Chapter 9

Expressing Yourself Fully with the Power of Resonance

In This Chapter

Producing your voice at different pitches

Speaking expressively

Coming from places of confidence, authority and passion

Expanding your range

In this chapter I share with you the most important secret of a great voice, the one thing that gives your voice tonal quality, that amplifies your voice and that provides the basis for such a variety of sounds. It’s resonance.

Resonance is the physical vibration of your vocal folds through your body. When you produce your voice without constriction, resonance produces vibrations in different parts of your body as you express different energies such as determination or empathy. Discovering how to use resonance opens the way to being able to express yourself powerfully and influentially. In this chapter, I introduce you to the different resonators in turn.

Beginning to Explore Resonance

If your voice didn’t resonate, it would be feeble. Your vocal chords are like tiny rubber bands and don’t produce much sound on their own. They need the resonating cavities of your head, chest and the rest of your body to amplify your sound and create a powerful, dynamic voice.

Experience how vibration and resonance works with this little experiment. Hold a rubber band loosely between your thumb and forefinger and pluck it. In its flabby state, it makes practically no sound. Then loop the band over your thumb and little finger and stretch out your hand to extend the rubber band. Now pluck it. It makes a pinging sound, more resonant but still fairly quiet. Finally stretch the rubber band across the top and around the bottom of a fairly steep-sided bowl. Rest the bowl on a hard surface and pluck the band within the concave shape. You hear a sound that is considerably louder and more musical. That’s resonance!

The strings of a violin stretched across the instrument’s hollow body work in a similar way to a taut rubber band stretched around a bowl. The strings are fixed at each end, leaving the body of the violin free to vibrate. These vibrations produce the warm, powerful sound of the instrument.

When you speak, your equivalent of the violin’s wood structure is your head and your body. The vibrations produced by your vocal folds (refer to Chapter 4) multiply as they encounter the bony surfaces and cavities within you, setting off harmonics that make the tone satisfyingly rich and complex.

Your unique body shape creates your sounds. The legendary tenor Pavarotti’s beautiful sounds were enhanced by his vast bulk. Another great singer, Maria Callas, sacrificed some of her rich vocal tone when she lost a considerable number of pounds to look more the part of the consumptive heroine. Don’t worry though – a violin sounds just as good as a double bass – and vice versa!

Expressing resonance

Resonance loves bones! They’re excellent conductors of vibrations. The hard surfaces of your body provide the strongest resonance. The bones of the skull and the chest are particularly good, but all bones contribute – even the vertebrae of your spine. Cartilage and muscles (if toned up!) also amplify the sound well. Resonance especially loves hollows and other concave surfaces, which you find in the lower throat, the mouth, the nose, the sinus hollows and the skull.

Don’t hold yourself too tightly. Sound needs freedom to echo around your body without meeting rigidity. However, you also need to avoid slumping or sagging. Resonance does not love the flabby, squishy parts of the body because they absorb and deaden sound like heavy curtains and a thick carpet in a sitting room. If you want your voice to resonate well, you need to feel the elastic strength of your body – neither tight nor flabby – as you hold yourself open and free. See Chapter 5 for further descriptions of elastic relaxation.

As I explore in detail in the following sections, resonance in different parts of your body happens naturally as you access different mental and emotional energies. In order for resonance to happen, however, your body needs to be free and flexible, and your mind and emotions must permit you to express what’s going on. If either of these provisos isn’t in place, the natural process is disrupted and you experience vocal problems (which I explore in Chapter 11). For now, I assume that you’re free and flexible and willing to express yourself fully.

When you produce your voice with freedom, every different thought, feeling or impulse affects the resonance, and your voice expresses ever-varying combinations of these different energies with extraordinary subtlety. When you do the exercises in this chapter, you focus on just one resonator at time. You don’t do this in real life, but isolating them one at a time enables you to understand the function of each resonator separately, and to work on particular resonators that you may have neglected until now.

