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. 

It is not uncommon that when we feel really strongly about something that our voice fails. It either starts to shake or we can’t get the words out. We can’t get a deep breath. All of a sudden it feels like the voice just doesn’t work in some way, and I wanna talk about how to mitigate that in today’s podcast.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a news story texted to me by one of my children. I seem to get the best news stories from my children. And it was from the Guardian newspaper that Kermit the Frog was announced as the University of Maryland’s commencement speaker for this year.

Jim Henson, the creator of Kermit the Frog, attended the University of Maryland, and they’re very proud of him. There’s a statue of him on their campus, and this year they wanna hear from Kermit at commencement.

My first reaction was, “Oh my God, the Muppets are the only grownups left available to give us any advice about life.”

And then I remembered the advice of Fred Rogers, of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, that whenever something terrible is happening in the world, when there’s been an accident, when something awful is going on, the thing to do is to “look for the helpers.” “Look for the people who are helping.”

And throughout history, we’ve always needed more helpers – I think that goes without saying.

What I notice in my conversations lately with students and friends and just, people in the world that I come in contact with, there’s a great agony that many of us are sharing. There is a “sick to [our] stomach.”

There is a powerless feeling that the government is spinning out of control and the world literally is going to hell in a hand basket, and we’re not sure what we can do about that.

And it seems to me that the desire to help is a good one, and where we can get in our own way physically, emotionally, when it comes to speaking out – I mean, literally speaking out about something – is something to talk about and to address.

There are steps you can take so that your voice will work better when you’re feeling full of rage, full of care, full of concern, and you want to make a difference.

I want to give you some tips today to help you be a better helper. The world does need more helpers.

Before I do that though, I wanna give you a couple of cautionary tales, scenes that I witnessed in my neighborhood in the last couple of weeks.

So, uh, it’s a Monday morning, I’m walking to get my groceries.

A few years ago I decided that I was gonna walk to get my groceries. I live within about a mile and a half of a handful of really nice stores where I can get just about everything that I need and I just decided, better for the planet, better for me to carry my groceries.

So I’m walking to Trader Joe’s to get my groceries and listening to a podcast, and all of a sudden I hear this voice that to me is frightening.

It’s a man yelling. I don’t know if the man is yelling at a hallucination or if the man is yelling at a person. Whatever the man is yelling at, it is scary.

And I climb outta my podcast, you know, take my headphones off and look around and I see a man, a neighbor of mine, I don’t know him, but you know, he obviously lives in the neighborhood, yelling at the driver of a car who had just tried to turn left while he was crossing the street, and so very nearly hit him.

And he’s yelling at the driver of the car with this great growling, just astoni- frightening, astonishing voice, making very good points like, the driver should have been paying more attention.

“How could you not see me?
Nobody slows down for people anymore!
Don’t, you know, pedestrians have gotten killed on this street?”

All of the things, making very good points, in the scariest voice imaginable, such that I thought that he was actually gonna pull the driver out of the car and beat him to a bloody pulp.

That did not happen. He yelled his piece and then continued on toward the same shopping center I was going to, and the driver drove off. And my first thought was, “this driver is now not a safer driver,” right?

Not that the driver was in the right, I mean the pedestrian was perfectly right to be frightened, angry, and, all of that, that’s all totally valid. It’s terrifying to almost be hit by a car and it’s infuriating, you know, for all kinds of reasons, we don’t need to, right? That’s clear. Right?

But the yelling at the driver in that way did not make the driver a safer driver.

I would want the driver to pull over and take a walk around the block two or three times and try to calm down, reflect, repent, reboot before getting in the car again. But instead, of course, the car just drove off and hopefully had a successful journey without hitting anybody.

A few days later, just a block from my house, I was out for a walk again, heading to a grocery store and there was a Tesla stopped at the four-way stop because there was a pedestrian crossing the street.

And the person in the car behind the Tesla was a Toyota driver had their window rolled down and was yelling taunts and obscenities at the driver of the Tesla who was stopped.

And the driver of the Toyota maybe didn’t register that there was a pedestrian crossing the street. It seemed partly, to be yelling at the Tesla driver because it’s a Tesla and, but also because the Tesla was stopped too long at the four-way stop.

And I’m sure you’ve seen this before at stop signs and stop lights when the person doesn’t go as quickly as you think they should, people will honk. Or maybe even you’ve honked. I’ve honked at the person in front, like, “Hello, we need to go now. Stop looking at your phone.”

