Your voice is unique to you. It grows as you grow. It changes as you change. If you’re curious about the relationship between your voice and your body, your heart and your mind, welcome. My name is Michèle Voillequé and I can’t wait to hear you. 

Today I want to give you three questions you can ask yourself before you’re about to do anything in public, whether that’s giving a spoken presentation or singing a piece of music, or maybe even having a difficult conversation.

These are three questions you can ask yourself to sort of evaluate how you’re doing, a kind of pre-flight checklist: is there any other way you could prepare for what you’re about to do?

I would highly recommend that you ask yourself these questions in your daily life at random opportunities just to get used to asking them because they’re not entirely intuitive, but I have found that they are very effective.

So this is one of those things that’s simple, but not easy, I’ll just say that at the beginning.

So the three questions are,

Am I safe in my body?
Am I safe in the room?
and Am I safe in the material?

What I mean by “Am I safe in my body?” – I mean that question to prompt you to maybe close your eyes and scan your system and notice, do you have butterflies in your stomach?
Are your shoulders really tense?
Are you clenching your hands?
Are your knees locked?
Can you feel the floor underneath your feet?
Do you have a headache?
Do you feel like you’re gonna throw up?

Am I safe in my body? Meaning, not, “Am I having a perfectly angelic experience right now?” because you’re not, you’re probably having a perfectly human experience right now. But can you identify those places in yourself where you’re nervous, where there’s some dis-ease, and by bringing attention to those places, can you create safety and calm and security for yourself?

I will tell you one thing for sure, you cannot talk yourself into feeling calm without acknowledging first how you’re actually feeling.

So let’s make up an example:

I am about to teach a song to a large group of people, some of whom I know, some of whom I don’t, and this is happening in a large room that’s very familiar to me.

Nobody knows what the words are. Nobody has the sheet music in front of them. They’re going to learn the song by echoing back what I sing to them.

I’ll keep this example throughout the podcast, to apply to the other two questions, but just taking the first question, “Am I safe in my body?” –

I notice as it becomes my, closer to my turn to stand up and teach this song that my palms are kind of sweaty. And I feel a little shaky and I regret having had two cups of coffee that morning. Maybe I only needed one cup of coffee, but I’m feeling that jittery bit of caffeine in my system.

But in those moments before it’s my turn, I’m just noticing, “Okay, my hands are shaky. I’m a little jittery. I can breathe into that. I understand why that might be happening. That doesn’t have to affect my performance today. I can just know that that’s happening and I can breathe into the center of my body, breathe into my sit bones, and remind myself that I know what I’m doing. I’m physically healthy, and there’s really no reason why this can’t go well.”

It’s a simple example, but that’s what I mean when I say, asking the question, “Am I safe in my body?” – scanning my body, noticing what’s awry, and then generating feelings of safety, talking myself through “my hands are shaky. Oh yeah, maybe you didn’t need two cups of coffee, but you had them. So here we are now.”

And sort of normalizing for my own self what’s happening in my body, and by acknowledging how I am, physically, right then and there, I give myself the opportunity to change how I am physically right then and there.

So the second question, “Am I safe in the room?” – what I mean by that, in my example of, “I’m about to get up and teach a song to a large group of people in a large room that I’m familiar with,” I know already that I’m going to need to move a microphone stand and stand in front of the microphone, in order to teach the song.

So long before it was my turn, like, an hour before it was my turn, I had the opportunity to figure out, okay, this is where I’m supposed to stand. This is the equipment that I need. This is how that equipment is going to arrive there. And I was able to think through all of that.

And because this is a room that I’m really familiar with, I didn’t need to spend a lot of time thinking about, “How do I need to project my voice to reach, so that it reaches all the way to the back?” or, the lighting is familiar to me.

Sometimes you’ll find yourself about to do something in a room with lighting that is just odd – like there’s a wall of windows and really bright glare-y sunlight, or maybe there’s a lot of fluorescent lighting or something like, it’s new and unfamiliar.

Giving yourself time in advance of whatever it is you’re doing is just so helpful to just sort of acclimate yourself to the room.

So, “Am I safe in the room?” means, “Am I comfortable in this room?”

I’m not talking about, “Did you need to bring a security guard who will save you from the marauders who are going to interrupt your speech?” That’s not likely to be happening.

But do you know where you’re gonna be sitting? Where you’re gonna be standing, where you’re gonna be speaking from? What the room sounds like?

If you’re speaking into a microphone, it’s really great to get to do a sound check so you can hear, is it going to, is your voice going to come booming back to you? Is the mic gonna take a minute to warm up? Do you need to remember to turn on the mic?

All of these are details that have to do with the room, that have to do with your preparation for your presentation, whether it’s singing or speaking, and by asking yourself the question, “Am I safe in the room?” you allow yourself the opportunity to cast your mind through, across, all of the details of the physical space you’re finding yourself in, and just double check: Do I know how all of this is gonna go? Do I understand how all of this works?

Of course, we don’t actually know how it’s all going to go, that’s in the future. That’s for us to discover. But, can I walk myself through it? Can I think my way through it?

