83. What does a voice coach do?

What on earth do voice coaches like myself actually do?! This episode takes you through the main ways I help people and the key concepts I cover in my sessions and courses.

Transcript

Hello, hello. Welcome to Episode 83 of That Voice Podcast, "What does a voice coach do?" What the hell do I do?

I am revealing it all today. If you're new to the podcast, a big welcome. Great to have you here. If you're a regular listener back for more, then I'm sure you have a bit of an idea of what it is I do. It is still a question I get quite a lot, which is why on my business cards, I say voice coach, and then in brackets, it says, "No, it's not singing." Voice and public speaking coach is probably a little bit more accurate. So what do I do? I'll start off by sharing the kinds of formats I work with and the kind of people I work with. So a big part of my business is corporate workshops and I do about one of these a month. And so I have a really wide range of companies that I work with. I've worked with architects who need to pitch confidently to clients, retail brands who are speaking to customers, not for profits who need to advocate for their cause. So many different reasons. And of course, media training is a big part of what I do as well. I've got experience on both sides of the microphone. I've been a TV journalist and a radio journalist, and then also a spokesperson for a company. And so I work with lots of different companies who need to train their spokespeople up to be in front of the media. So aside from my workshops, I work with people one-on-one and I work with men and women with a variety of different jobs and different reasons that they come and see me. And we could be working on anything from preparing for a job interview, preparing for a media interview, preparing for a conference presentation, wanting to have more influence in the team meeting, whether that be in-person or on Zoom.

I work with people who are facilitators and they want to be able to confidently speak in front of their workshop participants and especially professionals who want to take their career to the next level. They realize that to do that, you need to be a confident speaker. There's no two ways about it. And of course, I work with lots of journalists and journalism students and broadcasters to help them get that broadcast voice. So outside the one-on-ones, I do have a membership-- members only come on board. It's a great membership, but what you'll hear me talking about a lot lately is My Six Week Voice Makeover, which is my signature six-week group coaching course online. And that's starting again on the 5th of July. And it is the last time this year I'm running the course. I wanted to do do it again, but I've had to look at my calendar and there isn't literally no block of six weeks that I can do it in because I'm so heavily booked with other things.

So this next cohort of my six week voice make-over is the last chance this year to get on board. And I designed this course to cover the core skills that you need to speak with confidence in any scenario, including some of those ones I mentioned earlier. Whether you're on the radio on a podcast, reading the news, speaking to the media, wanting to have more influence with your team. You have a conference presentation. Sorry, I should put my phone on silent. My goodness. That's not very good. All of these different scenarios, these core skills apply. And that's what is in My Six Week Voice Makeover. It really is those fundamental building blocks. And I've broken it down into the six different weeks, the six different skills that layer up. So you have got them there. It's your arsenal for any situation you find yourself in. What are these skills?

So we start off by speaking about mindset. We dig down, what are these beliefs that you have around public speaking? What is the story you tell yourself, where do these thoughts come from? What was your first experience with public speaking? Why do you feel that way? Why do you have fear of judgment that people pleasing, the perfectionist, all of these different critics that come up? And we work to reframe the story, change the story, change that mindset. Once you can do that, everything else flows a lot more easily, and it is just like physical fitness. You know, you have your on days and your off days, it's something that you have to keep at constantly in order to stay fit. And so in the course, I give lots of strategies for what you can do to keep your mental fitness regime up and strong, especially in relation to speaking.

And then from mindset, we move into our bodies. So many of the symptoms that we feel when we're scared of public speaking, are physical. Butterflies in the tummy, the pounding heart, the face flushing, red, the hands being sweaty, the leg shaking, all of these are physical things that are happening to us. And so it's important that you drop into your body and know how to move that energy through you. And a big part of doing that is through breathing. So week three is all about breathing. Oxygen fuels our voice. So we don't want to be speaking on almost empty. How do you breathe? Well, it might seem like a simple question, but you probably not thought too much about it. We feel like breathing is something that's natural, but it's actually habitual. Breathing is habitual, not natural. It's a habit that we formed and many of us have formed bad habits around breathing.

