out of our comfort zone, it takes COURAGE.
So, in a world where there’s already so many people speaking up, why should, us teenagers, still speak up?
I personally think there are three stages to WHY we should do just that.
Us speaking up starts with us
Before we can share ideas, we must know what our ideas are and where our ideals and values come from.
That means asking ourselves:
- What do I believe in?
- What do I stand for?
- What do I want to bring to the world?
This demands moments of deep SELF-REFLECTION, something most young people don’t often take time to do. And these moments help us discover ourselves, learn things we didn’t know about ourselves, explore our interior world. It helps us grow to be virtuous and committed.
Speaking up helped me find myself.
For my last year of high school I went to study abroad to Ireland. During the first semester I had a hard time with the family and to escape it all I would go on my phone for whole afternoons. I realised the situation and decided that I wanted to change my relationship with my phone. I passed from spending over five hours a day and my phone controlling me and what I did, to spending under hour and half, and being me the one controlling the situation. I wouldn’t check constantly my phone or spend hours glued to it. I had FREED myself.
Then, around a year after the change, during my first year of Bachillerato back in Spain, the school offered us the opportunity of making a little video about something that we cared about and enter this speech competition, 4Voices. It was just a video no longer than one minute so I said to myself, why not, it cannot be that hard and maybe we might even achieve something. But I still had to choose a theme, what would I talk about?
Here is when my experience and change came in handy. I felt like that change did me good and wanted to help light that spark in other people and encourage them to make the same change. And it was reflecting on what I wanted to say I realised how big the change had been, how my day to day changed, my relationships and, especially, my UNDERSTANDING of myself.
All these reflections and the NEED to communicate them made me AWARE of what was important for me, my values. I realiSed how important it was for me to better myself, how important it was to get to know myself and trying to discover new aspects of myself that I had been avoiding.
I discovered the value of creating real relationships with other people.
Us speaking up continues with others
It is not just I emit. You receive. It’s about creating a bond. Bonds between speaker and listener, bonds with other speakers. We get to meet lots of new people, people with a similar message and values as ours or people with completely different ones. We also learn to respect others despite their religion, skin colour or ideals, we learn to LISTEN. It gives us ways to CONNECT to people, to create relationships, the most important tool in our world today.
4Voices brings this opportunity to the table. Through their bootcamp and the sessions to work on our speeches we got to know all the other contestants, and for all those sessions we forgot that we were competing against each other, we learned from one another, we listened to other’s stories, we shared our thought, our values, our interests. Speaking up gives us the change to bond and connect with other people.
But not only can we connect with people, but we can also HELP them.
When we speak, we have the power of helping others. We don’t have to move masses of people. If what we say inspires, moves, or makes even one person reflect, we’ve already made an impact. Despite being young, our voice might be the spark that helps someone else find theirs.
Thanks to my speech, my aunt came to me and expressed how she felt about her relationship with her phone, how my speech had made her realise the toxic relationship she had developed around her phone. After her also came my parents and fellow students of mine, people who my speech had helped light their spark to initiate the change. I was able to connect with them, deepen my relationships and HELP them.
However, none of it would have been possible if they didn’t take time to listen to me.
Us speaking up finishes with you listening
Think of the last time you talked to your son, daughter, niece, nephew, student, grandchildren, cousin… a teenager close to you. What did you talk about? Did you ask them about what they felt or what they thought about the fact that housing prices had increased so much? Or did you just ask them how school and the grades were going?
Don’t take for GRANTED that we don’t have something to say about the real world. Don’t undermine our message, listen to what we’ve got to say. We are the ones to take over this world when there you won’t be around anymore.
And every time you give us that opportunity to speak up and listen to us, you give us the chance to self-reflect, to improve ourselves. You give us the chance to create bonds, with our listener. You give YOURSELVES the opportunity to bond with your fellow teenagers.
So next time you see your son, daughter, niece, nephew, grandson, cousin… give them a chance to speak up and listen to them. Propose a topic you’ve never talked with them about, or EVEN BETTER, ask them to tell you about what is important to them.
Give us a chance to grow and understand ourselves.
Give us a chance to connect and help other people.
Give us a chance to change our worlds.
