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. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the belief side of the equation when it comes to changing your voice, whether it’s how you sing or how you speak, or even what it’s like to be you with a voice. Just how, how does it feel to have a voice? Because it’s, it’s not enough just to learn the exercises that you need to do.

Using the voice is a physical activity of the body, that’s true. And doing physical exercises is a really important way of changing your voice. But if you’re only doing the physical stuff, it’s not gonna be enough for durable, lasting change for your voice because our thoughts and our feelings so directly impact the physical instrument. We really can’t ignore them.

We really can’t ignore our beliefs about ourself and the world, and we really can’t ignore how we are feeling in our bodies, how we are experiencing emotion in our bodies when we’re using our voice or thinking about changing our voice.

So today I wanna talk about the beliefs that we need to have in order to make a change with our voice.

But I wanna start first with talking about the beliefs that we need to have to make any change at all, just to sort of provide some context for how I’m thinking about this right now.

I think in order to make any kind of change in your, in our lives, we need to first believe that the change is possible. If we don’t think it’s possible to stop smoking, we’re not gonna try, right?

In order to stop smoking, to try to stop smoking, you have to believe that it’s possible for you to live a life as a non-smoker, and if you don’t have that belief, nothing’s gonna get you there. Because even if you do stop smoking for a little bit, you won’t stay a non-smoker if you don’t think that you can be one, right?

So to make any kind of change, we have to believe that it’s possible, and we have to believe secondly, that that result is gonna be worth the trouble it takes to get there.

That change has to be worth something to us. It has to have some emotional, psychological, social value for us to go to the trouble of trying to make the change at all.

Because, as we all know, change is hard. You know, it’s much easier, “Do we have to?” “If we don’t have to, let’s not!” “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” right?

So we have to believe the change is possible. We have to believe that the result is gonna be worth the trouble. I think we have to believe that the trouble is gonna be fun, or f it isn’t fun, it’s at least educational.

And maybe another way to think about educational is that I’m going to grow in a good way for having tried to make this change. And then we need to believe that we have the resources available right now to get started. We might not have all the resources we need to get all the way through the change, but we have enough to get started.

Those might be, just emotional resources. It might be willpower, it might be social support, the love of a friend, the support of a partner, the right book. It might be any number of things, but we have to believe that those resources exist and that they’re available to us.

And the fifth thing, I think when we go to make any kind of change, we have to believe that we’re worthy of support when it gets hard.

Because as I said before, change is hard. And if you don’t think you’re worthy of support when the change gets hard, you’re going to feel ashamed of yourself for not succeeding rather than, “I just need more support.”

A very helpful thing a therapist said to me once is, the only lesson we should take from something feeling hard, something feeling difficult, is that we need more support in order to accomplish it.

The difficulty is not because we’re not worthy, the difficulty is because we need more resources. We need help, and it’s okay to ask for help. That’s what we’re all here for. That’s what the world is here for.

I know that can feel like a hard thing to believe sometimes that the world exists in order to support us, but on the days when I believe that the world is full of support for me, those are much better days than the days when I believe that there’s no support in the world available to me.

So how does this relate to trying to make change with your voice? Like, what specific beliefs are helpful when you’re trying to change either how you sing or how you speak, or just how you feel as a person with a voice?

Let me back up a little and say that, or reiterate, that using the voice is a physical activity. It involves physical body parts, muscles, air, ligaments, cartilage – all of that’s necessary to make sound. And when we start working on changing how our voice sounds, that literally affects your body. Muscles change as they’re used.

Your voice is mostly muscles. The vocal folds and the muscles used for breathing and your tongue and your jaw, and there are ligaments and cartilage too, but it’s mostly muscle.

As you change how you use your voice, your physical body is gonna change. And as you change your physical body and how you sound in the world, that is going to change what and how you think of yourself.

Because our voice is so connected to who we imagine ourselves to be in the world. we can’t change the voice without, at some level, changing who we think we are and what we’re capable of.

So when you go to change your voice, that’s just gonna happen. That’s not a question of believing or not like that, that’s just a fact. And because those are the facts, that playing around, changing the voice changes your self-concept, changes what you think of yourself, it’s really important to believe that it’s safe to experiment because part of your brain is gonna rebel as soon as you start trying to make a change, because how you’ve sounded until now has worked just fine for survival.