So there was a little bit of that energy, but mostly what I was witnessing was like aggression about the kind of car – yelling, taunting, all the things, again, is not making the road safer.

We are more likely to die in a car accident than just about anything else. All the thoughts about Elon Musk and the government, that may all be true, but I am really not sure that we are making the world safer with this kind of behavior on the road.

So those are two uses of a voice in the last couple of weeks that were honestly really disturbing for me, and it makes me want to talk about emotional regulation and how to find that when you are, dysregulated.

When you’re afraid, when you’re threatened, when you really wanna make a difference and you’re not sure you’re gonna be able to pull it off, step one in this moment is just to notice what you’re feeling.

Notice what’s happening in your body. Where this emotion is residing in your body?

What I notice in my students in a voice lesson, when there’s nervousness or fear or stress, that tends to accumulate in the torso. It shows up in the shoulders, it shows up in a belly that’s too tight.

And it also shows up in the chin and the jaw. This feeling that, wanting to make a point, that the chin automatically juts forward or, not wanting to say the wrong thing, the jaw starts to clench.

So step one is noticing what is – getting intimate with your own system, how you respond to strong emotion, where strong emotion resides in your body.

A really good time to do this is at home where you feel safe and imagining a scenario that is really triggering for you. It either pisses you off, makes you really scared, whatever that is, just letting yourself feel that emotion, knowing that everything is fine.

Nothing is actually happening right now. You’re in a safe and cozy place. This is just a mental exercise to bring up that feeling and notice how your body responds.

This is one of the techniques that I use when I am working on a song that is making me cry. I will intentionally sit with those emotions, feel that grief, that sadness, the longing, the love, whatever the song is bringing up that is bringing me to tears and just feel the path of that through my body.

I try to get really intimate with it. Really clear about what happens so that when it comes time to be singing the song and I start to feel that feeling, I know exactly, “oh, that’s the beginning of this,” or “this is where it’s going to go next.” Or that’s, this is how far I can allow myself to feel into this emotion while I’m singing, before it starts affecting my voice.

It may feel like, uh, a waste of time or like, “Michèle, when I meditate, I want to be thinking about blooming flowers and rainbows and infinite potential. I don’t wanna be thinking about things that make me feel terrible.”

It really is worth your time to think about things that make you feel terrible so that you can feel what that is in your body, and so then you can manage it.

What was most upsetting to me about these two road rage incidents in my neighborhood was that the behavior of the person with the righteous anger, the expression of the righteous anger, did not make the world safer.

Their expression of righteous anger actually made the world less safe, and that is not a good use of our energy. If anything, we need to make the world safer now, and when we are already angry, afraid, triggered, that’s hard to do. It’s hard to do.

So that’s why I’m talking about it today. Take some time on your own. How does it feel as the emotion travels through your body? Step one. Another way to think about that is “notice what is” as a simple instruction.

And then step two, once you’re noticing what is, practice curiosity, ask questions about it. Get curious about how you’re feeling and what happens, for example, if you breathe into that part of your body.

If your shoulders all of a sudden feel really tense, can you move those joints and can you breathe into those joints? Of course, all the air’s going into your lungs, but can you just take a second, a minute?

How about 15 seconds? I’ll bargain you down to 15 seconds. If you take 15 seconds to breathe into those shoulders that you’re moving and then notice if they, how they feel. Do they feel better?

If they do, if that feels like a strategy that will work for you, that’s a strategy to practice on your own at home with the silly things, the not-public things, the little things that irritate you and know, it’s not of global importance.

But in that moment you can practice this, “Oh, I just noticed my shoulders tense. What if I move them? And what if I breathe as I move them? Does that help move the emotion through? Does that put me in closer contact with the earth?”

That’s where we’re going. In those moments of high reactivity, can you reconnect to the earth?

First, notice what’s going on in your body. Conduct some experiments. Practice curiosity. Can you breathe into the part of your body that is having a freak out along with your mind? And does that loosen anything up?

And then can you move lower? Can you begin to feel your legs? Can you feel your feet on the ground? Stomping your feet is a great thing to do when you’re mad. Toddlers have it right.

Can you stomp your feet, make contact with the earth and start to feel yourself more grounded?

For many of us, and I see this in myself and in my students when performing, we escape into our heads and it’s like we can’t feel our feet at all. We can’t feel anything below our neck at all. It’s like it’s all disappeared and we’re just sort of spinning in thought and sometimes, panic.

