E006 - How your voice can bring you confidence and joy

Hi loves,

This blog was shot in a bungalow in Thailand, where I'm running workshops and private sessions and sharing music over two weeks.

 Watch the video or continue reading below!

Today we're going to be investigating some mindset shifts around our voices that are worth exploring.

The first one goes like this:

"I can heal my social engagement system, I can feel safe in front of and around a lot of people."

So here's the thing: we have this amazing thing called our ventral vagal nervous system, said to be one of the most developed parts of our nervous system. Among other things, it regulates our relationships with other people and our feelings of safety around other humans. It's an amazing set of nerves that descends out of the brain, visits our voice-box, has plenty of contact with our heart and then even more with our gut, tummy, and abdomen.

So it's plays a really important role in regulating how we feel at any given moment—and specifically for those of us who want to sing or dance or speak in front of a lot of people or in social environments.

In such situations we may start to feel a sense of locking up in the throat, potentially spreading into the chest and delivering a whole whirlwind to the tummy too.

The way out of this feeling is to begin to free the voice and tone and soothe the ventral vagal nervous system—the social engagement nervous system.  By bringing it back into health when we're around other humans, we can feel safe and comfortable and not under threat.

Really we just sit in our skin.

Another upside of this is being able to pitch up on the internet and just be who you are. And it's obviously really important at work and in relationships and friendships, to be confident and comfortable in your own skin.

The second mindset shift, which is really allied to the first, is a beautiful affirmation:

"My voice brings me confidence and joy."

For those who have an ambivalent relationship with their voices, who are not quire sure—love it sometimes, other times not so much... It is possible to develop an enormous amount of confidence and joy in our voices. One of the ways of doing it is through learning to sing again. Learning how to free up the voice is like a pyramid, with three legs to this pot or pyramid.

First of all, we need to develop beautiful strength in the voice to sing and speak with confidence so that we can trust that our voice is consistent. A second aspect is to develop dexterity, so that it is fluid and knows how to move and is loose and free. And the third part is really undoing all of the tension in the voice.

In this practice of learning how to sing and freeing our voices, we develop a more melodic, more intuitive voice, that's not our rational, "in control" voice. Modern science says that the left-hand side of our brain regulates speech, for the most part. So that's our logical side, that's our analytical side; it deals with the known.

So the other side of our brain, the right side, deals with the intuitive, the unknown, the more creative side, and it also regulates singing. So expressing this holistically, we want to do use both hemispheres and teach our body and being to sing and move between speaking and making sense, and then making no sense and singing and being lyrical and beautiful and emotional and all the things.

"My voice brings me confidence and joy."

And the last thing is a beautiful mindset shift for those of you who are not sure, which is:

"I can sing beautifully in tune."

I have yet to experience a single person who can't learn how to sing in tune. The amazing thing is is that you can learn how to sing in tune and you can learn how to do it consistently. I always refer to those people who got thrown out of the birthday party at age six or 12 or whenever they stopped singing. Someone would have told them that they can't or shouldn't sing, and it's absolutely not true. In the private sessions that I do, usually within 10 minutes people start singing and experience their voices in a way that is, "Oh actually it's just my voice, and it's beautiful just the way it is." And to that end, the best thing that you can do is check out my humming video and start humming every morning, so you have some time with your voice just expressing and not being "logical." It's a five minute humming practice every morning for your voice to come out without judgment. So just a little bit of magical one-on-one time with your voice.

Every single person that I work with is singing in tune within half an hour. (And I'm not saying you should do private lessons with me to make this work—I'm just saying it's easier than you may think!) Your natural ability, whatever it is in your body that says "I don't know if I'm singing right," that says, "Ooh this feels weird," is actually your tuning sense telling you  "Oh, we need to move somewhere else."

And you can learn how to move with that feeling, move your voice to the right place and—bam, you're a singer and you have a beautiful voice. So I'd love you to make that shift if you consider yourself a non-singer. To shift it, even today, to say, "You know what? I actually can sing in tune. I'm gonna work out how later, but for the moment I totally believe I can, and it's just a matter of time. And within this lifetime I'm gonna join the big circle of friends who are all singing and we're gonna have a good time together."

Let me know how any of this landed and how you're feeling about your voice today. I'd love you to join in the journey.