But if you’re looking to change your voice now, it’s probably not for survival. It might be to enhance your life, either to sing better, to, hit higher notes, to give presentations with greater ease to apply for a promotion or a completely different job, right?

It’s enhancing your life, but it’s not for survival and that survival-focused part of your brain is gonna resist your attempts to sound different just because it’s different, because different is scary.

So connected to that idea that believing that it’s safe to experiment, you also wanna cultivate the belief that sounds are morally neutral.

I had a really interesting experience recently in a lesson. We were working on, we were working on breathing and finding, you know, exploring breath support. And I asked my student to make a really rude sound, which is a sh. A great big shush, like louder than you would make ever in a movie theater or anything to get people to be quiet.

It’s the kind of sound that you make when you pull your belly button to your spine and you just quickly force all of the air out of your lungs. So “sh” and we were practicing that and she said one of the first thoughts that she had after she made that sound, was, “But I’m not that rude of a person.”

That was the first thought her brain offered her, was that sound was not polite and I’m not the kind of person who makes those sounds.

And that’s true. She’s not. She’s, she’s lovely. She’s not, she’s not bombastic or snarky or, you know, uptight really in, in that kind of a way at all. That sound “sh” is not a sound that she would ever make, but that’s a very useful sound to make as we’re exploring ways to help her use her voice better.

So in order to let yourself explore and experiment, we have to believe that the sounds we’re making are morally neutral. It’s just a sound. It’s the context in which we use the sound that determines whether or not it’s a problem in terms of, our relationships with other people and the world.

The next two beliefs are related to the journey from A to B.

The first is to believe that you are the expert on your own body, and that there is a lot that you’ve never considered before, that both can be true. I’m the expert on my own body and there is a lot that I’ve never considered before.

There’s a lot that I don’t know about it because one of the things that’s important as we’re working to change the voice is increasing your sense of ease as you use it.

How does it feel to be you as you’re singing, as you’re speaking, as you’re using your body differently? What does it feel like to be you?

As a teacher, I can hear a lot in the kinds of sounds that you’re making. I can infer how comfortable you may or may not be based on what I hear, but you are the only one who can tell me if it really does feel more comfortable.

If making a sound in this new way say that I’ve showed you, does that create more ease in your throat? Does that feel simpler? Does that feel more powerful with without forcing or pushing anything?

And so in that way, you are the expert on your own body, and, in the course of learning to change your voice, I’m going to show you all kinds of things that are available to your body that you have never thought about before.

As we’re working to change our voices, we get to be both the expert and the novice at the same time.

And then the companion belief to this is that what I’m going to learn is only going to make me a deeper person.

We are traveling this path from A to B. There will be resistance, there will be fearful moments, there will be objections like, “I’m not that rude of a person to make that kind of sound,” but when we can believe that what we’re learning along this path from A to B will only make me a deeper person, it makes change so much easier.

It takes us out of thinking that the change has to happen quickly or it has no value. Believing that this change is only going to make me a deeper person gives a sense of spaciousness around the project. And it gives us all kinds of other things that we can notice, in addition to the sounds that we’re making.

As I said before, how it feels in your body. But, how does it sit with your mind? What does your brain think of these strange sounds that you’re making? And the sounds are “strange” in air quotes because you’ve never made them before.

Sometimes they are actually strange, but a lot of the time what our brain labels as “strange” or “wrong” or “dangerous” or “rude” or “socially unacceptable,” it’s simply different.

But that’s good when our brains freak out because we’re making sounds that it just can’t comprehend, the brain can’t comprehend, that’s a sign that we have landed on something that is new.

You’re using your voice differently, and this new sound that you’re making we can continue to play with it and find a way to make it useful. Even though your brain might be saying, “No! Stop. It’s wrong.”

This gets us to the next fact of vocal change. So, using your voice is a physical activity. Changing your voice means changing your body, and because our voice is so connected to who we imagine ourselves to be, changing your voice will also change who you think you are.

The next fact in that line is, the process of changing the voice involves an ugly duckling period. I wish I could tell you like exactly how long the ugly duckling period is, but I’m afraid it just recurs. We embark on this adventure to make a, a change to our voices, and at first it can even sound worse. At first for sure, the kinds of sounds we’re making sound unfamiliar, and they’re disturbing because they’re unfamiliar.