And it can feel like levitation, like there, there is no earth anymore. It’s just, a brain spinning out of control.

I think what I observed in those two road rage incidents were two men who were so filled with emotion that there wasn’t any way to contain it. The only thing to do was to throw it out into the world and hope for the best, if they were hoping at all.

I so know this feeling. I so know that feeling of feeling so much, it feels like the body can’t contain it, and I just need to get it out into something. Get it out of my body, get it into the world, get it somewhere safe.

And I have done a lot of ball slams in my life to that end. That’s where you hold a weighted medicine ball over your head, and then you slam it into the ground and then you pick it up and you do it again.

It’s a great exercise for your core. It’s more of a core exercise than anything, but it is a great way to discharge excess energy, anger, rage, disappointment, grief, worry, you fill in your own blank.

This is a time when we need to really learn how to take exquisite care of ourselves so that we can care more effectively for one another, and be the helpers in the world.

There are lots of specific ways that we get in our own way when we’re trying to use our voice and we’re experiencing emotion.

I am thrilled right now by the example of Cory Booker speaking last week for over 25 hours without losing his voice, and, just the human accomplishment of that and the vocal accomplishment of that, especially since he had intentionally dehydrated himself, because you can’t excuse yourself to use the restroom when you’re speaking on the Senate floor. That would’ve, cut his time.

And the voice runs on hydration. The vocal folds are covered with three layers of mucosa, like the kind of tissue that’s inside your sinuses, and when we’re dehydrated, uh, they get sticky, right? They don’t work as well, and they can fail, you can lose your voice.

And I chalk it up to him being a professional voice user. He’s been in public life for years and years at this point. He’s figured out how to take care of his instrument, how to take care of his body, so that it doesn’t wear out. He’s in good fighting shape, you might say.

One of the things you can notice though, about how he speaks is that his head is pretty generally on the top of his spine. When he’s making a point, he will lean his whole torso forward, but he’s not, somebody who really juts his chin or moves his head forward when he’s making a point.

If somebody’s imitating a chicken, right, you’ll move your head forward and back? That creates a lot of stress in the neck and on the vocal folds, and it is something that so many of us humans do when we’re going to make a point or when we’re going to say something. The first thing that we do is move our head forward, out of alignment with our spine.

You can observe this in yourself, maybe the next time you’re on the telephone be somewhere where you can watch yourself in a mirror as you talk and notice how much your head is moving as you’re talking. Just to become aware of it.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you try to adopt the habit of never moving your head when you talk, that will lead to you looking really strange to the people you’re trying to relate to.

There’s a lot of head movement that goes into rapport-building and, you know, just general communication and, looking like an approachable, emotionally healthy person.

We move our heads when we talk, but if the head movement always when you’re really full of emotion is forward and also tense, that’s going to feed back into your vocal production.

That’s going make it harder to talk for a longer period of time. That’s going to make it harder to be louder if you’re trying to project your voice, and that’s just not gonna feel very good after a while. So that’s something that you can notice.

I already mentioned jaw tension and there there’s a lot in other podcast episodes about jaw tension – ways you can become aware of it and things you can do to try to release it as a regular practice.

Probably the biggest thing that will help you in times of high emotion is practicing a low breath – learning how to take air in in a way that expands your belly, puts you in contact with your pelvic floor breathing in so that you have a sense of your hips, and your legs that are coming out of your hip sockets, and your feet that are attached to your legs and the feet are connected to the floor.

When you can learn how to breathe in deeply and feel that breath connect you with the floor or the earth, that has an established and wonderful calming effect on the nervous system.

It can help you think more clearly. It will provide you with really good air for singing or speaking, whatever’s gonna come next, and it buys you time.

As you’re taking that deep low breath, it buys you time to notice what’s going on in your heart, in your mind, in your body. It gives you time to ask a question about it, and it gives you time to formulate a sentence or a word, to avoid gratuitous expressions of righteous anger that unfortunately do not help, that only help you to momentarily feel better, but do not make the world a better place.

Notice what’s going on in your body.
Get curious about it.
Find a way to reconnect to the earth, to feel yourself at home, on the planet.

And I find the best way for me to do that is to practice taking a low breath, a breath that goes all the way in to the bottom of my lungs, expands my belly, puts me in contact with my pelvic floor.

Our righteous anger is good. I really want us to leverage it in the healthiest, most effective ways possible.

I really hope this has been 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.