Varying your pitch

As your voice resounds around your body, it also has the ability to vary in pitch. Most people have a vocal range of three or four notes when they speak, but they could have a range of three or four octaves if they trained their voices with the dedication of singers.

Your range is defined not only by the physical limitations of your individual physiology but also by your conditioning. You may still be able to scream on a really high note, but you probably last performed that feat in your cradle.

A wider pitch range involves greater emotional freedom and intensity than you probably demonstrate in daily life. Many people keep the resonance of their voices down in their throats and chests, confirming the common view that expressions of passion or joy don’t have a place in everyday speaking. Most people are quite inhibited!

Actors, because they train their voices, have a bigger pitch range than most people. Every new part demands something different from the voice. The great British actor Laurence Olivier frequently rose to the challenge. But when he accepted the part of Othello, he decided that something exceptional was needed from his voice. He undertook a period of intensive preparation, including body work, to give himself greater muscle tone and strength and voice work to lower his voice. People who heard him in the part remarked upon how deep his voice was; he succeeded in adding several notes to his lower range. Incidentally, reports said that Olivier warmed up his voice for the role by bellowing at a herd of cows for an hour!

Different parts of your body come into play when producing different pitches:

The chest for low sounds

The throat, palate, teeth and jaw for middle sounds

The sinuses, cheekbones, nose, and the upper sinuses and skull for the highest sounds

In the following sections, I offer activities to develop each resonator in turn. That said, the whole body is constantly involved in creating sound because a resonance in one part of the body sets up other resonances, harmonics and overtones elsewhere.

Try out different pitches to explore your range with this playful practice which I demonstrate in Track 28. Tell yourself – or a captive child – the story of ‘The Three Bears’, getting fully into the various characters. Enjoy the parts where the three bears speak and see just how different in pitch you can make the voices. Try this part for example:

‘Somebody’s been eating my porridge,’ said the Daddy Bear in a deep gruff voice.

‘And somebody’s been eating my porridge,’ said the Mummy Bear in a gentle medium voice.

‘And somebody’s been eating my porridge, and they’ve eaten it all up,’ said the Baby Bear in a high squeal of a voice.

You can practise these skills in slightly more serious mode using the following extract from the love poem ‘The Good Morrow’ by John Donne. In order to get into dramatic mode, stride around the room using broad gestures as you recite the lines:

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
(high voice of surprise for these lines)

But sucked on country pleasures childishly?
(middle voice for this line)

Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
(deep voice for this line)

’Twas so
(deepest of slow deep voices for this phrase)

In the previous two practices, concentrate on the meaning of the words and the feeling of the different pitches rather than on what you hear. Your ears may deceive you!

Avoid pushing down physically to make your voice deep. Don’t force anything. Just imagine and feel a low voice coming from deep in your body. Whatever sounds come out are fine.

Championing Your Chest Voice

When you state something you believe to be true and want to share your belief, your voice naturally vibrates in your chest. You hear the connection between this part of the body and truth in language too: you ‘get things off your chest’ and ‘make a clean breast of it’. If you want to develop a voice with more authority and gravitas, this is the resonance you need to develop.

The voice that resounds in your chest is easy to listen to, not too high and not too low, and it carries well. It has the ring of authority and tends to be trusted. It sounds confident and assured. See the later section ‘Using your chest voice’ for more on situations in which your chest voice is particularly effective.

Producing your chest voice

Stand tall and open for all these resonance practices. Stay relaxed, particularly in the upper part of your body, with your shoulders loose and throat free. For the lower resonances, think low and settle down into your body with no upward tension. See Chapter 5 for more relaxation techniques.

In order to produce your confident chest voice, you need to locate the area of your body that resonates most strongly when you produce these tones – your sternum (breast) bone. You can feel its hard flat surface when you touch your chest. Listen to Track 29.