And then maybe, “Okay, it’s not so unfamiliar anymore, but I’m really not sure that I like this.” It takes a great deal of faith and patience to make it through that part of, “I’m really not sure that I, yes, it feels easy, but I’m not sure that I like this. I don’t see how this is gonna be useful. I really don’t know…” – this ugly duckling period.

And then, and then we land on it. Then we find the sound, or we have the moment where, “Oh, right, this is better. And I do like how that sounds.” And so we go with that for a while and we have this experience of making sound in a new way, in a way that we like and we feel like, “Wow, I’ve really got it together.”

And then, but because the voice is a physical part of your body that involves muscles and muscles change as they’re used, as you keep using, as you use your muscles in this new way, with this voice that you really like, the muscles keep growing. And then your voice grows again and you find yourself in another ugly duckling period because your voice has grown, your body has changed.

You’re capable of more, and you’re in between what you have now and what you’re gonna have in a little bit, and that little bit for lots of people it can be weeks, it can be months, it’s rarely years. I notice significant changes in my students’ voices over, of course, it depends on the student, it depends on what they’re working on, but like between two and three months is about how long it takes for, somebody to learn how to make any particular sound significantly differently.

And then for the next two or three months we’re working on, repeating it and getting it to be automatic, getting it to be easier, ’cause it takes a lot of mental effort for vocal change. That’s something that we really can’t do anything about.

But once you get some traction, it takes less thought, and then the new habit becomes automatic and then the body grows, and then you wanna make a different change, and you’re back to being an ugly duckling again.

So, there is a fact that ugly duckling is gonna happen, molting is gonna happen. So a really important belief to have is, “I believe that integration is possible. I have made it through other ugly duckling periods in my life. I have molted before and it’s turned out okay.”

And before you embark on any kind of voice change, or maybe if you’re in the process of it, that’s a really good list to make: what are all of the other changes in your life? What are all of the ugly duckling periods that you have made it through?

Just so that you can go back and see, prove to yourself that it’s true, “I’ve been an ugly duckling before and it’s turned out okay. I have molted before and it’s turned out okay.”

And then the last belief that I think is important to have is that small changes can make a big difference, that working on one thing at a time is enough and that bite-sized chunks are good enough, however that lands best with you. Those are three different ways of saying the same basic thing, that the small change is the durable change.

There’s a lot in our culture that points to dramatic befores and afters. We love those kinds of stories, whole television shows, right, about home improvement, weight loss, gardening. There’s all kinds of like dramatic before and after journeys and those are wonderful, and that is not what vocal change is like.

My voice is dramatically different now than it was 30 or 40 years ago because I’ve worked on it and invested a lot of time and energy into it. But all of the changes have been gradual, because the muscles involved are not that big.

The muscles required for breathing are quite big, right? Your abs are significant. They’re strong. Those are big muscles, but the vocal folds themselves are the size of your thumbnail. They are not that big. The amount of power that our voice exerts in the world is so much bigger than their actual size. It’s really kind of astonishing to think about.

The best example of this is just how children use their voices, how absolutely loud they can be without any effort. You know, they’re just, they’re loud. They are so loud, and their vocal folds are so small. Right? That’s the power of the breath and how we’re built. It’s just magical.

But what it means, because those vocal folds are small and, the jaw and the tongue also aren’t that big either. And we’re using this instrument all the time. We’ve been using this instrument our whole lives in a very particular way that has worked for us.

Vocal change happens in increments. It happens in small steps, and if you believe that only the big steps are the worthy ones, it’s gonna be really difficult to change how you sing or speak and enjoy that process because you’re gonna be beating yourself up because you wanted more results by now. You wanted to hear a bigger difference by now.

There are plenty of small changes that you can hear even after one lesson that can compound over time and make a huge change in how you use your instrument. But you need to be available to hear them, your mind needs to be open to them for you to find them.

Now, do you have to believe all of these things in order to change your voice? No. Do you have to believe any of them? Probably not. I just offer these to you because this is what I’ve noticed makes change easier.

I know in my own life as a learner, I have made the most progress the fastest when my teacher has held a vision of what I’m capable of that was bigger than what I could see for myself. And also in that relationship, I trusted my teacher and I trusted their vision for me.

And so I offer these beliefs today so that you know some of what’s going on in my head about your process and what will make it, what I think will make it easier.

We are completely free to disagree, and I would love to know if you do. So let me know what you think about these ideas and what change has been like in your own life. What has supported the process of change for you?

And thank you 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.