This is maybe even especially important if you are a musician and you’re performing in a pub or someplace where, say you’ve got a band, right, and lots of different people have to plug into the PA system and the venue has its own house sound engineer at the back.

“Am I safe in the room” applies to, “Do I have a good relationship with the sound engineer? Do I trust them? Did we get a good sound check? Have all of our concerns been addressed? Can we hear through the monitors? Are the monitors too loud? Do we have monitors at all?

“How are we going to hear ourselves? How are we going to relate when we’re on stage? How are our sight lines?” All of that relates to, “Am I safe in the room?”

And then the third question, “Am I safe in the material?” meaning, do you know what you’re about to do? Have you finished the speech you’re about to give? Do you know what exercises you’re gonna give the workshop participants to do?

In my example of teaching a song to a group of people, do I know the song? I mean, am I really secure in this song that I’m going to teach without any sheet music or handouts or anything for the people there?

How am I going to find my note, my starting note? How do I make sure I start in the right key? In this case, I did that by asking, there was somebody nearby at a piano, and I asked them ahead of time, could you noodle something in C minor, just play anything. I just need to get my head into C minor and then I can start to lead the song in the right key. And they did that.

But in order for me to ask for that, I needed to know that that’s what I needed, right? In a similar situation, you can also use a pitch pipe. Maybe you have really good pitch memory and you just rely on your memory, that’s totally fine, too.

So, “Am I safe in the material?” means, as I’m waiting for it to be my turn, I’m thinking through my strategy for teaching the song. I’m reminding myself what it was I intended to do, what my plan was for the morning, and I just check in with myself and check in again with my body: does that feel calm and true? Do I really feel prepared?

And just sort of thinking through it. “Am I safe in the material?” “Yeah, yeah. I’m safe in the material. I know what I’m about to do.”

Now, if you’re giving a speech or a presentation that might involve creating slides ahead of time and looking through the slides before it’s your turn or the night before or the morning of.

It might mean writing things down on note cards. For some people it means writing the whole thing out, even if their intention is to give the speech as though it’s extemporaneous – like they’re not planning to read from a lectern or anything – but they will write out, in more detail than bullet points, everything that they intend to say.

Some people will write out the main takeaways, like if there are four or five bumper stickers that they want people to remember from their presentation, like the main points, they’ll write those out, even again and again on a piece of notebook paper to make sure that they’re burned in their own brain, as they hope those ideas get burned into the brains of the people in their workshop or attending their presentation.

Of course, it’s a terrible moment when you ask yourself, “Am I safe in the material?” and it’s five minutes until you go on, and the answer is, “no.” So that’s something that we want to avoid.

There’s another aspect to being safe in the material that I think is true of speaking, although I found it through music first, which is that as I’m learning the material, as I’m learning the song, am I building in safety as I’m learning it?

By that I mean, am I learning the material in a way that is maximizing my own sense of calm?

A lot of times when we go to learn a piece of music, we start at the beginning. This was really true for me with piano and violin.

I’d start at the beginning and I’d play along until I got to the place where it was too hard, and then I would sort of crash and burn, and then I’d rewind to the beginning and play it again until I crashed and burned.

And I would repeat that, so that when it came time to perform the piece at the recital or whatever, I had practiced the beginning of the piece, like maybe even hundreds of times more than I had practiced the end, because every time I got to a trouble spot, I just went back to the beginning again. And maybe I worked on the trouble spot a little, but the ends of the pieces regularly got shortchanged.

And so I learned to learn music, more often than not, from the end of the piece – like, literally, like, the last note. And then the last two notes, or the last measure, the last two measures, the last three measures play to the end, the last four measures play to the end, so that my brain really knew where I was going, and knew how the piece ended, and knew that it was going to end strong because I had practiced the end over and over and over again.

And that creates such a sense of safety, when you know that you’re going to end it well.

So “Am I safe in the material?” when it comes to a piece of music, for me, includes the thought, “Have I built in any catastrophes because of how I’ve practiced it? When I think through the whole song, is there a part that just still scares the crap out of me that I don’t have a plan for or I ‘kind of’ have a plan for, but you know, it’s only worked out like two of the last five times and I’m not sure it’s gonna work out this time.”

Places like that, places that are scary. And so, obviously not five minutes before you go on, but some length of time before it’s time to perform it,  what can you do to iron those places out, to build safety into those places so that you’re no longer afraid of what happens at rehearsal B? So that you know you have a plan for maybe that high note that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.

If you have a piece with one of those notes, it’s a high note, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, create a plan B and practice the plan B as much as you practice plan A. So when you get there, maybe you’ll sing the high note, maybe you’ll sing this other note that you found that works just as well and feels safer, is a no-brainer.

So all preparatory work is to get to the place of being safe in the material. But I tell you, when, when you feel safe in your body and safe in the room and safe in the material, your chance of delivering an effective, compelling performance, whether you’re speaking or singing, just goes through the roof.

Thinking about, “Am I safe in the material?” when it comes to a spoken presentation – say it’s a workshop, maybe it’s a sales presentation, maybe it’s a speech – a great thing to do is to brainstorm all of the questions you hope nobody asks you, and then go about answering them to the best of your ability.