1. Put your hand on your chest and breathe in.

2. As you breathe out, settle into the easy humming sound hermmm.

Have a feeling of relaxing downwards – without any pushing or strain.

You may choose instead to start on a hum at a comfortable pitch and slide the sound down in pitch until it feels as if it reaches your chest. Then open the hum out into the lengthened word mmmore.

3. Feel your sternum bone vibrate under your hand.

4. Continue to breathe and make an aah sound while patting your chest repeatedly with your hand.

Notice how the movement of your hand interrupts the sounds – if your voice is vibrating there. The sound ululates like Tarzan when he does his famous cry.

5. When you find the place where your chest vibrates, let yourself go with the full-bodied Tarzan cry, beating your chest vigorously.

Enjoy the robust sounds that vibrate in your chest!

Tarzan cries are a great way to get an accurate feeling of sound resonating in your chest. Another way is to locate the correct place and speak from that resonance (Track 29):

1. Lay your hands lightly on your belly and take a good fresh breath.

Feel your hands gently rise as you take in air low down.

2. Make the sound ffff on the out-breath, keeping your hands in gentle contact with your belly to monitor the smooth flow of air.

Continue making the sound for a few seconds, keeping the air flowing in a beautiful steady stream.

3. Repeat Steps 1 and 2, but this time make the sound vvvv (which engages your vocal cords) on the out-breath.

Think fairly low, but let the pitch decide itself. Keep the air flow free and steady. Be aware of vibrations in your body. If your chest vibrates, that’s perfect.

4. Speak from same place as the vvvv sound you made.

If you like, go straight from vvvv into a sentence within the same breath: ‘Vvvveronica loves to play chess.’ Hear how the tone is low and resonates in your chest.

During resonance practice, imagine that you’re breathing into the resonating place and connecting with its energy before you speak. Think of confidence and strength as you breathe into the resonance in your chest.

Having found the resonance through physical practice, you can also discover it – often more strongly – through mental intention. Most people resonate their voice naturally in the chest when they have a strong opinion about something, especially if the opinion is negative. So now, with someone to listen to you if possible, speak strongly about something you think should happen or shouldn’t happen, something that is wrong, ridiculous or shocking. Find a subject that you have a strong opinion about so that you can put genuine energy into it. When you make your statement real, the sound resounds in your chest.

Using your chest voice

The chest voice is ideal for public speaking and for all situations where you want to be taken seriously. The big sternum bone provides excellent resonance without straining your voice, so this way of speaking is kind to your vocal apparatus too.

You hear chest resonance often in the speeches of western political leaders. Listen to former US President Bill Clinton or the first female president of Ireland, Mary Robinson. Margaret Thatcher spoke powerfully in Parliament in her time as leader of the opposition but lacked this authoritative deeper chest voice. As prime minister, she put in a lot of work with a voice coach to acquire the deeper authoritative chest sounds that became her hallmark.

Centring in on your chest resonance is difficult if you fear expressing opinions that people may disagree with. Listen to others in the public arena, and you can hear how their voices slip away from strong resonance in their chest to a slightly higher place in the body when they lose confidence. Being able to produce the chest voice is about trusting yourself to state your case firmly without being swayed by what others think.

When trust is absent, your voice sometimes tells the truth more surely than your words! Tony Blair, as prime minister, was an excellent speaker who carried audiences with him, and his voice had many qualities that made people warm towards him. However, the voice of the chest – the voice of truth that isn’t swayed by outside influence – sometimes eluded him. When asked in media interviews to justify his decisions over the war in Iraq, you can hear how his voice tightens and thins instead of resounding clearly in the chest. Blair reveals his discomfort even as he states his case with emphasis, ultimately creating a feeling of uncertainty as you listen to him.

Getting Excited about Your Head Resonance

Your voice does something special when you get excited about something, and this brings me to head resonance.

I demonstrate the head voice in Track 30. Speak the following phrases with excitement – the exclamation marks are your reminders to get genuinely excited!

