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 have a couple of New Year’s resolutions that I want to share with you. Maybe you’ll like them, maybe you won’t, but I hope it’s at least helpful.

I would love it if we could all resolve to practice in the shoes that we’re going to wear on the day we do the thing.

Our connection to the earth when we’re using our voice, whether it’s for speaking or singing, is so important: to feel our feet firmly on the ground, to feel our hips, our weight balanced in our hips, to feel our chest happily centered over our hips, and to feel our head centered above that.

That sense of feeling grounded and aligned through the spine, it makes all the difference when it comes to using the voice. It’s easier to breathe, it’s easier to feel safe. It’s easier to feel solid and strong and powerful and good.

It really matters how your feet are on the floor, and lots of us practice barefoot, stocking feet, wearing sneakers. We practice with different feet than we will have on the day.

So if you’re going to give a presentation and you’re going to be wearing work shoes, practice that presentation in those shoes. If you’re going be singing a fancy song and you’re gonna be wearing heels, practice in those heels. Not just standing in those heels, but also walking in those heels.

Part of practicing is also imagining what it’s going be like at the performance.

It’s not a waste of your time at all to put on the costume, so to speak. At the very least, put on the part of the costume that is your footwear.

And of course, if it’s a big, fancy event and you’re gonna be wearing fancy clothes, do all the other things:

Do the “sit test,” do the get up from sitting test, right? See if you can sit in what you’re wearing – sit comfortably in what you’re wearing.

Stand up. Notice how that feels. Is it wrinkly? Do you need to adjust yourself?

What’s it like to walk in that outfit? What’s it like to stand still for a period of time in those shoes, in that outfit? Like, how comfortable are you? It will make all the difference when it comes time to perform.

So that’s New Year’s resolution number one: practice in the shoes that you’re going to wear on the day you do the thing.

My second suggestion for a New Year’s resolution, and this is a tall order, this one’s probably a multi-year resolution, but it’s to try to not judge your out of tune singing. 

I talked to so many people this week, and a big thing this week for a handful of people, not just one or two, a handful of people is fretting over singing out of tune.

Like being really bothered by it and feeling like it means that this is something that they can’t do, that they shouldn’t do, that they’re wasting my time or they’re irritating me because they’re not singing in tune.

I really want us to stop judging ourselves for singing out of tune.

It’s good to notice it, for sure, because singing out of tune means that there is some technical issue. There’s something physical going on that is not going as well as it could, and that’s something that we can fix and that’s something that we should definitely attend to and work on.

But getting all judgy and shame, ashamed and, you know, worked up about it, it doesn’t make addressing the physical problem any easier.

And I hear Yoda in my head saying, “Do or do not. There is no try.”

Okay. But, you know, as somebody who’s spent a lifetime wrestling with her perfectionism, I know about trying not to judge myself. That feels like the authentic way to express it. Sorry, Yoda.

But what can help with that?

What can help us be more compassionate with ourselves when we’re singing out of tune is, first of all, to recognize that it means that there’s something, there’s some part of our technique that is not working.

There’s too much tension in one part of the system and not enough support in another part of the system. It’s a physical problem. It’s not that you’ve been cursed by God or you don’t have any talent or, whatever other negative things you might say to yourself.

It’s a mechanics issue. It’s how you’re using your body that is the problem. And if that’s enough to just take me at my word, awesome.

If you’re still, if you’re thinking, Michèle, I don’t think, um, if you’ve got any kind of doubt at all, go ahead and schedule a free consultation. Let’s talk about it.

Let’s talk about it. I mean, really. On Zoom. 20 minutes, let’s talk about it. Because I need you to be compassionate with yourself.

So the first thing is that singing out of tune is a mechanical problem that is fixable.

The second thing that can help you be more compassionate with yourself is to recognize that you are a human being with a human instrument.

The instrument of your voice is your human body, and your human body is different every damn day. It’s affected by all kinds of things, your body: how much sleep you got, what you’ve eaten, what’s going on in your life, ambient noise, stress, disease, all kinds of stuff, right?

Your human body is not the piano that is pretty much like you left it.
You know, you leave it, come back to it and you know, over the course of a year it might fall out of tune, right? It, the pianos need maintenance, but pretty much they sound like they did the last time you saw them.

Our human body changes a whole lot more than that piano. It even changes more than, you know, a violin or a guitar, a stringed instrument that needs to be tuned more often.

You’re a human person with a human body and that body is your instrument. There is going to be variation in how it performs.

And the third thing I want you to know is that there is no singing “perfectly” in your head before you sing “perfectly” out loud. The process of making a note is a process it’s moving air. Singing is about allowing notes to be right.

We’re not hitting anything. We’re not plucking anything, the sound of a note has duration. It can start out out of tune, and then you can fix it. In fact, that’s the sign of a good singer – not that they never sing out of tune, but that they catch when it’s out of tune and they fix it immediately or as close to immediately as possible.

It’s not that there’s never a mistake, it’s that they correct those mistakes really fast so that if you’re not listening with music teacher ears, you probably won’t even notice.

So I guess maybe that’s the fourth thing, is that we’re all singing out of tune. We are all singing clunkers. They happen for all of us. It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been singing. We will sing out of tune sometimes.

It’s going to keep happening, and the less energy we can spend getting upset about it happening, the more energy we have to put toward addressing it.

It’s important for you to know that I have spent a whole lot of my life judging myself for singing and playing out of tune. It has been sometimes a crippling amount of judgment that made it impossible for me to practice, because I could not stand how I sounded.

I would love to save you that time.

So that’s what I have – just a couple of New Year’s resolutions, if you want them. If you don’t, no worries.

Happy 2026, 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.