You may find that you don’t have an answer to a lot of the questions. In fact, you may be thinking, “Michèle, the reason I don’t want them to ask is because I don’t know the answer.”

I guarantee, if you go into the situation hoping that somebody is not going to ask you a question, there will be somebody who will ask that question.

Walking into any situation with dread about a particular outcome, in my experience, almost always guarantees that the dreadful outcome happens. So you want to remove the dread ahead of time as much as possible.

And this might mean getting really good at saying, “That’s a great question, and you know, I don’t know.”

“I don’t have a good answer for that. That’s really worth investigating.”

Or, if it’s a work presentation and you’re asked a question about an aspect of the project that isn’t in your area of expertise, and the person who would be perfect to answer that question is not there, you can say with all generosity, “That is a fantastic question and I’m not able to answer it for you, but let me put you in contact with my colleague and, because they for sure can address that concern for you.”

You’re affirming the question and the questioner. You’re letting the person who’s asking know that they’re important and they’re smart, and you care about their concern. And then you have this beautiful moment of being a networker for them and saying,

“I don’t have the answer, but I know where you can find it.

“And let me get you that phone number.

“Let me get you that website.

“Let me refer you to this book.

“Let me send you on to another person who will be perfect for you, to help you resolve that issue.”

We are not capable of being everything for everybody. There’s just no way that we can know all of the things, and it’s unreasonable to expect ourselves to be perfect in everybody’s eyes.

We are the bee’s knees for somebody, but not everybody, and the sooner you can get comfortable with that, in the context of this presentation that you’re giving, whether it’s spoken or sung, the safer you’re going to feel in your body.

There’s no shame in not knowing everything. I wish there were a lot more people in the world comfortable with saying, “You know, I don’t know.”

There’s humility in that that is actually really good for us because it reminds us we’re not in this alone, and we’re not responsible for everything.

And when you release yourself from the burden of being responsible for everything, it gives you the bandwidth to really care for and shepherd the parts that you are responsible for.

And that just makes the world sometimes more beautiful, sometimes more efficient, sometimes kinder, sometimes all three. It makes the world better.

These three questions, “Am I safe in my body? Am I safe in the room? Am I safe in the material?” guide my preparatory process for, I think almost everything I do in public, and there are corollary questions:

“Am I safe in my body?” –
“How can I feel safe in my body?”
“What do I need to feel safe in my body?”

“Am I safe in the room?” – similarly, “What do I need to feel safe in the room?” – especially if you’re, booking a venue, right? You want to have the answer to that question, “What do I need to feel safe in this room?” when you’re arranging the booking and figuring out how much lead time you need.

When will you get to have access to the room before your speech or before your show?

How much time do you need for a sound check?

Maybe you need to go to the room or the venue, go see another show there, go hear another speech there. If it’s like a hotel ballroom or something, just drop by the hotel and see if you can poke your head in, right, see what it’s like ahead of time, even maybe as a process of deciding whether or not you want to book it, right?

I think it’s important to phrase the question as, “What do I need to feel safe?”

Certainly there’s a certain amount of all of this that’s just basic due diligence, right? If you’re going to book a venue, you should, you could go online and find all kinds of checklists about all the questions that you’re supposed to ask, and those are not bad checklists.

But I want you to get used to asking the question, “What do I need to feel safe?” Because when you feel safe and secure, you are at your smartest, you’re at your most responsive, you’re at your most interesting. You have access to your sense of humor. You have access to your generosity.

When you feel safe, you are amazing. you are brilliant. And I want that to be the bar for you. “What do I need to feel safe in the room?” and similarly, “Am I safe in the material? What do I need to feel safe in the material?” And let the answer to that question guide your preparation.

You might find that part of your frustration in your life is that you’re just not giving yourself enough time to prepare. You’re doing things, you’re making presentations that are freaking you out just because you, you’re not giving yourself enough time to feel comfortable with the idea.

You’re not giving yourself time enough to write the speech, make the slides, brainstorm the questions you want nobody to ask. You know, that might all take more time than you’ve been allowing.

Or you might be timing it perfectly, but you find that when it’s five minutes until you go on, your mind is going blank. “Yes, Michèle, I’m safe in the material until it’s time for me to go on and then I can think of nothing.”

Okay, hear me. That’s a body problem. That’s an “Am I safe in my body?” problem, and that is solvable, but it’s not, it’s not about the material. It’s not about not knowing the material, I suspect, but it’s about not being safe enough in your body at that moment. And that’s a project that I would love to help you with if that’s something that’s going haywire for you.

So I hope this is helpful. Thanks so much for listening.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new people find the show. Subscribing ensures you’ll learn about new episodes as soon as they come out. If you have a question about singing or speaking or being, please send me an email at letters@mvmusik.com.

That’s letters at M as in Mary, V as in Victor, M U S I K.com.

Transcripts and show notes are available on my website. You can subscribe to my newsletter there, too. Can’t Wait to Hear You is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media. I’m your host, Michèle Voillequé. I can’t wait to hear you.