You’ll never guess what’s happened!

I won! I know, it’s amazing!

It was the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen!

Did you really? You couldn’t have!

For most people, when you read the preceding phrases with excitement, your voice goes higher, throughout the phrase or at the strongest point within it. The more energetic, enthusiastic and excited you feel, the more your voice rises.

Consider different scenarios. Play the part of greeting each of the following people in turn:

Someone who turns up and he or she is the last person you want to see.

A business associate you don’t know well.

Someone you really care about, who turns up on a surprise visit.

How was your voice different with each person? I’m guessing it was low and flat for the first, mid-range and business-like for the second, and high and excited for the third.

Your tone is usually a fairly accurate indicator of your enthusiasm. Have a listen to other people. If nothing excites them much, you find their voices don’t go up often. If you know someone whose life is a roller coaster, swinging between enormous enthusiasm and utter despair, you’re likely to hear a voice that swoops up and down with the changes of mood, perhaps even within a single sentence or phrase. Teachers recognise children’s characteristics through their tone in their classrooms: the quiet low voices of the timid and the high ‘have to speak’ tones of, ‘Me! Me! Me Miss! I know the answer!’

Producing head tones

Your high tones ring in your head, which is a powerful resonator full of bony tunnels and cavities. Find your head tones with the following activity (Track 30):

1. Make a long whoo-oop! sound that starts at a comfortable mid-level and rises quickly to your highest pitch.

2. Do the rising ‘whoop!’ again and then repeat just the high sound on its own: oop.

3. Explore the different resonators of your head.

Speak in a funny, high voice in your nose like Gollum in Lord of the Rings, using lots of ‘n’ sounds, for instance: ‘Nn, nn, nno, never! Never!’

Become aware of your cheek bones and speak with lots of squeaky ‘w’ sounds: ‘Why? Wow, that’s wonderful!’

Speak imagining sound coming out of your ears: ‘Eeeears! Out of my eeeears!’

Make sounds that issue from the very top of your skull, the highest sounds you can ever imagine: ‘Eeee! Wiiiii! Wee Willy Winkiiii!’

Yes, I know! These sounds don’t seem like the kind you’re going to use often in sensible adult conversation. But play along; these tones are vitally important components of your voice and probably under-exercised and under-used.

The following practice (also covered in Track 30) is to develop your head voice on its own to enjoy all the head cavities. This one is easier to practise with someone else.

1. Imagine that you and your partner are both children in the playground.

No need to take to take this step seriously!

Children have high voices, get excited, sometimes squabble and are often exceedingly insistent. Include these elements as you speak, shout and yell to each other in high voices. ‘That’s my ball!’ ‘No it’s mine! Here it comes! Whee!’ ‘Oh you’ve lost it!’ ‘Hee hee, that’s so funny!’ . . . you get the idea.

2. Choose a more everyday subject and have a more realistic conversation, using your adult voice while still including high tones.

Talk about your experience and, with each comment, try to outdo the other person in insistence that your experience was more exciting than theirs. Escalate the excitement as you go.

In the example below (in which two people talk about holidays), the high sounds are in italics – they come out naturally high if you’re insistent and enthusiastic:

Person A: We’ve just been in Cumbria. The landscape is magnificent! Person B: Ah but the Alps – those mountains are amazing! Person A: True, but the craggy Dolomites – just stunning! Person B: I’ll tell you what – if you want splendour, try New Zealand – astonishing! Person A: Good I’m sure, but for a complete one-off try the Galapagos Islands – they’re unbelievable! Person B: Okay, but check this out! The Great Barrier Reef – it’s extraordinary!

Just use your own words for expressing wonder – terrific, fantastic, brilliant, wonderful, super, superb, stupendous and marvellous are other examples – and let your voice hit the roof.