So we work on how can you get that breath low and deep into the belly, activating the diaphragm, the powerhouse of our voice. And then how do we let that air be free while we're speaking? When we get nervous or frustrated, we'll tense up. The chest, tenses the throat tenses, the midsection tenses. And it's like, we're squeezing a garden hose really tight. And that water, which is like our air, it's just not going to be able to get out. And if the air can't get out, we are not going to be able to get that beautiful tone. We're not going to be able to speak with freedom and also gather our thoughts, right? If we're not breathing in and out in a regulated way, we'll start oxygen depriving our brain. And it can be one of the main reasons that we have these freakouts. So breathing is super important.

And then after we've got the breath right, we move on to our vocal cord vibrations, Google vocal chords, while singing. It's pretty disgusting, but have you seen the way your vocal chords work? They're like two little chicken wings and they hit together with the air going through. And we need to make sure that those vocal chords do contact nice and strong so we have a clear sound and we let the air flow out. Then as it flows out, it vibrates in different parts of our body. We tap into where is it vibrating? Is it up in the head? Is it sitting in our nose? Are we pushing it back to the back of our throat? Because we want to sound more important. And so it's important. We bring these vibrations down and out. The only thing in your life you want to be down and out or your vocal vibrations, bringing them into the walls of the chest, speaking from the heart, literally. That's where we can have so much of our resonance and so much of our vocal power, really important that we can access this part of our voice. Then I haven't even made words yet. And this is all different techniques. Sorry. I keep hitting my microphone. I'm gesturing too much today.

Once we have sound, we need to turn that into speech. And for our speech to be clear, we need to exercise our organs of speech. We need to exercise our jaw, our lips, our tongue, our soft palate. All of these things that you've probably not thought too much about. If you want to check out your soft palate, just look in the mirror, open your mouth. And it's that little dangly thing at the back of your throat. That's not the tonsils that gets mixed up sometimes. Not the tonsils. And so by exercising, all of those things you might've heard in previous episodes, I talk about the E or ah, and the lots of these exercises and warmups truly do help. You sound much more ready to go. When you start speaking again, it's like sport. If you go hard without a warmup or without exercising and training in the background, you're likely to do yourself an injury. And this is what happens with our voice after years and years of bad technique, you can hear how voices can start going on people. And that's not just when they're sick. So you want to have a strong, healthy voice into your later years. You know, as your body starts breaking down, your voice becomes more and more important. So you want to look after it. And then of course, if you're not warming up or exercising, then you're not going to perform very well. So if you start speaking, whether it's a podcast or a speech or a video, and you're like, "Oh my gosh, I can not get my mouth around these words!", then you probably just need to warm up.

And then finally in our course, week six is all about expression. And this is where I help people develop the range in their voice. We get out of monotone town. We go up, we go down, we go loud. We go soft. We speak quite quickly when we want to, and we can slow it down when needed. So it's about developing this range and the range is so useful for tapping right into the meaning of what we're saying. We don't do it for fun. We tap into the meaning of what we're saying. That's what we cover in week six of the course. So that's a high level overview of what's in My Six Week Voice Makeover, but it's a really great way to explain what I do as a voice coach, because these fundamental concepts that are in the course are the same things that I weave into my corporate workshops, into working with my one-on-one clients throughout all of the activities we have in the membership.

Of course, there are different fancy things we do for different scenarios, but at its core, these six steps: mindset, body breathing, buzz--that resonance, clarity of speech and expression. They are there every single time. And so I am so close to launching My Six Week Voice Makeover and depending on when you're listening to this, I may have already launched it. So check my social media to see if that's the case.

I really appreciate you listening to the podcast. So if you are a listener of the podcast, please send me a message. Say, you want to do the course and I will swing you a little bit of a special deal. So reach out to me on email sally@sallyprosser.com.au or on Instagram. Let me know that you are interested in doing the course and you listened to the podcast and I'll see what I can do. But I'd really encourage every single one of you to come on board with me to do My Six Week Voice Makeover, there's a reason that you listened to this podcast. And if you've done the course before, then it's worth doing updated because this is cohort five. I've improved things each time that we've done it. And if you're in the membership, you can join us for free. So that's another good thing to keep in mind. And remember, this is the last time this year I'm running this course. I don't know if I'm going to even do it next year. I know I'm biased because I am a voice coach, but I honestly believe no matter who you are or what you do, these skills are going to help you. So head to the link in the show notes, My Six Week Voice Makeover and I will see you there.