When I first started my business, I had no idea the number of benefits that would result just by finding your ‘real’ voice. In fact, I never tire of hearing each and every new experience my clients tell me about.
How can this type of training improve your life? For one very basic and fundamental reason: if you want to discover your ‘real’ voice – which is the one you would power by means of your chest cavity instead of your throat – you must learn to breathe with the support of your diaphragm. It is this breathing that makes all the difference.
Breathing with the support of your diaphragm, something 99% of the population is not doing, eliminates the nasty toxins in your blood which helps eliminate stress, placing the body in a more relaxed state. This is why yoga and meditation are so popular today. People need to decrease their level of stress in order to function.
Shallow or lazy breathing, on the other hand, has the reverse effect. It increases your stress because you are using only the upper part of your chest cavity to breathe which means you are not eliminating the toxins in your blood. If I ask were to ask you to take a deep breath, the chances are likely that you would suck in your mid-torso region, lift up your shoulders, and throw out your chest. That physical process, alone, tends to increase our stress because we have a tendency to tighten the throat, neck muscles, and jaw in trying to accomplish the task. This is one of the reasons so many women find they have shoulders that ache or tension in their neck and jaw areas by the end of the day. Blame it on shallow breathing.
Those who support their breath properly are able to alleviate their stress easier which can result in better sleep, lower blood pressure, fewer physical ailments, a longer life span and a more relaxed state even when under pressure. And, there is no doubt that diaphragmatic breathing is the best means of controlling your nervousness in any form of public speaking.
While most voice coaches work on the voice you already have, there are a few of us who will teach you how to find the voice you don’t know you have. This is a sound that begins in your chest cavity and is only possible to achieve if you are breathing with support. In that sense, your chest – the largest of your 5 resonators – becomes your primary sounding board.
Imagine discovering your ‘real’ voice and adding 4-1/2 years to your life to boot! It is truly amazing what voice training can do for you, both professionally and personally.
Lucinablue,
(I just posted an article that I wrote several months ago, ‘Do Others Ask You to Tone it Down or to Speak More Softly?’)
From what you have written, I think that you probably speak with more volume when you are surrounded by those with whom you are comfortable at work — coworkers for example. When you are on the phone, you pull back your volume.
If you are being told, however, that you sound young, then I am confident you are pushing your voice from your throat. Voices that are being powered by the chest cavity never sound too young. They sound mature. Not too old; not too young.
I am concerned about the medications you take and what they are doing to you. There is no doubt that my training can help because it will regulate your volume and take the pressure off your throat and vocal folds (cords); however, you will need to breathe with the support of your diaphragm to do this. (You will discover that supported breathing will help your asthma.) You may also find that the breathing helps your fibromyalgia which in turn might decrease some of your medication.
Nancy
I’m looking all over the place for help with my voice. I have some big medical challenges, and I get constant conflicting feedback about my voice. I haven’t bought your program yet, because I’m not sure it will help.
Here’s the issue: My co-workers find that I speak too loudly; my clients find that my voice is rather soft and soothing, and sounds young. These are pieces of feedback given about the same words spoken at the same time. The clients are hearing me on the phone, and the co-workers in person. My friends find my voice neither loud nor soft. I am being driven mad by the inconsistency. I don’t know what to try to improve, and I don’t know what I can expect or even hope to change that might please the most people.
I am a telephone counselor by profession, and I have been doing this work for 35 years. I also do public speaking about counseling work with suicidal, depressed and anxious people. I am neither nervous about speaking nor uncomfortable with it.
Over the past five years, I have developed a set of symptoms that finally have been diagnosed as fibromyalgia. This affects my voice partly because there is pain in the tissues between my ribs, and I can’t expand my chest as well as I used to do; partly because I take not one, but five medications that are drying to the mouth and throat and make my voice positively creaky. I try to drink lots of fluids and I use Biotene to moisten my mouth and throat, with mixed results. I also have asthma, at varying levels of control at various times.
You speak much more about voices that are too soft than voices that are too loud, and I don’t see anything about voices that are too loud, too soft, and just right all at the same time in the same place. Is your program something that’s likely to help? In fact, does anybody who writes on this blog have ANY suggestions? I’m open to hearing them…