You may find that your voice doesn’t rise naturally on the italicised words; for this exercise, encourage it to do so even if it feels awkward. Usually, you find that just the accented syllable in the word sounds high, as in ‘amazing’ or ‘terrific’. That’s fine, and sounds more natural than saying the whole word on a high pitch.

Don’t confuse these enthusiastic high tones with the lacklustre thin high tones of someone who feels submissive or fearful. This high resonance always has lively energy behind it. See Chapter 11 for more about how to deal with fearful or squeaky voices.

Using your head voice

Your high resonance is like the sparkle on a Christmas tree decoration. It adds interest to your conversation. You don’t use it all the time, but when you do, people catch instantly your excitement, enthusiasm or the special significance you’re giving to a certain point.

You hear these high tones of enthusiasm all the time on chat shows in the media. Listen, for example, to the actor Jane Horrocks or show host Jonathan Ross to hear frequent head tones giving high energy to their delivery.

Another vital use of high resonance is to give your voice stronger carrying power. The more you want your voice to project, the more you need to include the resonance of your nose, cheeks and the bones of the front of your face – your mask. I don’t mean that you use just those high tones, but they join with your chest resonance to give your voice a brightness that projects well. You can discover more about projecting your voice in Chapter 7.

As a general rule, don’t use your head voice on its own for any length of time. For example, if you’re speaking in a serious forum, intersperse your speech with high sounds to show enthusiasm or significance, but don’t use high sounds continuously. This advice is especially good for women, as a constant high pitch can sound shrill and unpleasant – and attract accusations in public life that you’re a witch, a harpy or worse!

Warming to Your Heart Voice

Consider the following media descriptions of the finest speakers:

‘One of the greatest communicators of our time . . . speaks from the heart.’

‘One of the most gifted communicators on the planet – speaks from the heart in a human voice.’

‘She is fervent and articulate . . . speaking with passion, eloquence and dry humour.’

‘Speaks with passion and conviction.’

Who does each description refer to? In order: Colin Powell, Bill Clinton, author Arundhati Roy and Mother Teresa. A diverse group, yet one important quality they all share is passion. And passion persuades. Eloquence may impress, but strong feeling changes hearts.

Whenever a speaker is genuinely speaking from the heart with feeling, you hear the soft-edged low-pitched tones of this resonance. You hear it in the voice of Nelson Mandela, who once said that a good head and a good heart are a formidable combination. The conductor Benjamin Zander and the politician Shirley Williams provide other examples of heartfelt voices.

In this section, I introduce what I call the voice of the heart. You display a different kind of energy when you care about something, and that energy naturally colours your voice, giving it a deeper sound and a softer persuasive edge. Emotion has a way of travelling straight from your heart into the hearts of your listeners.

Voice is coloured by emotional energy in every kind of communication. Even in classical singing, an art characterised by extremely difficult technique, the most adored singers are those who put heart into their voices. The famous tenor José Carreras suggested that singing from the soul is what distinguishes the good from the great. Or, as the poet Maya Angelou said, ‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’

Finding your passion

How easily you produce your heart voice depends on how willing you are to show others how you feel. Speaking from your heart is simply about feeling while speaking. At the precise moments when you feel moved in some way while speaking, your voice takes on a softer-edged quality.

This ability isn’t the same as being able to talk about feelings. Many people are able to talk only too easily about feelings they have or have had: ‘I felt he didn’t understand me’ or ‘I feel it’s just so awful that it’s happened.’ You can often spot a sentence that is about feelings rather than feeling itself because you can slot in the word ‘that’ after the word ‘feel’ or ‘felt’ without changing the sense. You also hear the unemotional reporting tone in the voice.

Revealing your emotional state to your listeners feels intimate and can make you feel vulnerable. When you do share your present feelings, however, you have great potential for connection and influence. Emotion moves people and makes them connect more with you and register more strongly what you’ve said. If you want to be influential as a speaker, you need to discover this resonance.

