And why children never do…
There tend to be four main drivers of occupational voice loss; they aren’t exclusive but they are the most common reasons in my profession. They are also almost non-existent in healthy children which is far from a coincidence as to why children rarely misplace their voice.
Like children, speaking should not be effortful, but fluid. Not painful, but joyful.
The Issue is Not Occupational
Clients ranging from business analysts, meditation teachers, to QA techs have come to me for this issue that debilitates their ability to present, guide, or coach. Some occupations demand them to talk all day, while others ask for merely an hour, but the pain, or tightness, arises nonetheless. …
Getting a job in the era of Covid and beyond
My partner, Emma, endured six months of unemployment. Throughout this time I saw her evolve due to the circumstances laid at her feet; and, indeed, in hindsight, this growth was due to three main rules she adapted to get herself to the finish line. I hope that for anyone going through the same ordeal this may provide some illumination and kindred feeling.
There is no instant panacea to the suffering to be found here. Instead, I offer you a roadmap of how to endure, how to get to the finish line, and perhaps to get you a nose ahead.
To begin, this wretched period of your life can be one of growth and, perhaps, one of necessity. …
Insight into the anatomy of the “you” in your voice
Where is the “you” in your voice? “Speech”, to the average person, is a terribly simple phenomenon that is largely an afterthought but underneath its simplicity lies a myriad of complex processes that each feeds into the way you speak and how you are heard.
How you are heard influences your career trajectory, has been found to influence sexual attractiveness, and creates all kinds of opportunities if speaking is treated with skill and finesse.
Becoming a great speaker demands that you understand how your anatomy works, and how it affects the “you” in your voice; because the powerhouse behind it all is largely…
The hidden statistics behind employment in the arts
With any kind of investment vehicle a legal caveat is required to be placed alongside promotional activities and typically runs like this:
Invest in Bitcoin at zero commission and start trading like the professionals. *Warning capital is at risk and you may get back less than you invested.
The legality behind this is to make sure individual investors, like you and I, take some time to think things through, understand the risk, rather than be blinded by the lust for wealth that the advertisement promotes.
Similarly, studying a degree such as a Masters in Performance (Acting) should also contain the…
The benefits of boxing
If you’ve ever thought that therapy may be worthwhile, but are trepidatious to put a foot through the door, boxing, although unconventional, can be an alternate means of self-discovery through an ironically gentler nudge.
I began boxing because I had a deeply ingrained habit to put other people’s needs above my own, a pattern I developed to survive an emotionally void and unstable support system in my childhood. The repression of feelings, whether or not they are anger or rage, have consequences down the line, and these patterns encroach upon every angle of your life.
Gabor Mate’s book “When The Body Says No” has countless stories of patients that developed autoimmune diseases from the fact that they couldn’t say “no”, due to the repression of stress. …
Critical skills all leaders need to practice
Habit 1: Monotone.
The physiological effects upon a listener and the speaker.
Habit 2: Underpowering.
How your body may be working to keep you alive but at the expense of your voice.
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” J. P. Sartre
We are free because we have the capacity to become angels of our better nature; we are condemned because we are born into contexts not of our choosing and hence everywhere curtailed by limits.
Your voice and the muscular physiology that fuel it have been moulded with precision to account for the language you were taught, and how you should speak it, such as an accent. Bi-lingual children can imitate their primary caregiver’s accent precisely but once passed that developmental “critical-window”, up to the age of six, the ability to imitate, and learn a new language “is steadily comprised from then until shortly after puberty, and is rare thereafter” (Pinker, S, 1994). Your first language’s muscle memory interferes with the language you are trying to learn and hence the rise of the dreaded “foreign-accent”. …
Three rules to attain an influential voice
You may have heard through the grapevine that human communication can be broken down into three proportions:
55% of communication is body language, 38% is the tone of voice, and 7% is the actual words spoken.
Although, these proportions tend to change over the years because the jury is still out on this one; it is too simplistic to explain such a complex matrix but it did provide a nice framework for life coaches everywhere.
Indeed, so as not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, body language is vital due to the effects it has on the unconscious parts of our perception and body! For example, mirror neurons fire when we observe subtle cues in another’s body language which influences us to replicate the same movement in our own body. It happens spontaneously, and albeit unconsciously, and may have been a survival mechanism to prime the body for danger before we are aware of a threat - a useful trait given that social cohesion was so pivotal for our survival. …
How and why the voice attracts
Sexual attraction can begin at the outset of hearing another’s voice.
The extra-linguistic cues, hidden within our voice, are programmed to influence certain bodily responses of another and have been crystallized as such by a number of phylogenetic traits passed down from reptiles to mammals to primates to us.
How female fallow deer choose their mates
Male vocalisations are often subject to sexual selection and can be used to assess the quality and condition of the caller in various vertebrates… In most vertebrates, high quality males have larger body sizes that determine higher social status and in turn higher reproductive success… Previous research has emphasised the importance of vocal tract resonances or formant frequencies of calls as cues to body size in mammals. (Vannoni, E., McElligott, G, A., …
And what you can learn from them to improve your voice
Somewhere in the Australian Outback, a lizard is scurrying for its life…but for a lizard to breathe, it must be stationary.
Why is this so for our lizard? The reason is that the intercostal and thoracic muscles that are responsible for the dilation of its lungs are also required for its movement, the bending of the body from side to side, and, unfortunately for our lizard, breathing and moving are mutually exclusive!
Crocodiles, however, can move, swim, and breathe all at the same time — and so can humans. The ability for humans to run and speak with each other was vital for sustaining life not to mention the necessity of speech underlying play for healthy upbringing, ‘like other animals, we play at those things that are important to our survival, and social play promotes social cohesion’ (Heinrich, 2008). Stopping to catch a breath to say a word every second or so would not be practical but because of our evolutionary ties to lizards, this may shine some light into why we find it difficult to speak when nervous. …
How Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s legacy lives on
Iwas part of a rag-tag crew assembled by Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, to free a man, a friend, called David McCallum III from 29 years of wrongful imprisonment.
My beginnings with Rubin, however, were a little stranger than fiction. It began with a letter I wrote, which traveled from Melbourne, Australia, to Toronto, where Rubin was currently residing.
Beating all odds, it founds its destination — especially when considering that a 21-year-old man had just sent his first international handwritten letter — using stamps no less!
Rubin, David, and a remarkable fellow called Ken were each to become mentors to me in their own way, at a time I needed them most. Little did I know what journey this letter would take me on, and how it would open my eyes to political and racial injustices universally. …