I demonstrate the heart voice in Track 31. Practice sharing something you care about with a friend or colleague, or preferably with a small group:

1. Choose someone or something you love or care about.

Think about a person you know or an animal or a place that is special to you. Think about an activity you enjoy that allows you to feel most yourself. Or a cause that you passionately care about.

Choose one of these subjects as the topic you’re going to talk about.

2. Absorb yourself in enjoyable memories of the subject for a moment, then take a couple of minutes to talk about your passion.

You may not instantly ‘switch on’ to your passion, but don’t worry; you get into it as you talk about it. Think especially of what you enjoy and care about and what ‘turns you on’ or moves you about it.

3. After you finish, ask your audience what it was like for them to listen to you.

Most listeners discover that they’re moved by a speaker who employs this kind of feeling, even if the subject isn’t one they usually relate to. Feelings are extremely contagious.

Even feelings can do with practice! The next time you experience or remember a happy time, take a few moments to relive the emotions. Enjoy them and even amplify them. File away the experience of happiness in your mind, so you can recall it and use it later. Do the same with other positive emotions, such as determination, confidence, joy and empathy.

The emotion of fear gets in the way of other emotions. Fear makes you self-conscious. That leads to you to try to make an impression rather than honestly feel a feeling, and true connection goes out of the window. Maybe the biggest fear is that if you feel an emotion deeply you won’t be able to cope with it in front of other people, so you end up suppressing all emotion. It’s a shame if you do, as heart-felt communication is beautiful and powerful, whether you’re speaking to a group or to one person. Moreover, after you do dare to share your emotion, you release yourself from performance expectations, all those ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’. You realise that a real connection has been established, and can let go and enjoy the experience. The same is true for everyone who listens to you.

Using your heart voice

Many professional speakers and business leaders avoid the voice of the heart, considering it ‘unprofessional’ or not appropriate in the office or conference room. When you eliminate this voice entirely from your repertoire, you’re missing a powerful element of public speaking.

You don’t need to use the voice of your heart all the time. In fact, wearing your heart constantly on your sleeve is probably not the best idea. But when you use your heart voice, it’s powerful and it moves people. In expressing your emotions, you get in touch with a powerful element of your life force.

The heart voice is always personal; it’s always ‘I’. It can’t be the company voice or considered opinion. This is its strength; it is one person’s feeling, and therefore never to be contested or denied. What you feel is what you feel, and it shows in your voice.

The voice of the heart also uses personal language. You can’t be heartfelt in the non-sensory language of business. ‘It has been determined that the strategic approach will afford the company considerable benefits’ can never have the emotional impact of ‘I’m fiercely determined to think long-term and win through.’

You may find yourself wary of sharing what you genuinely feel because in the past your voice has cracked or you found yourself fighting back tears. Some people stick to a flat unemotional delivery in order to keep tight control of their feelings. But feelings include determination, passion, motivation, empathy, joy and almost everything that connects powerfully with your listeners. You feel in your body, not your head. Blocking feelings entirely is like throwing out a valuable baby with the bath water! Practise revealing your feelings occasionally in safe situations at first, and discover how well people respond when you do.

Going with Your Gut: Speaking with Gravitas and Authenticity

I was in one of those meetings where everyone was getting excited. A confident voice declared, ‘Well, I think . . . ’ only to be have another heartfelt voice interject, ‘But I really feel . . . ’ while an excited voice cried out, ‘Why don’t we . . . ’ The voices batted to and fro without a pause, and then somehow, with no gap in the talking, a low voice made itself heard and everyone stopped in their tracks and turned to listen. ‘This is what we have to do,’ said the deep voice. Why did everyone stop to listen even though the voice wasn’t loud? And somehow we all heard it!

The conversation stopped because the speaker’s voice came from a place deep in the gut, producing a sound that impels people to listen. This is the voice of the whole body, one that resonates deep down and finds harmonic resonance throughout the body. It conveys a sense of commitment that is hard to resist. I call it the voice of the gut.

Producing the voice of your gut

The easiest way I can describe how to produce the gut resonance is to do the following activity, based on creating the low sound ohm used in meditation. Listen too to Track 32.

1. Stand open and relaxed.

See Chapter 5 for more on relaxation.

2. Take a fresh breath and launch smoothly into the long sound ohm on a low note that is comfortable for you.

3. Become aware of vibration.

Be aware of vibration in your body wherever you can sense it – your chest, lower in your belly and your back, in your arms and hands, the tips of your fingers, your legs and throughout your frame.

4. Take a breath whenever you need to without strain, and pay attention to each part of your body in turn.

Focus on any parts of your body where you can sense vibration, from the top of your head to the soles of your feet.

5. After feeling the vibration in your body, take another breath and say some words quietly using the same vibration.

This is the wise voice of your instinct. Choose a few words that come from deep within you. Maybe start your sentence, ‘I hold the deep belief that . . . ’ or ‘My gut instinct is . . . ’.

Another way to discover the resonance of your gut voice is to sing and speak.

1. Hum or sing a low note on any vowel you choose.

You’re not trying out for a televised singing contest here! Just think low and intone. Do nothing to push the sound down: don’t tuck your head in or pull it back. Just think low and intone in a free and natural way.

Use may like to use a piano or keyboard if you have one to check where you are.

2. Speak calmly and easily without strain from exactly the same place.

Say something short that comes from that sensation of using your whole body. What can you say that comes from the whole of you? The phrase I think of is: ‘That’s what it’s all about.’ The meaning is just for me! What will you choose?

3. Be aware of the vibrations that your voice creates.

Using the voice of your gut

You hear the deep gut voice when someone is stating a truth that is fundamental to him or her, beyond enthusiasm, beyond conviction, beyond emotion – just from the person’s whole inner being. The gut voice is most typically the voice of an older person who has deeper understanding. This voice is entirely free of self-consciousness, role playing and any other posturing or ego-positioning. It says simply, ‘This is how it is.’

You use your gut voice only when you’re accessing your gut instinct or speaking a truth that is fundamental to you, so people won’t hear it in your voice all the time. In fact, this voice is likely to appear fairly rarely.

Listen out for gut voice tones from time to time in the voice of the ex-Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan. Being a voice associated with ancient wisdom, you will hear actors taking on these tones in the voice of Ian McKellen as Gandalf in Lord of the Rings and Michael Gambon as Dumbledore in Harry Potter.

The gut voice is available to everyone, regardless of age (or wizardly powers) when they dig down into their sense of fundamental purpose. This voice is the resonance you may use if someone asks you a serious question, such as, ‘What does life mean to you?’ and you’re able to answer the question openly and fearlessly from your deepest being. The expression doesn’t leave you untouched; you have the sense of your boundaries being expanded.

Understanding the Gatehouse of Your Voice: Your Throat

In between the bright sounds of your head and the confident and heartfelt sounds of your body, you find your neck.

If you think of the human body as an hourglass, the throat is the narrow passageway where the sand trickles through. If you’re relaxed and free, the passage allows the vibrations of the vocal cords access to all the resonators of head and body, but if you’re tense or fearful, the passageway blocks, preventing certain parts of you from resonating.

The narrowing of your throat makes it a powerful gatekeeper.

For some people, the throat permits none of the lower resonance, and they have voices that just resound in the throat and head – childish, geeky, clever intellectual or over-pleasant voices.

For others, the throat blocks off all the joyful excited noises of the head and they have voices that resound just below the throat or unvaryingly in the chest – inhibited, boring or relentlessly certain voices.

The tensions put up by the gatekeeper throat can be formidable. The jaw can clamp like a vice. The neck can be held ramrod stiff. The tongue can solidly block the entrance to the throat. When these tensions lock the area, resonance is deadened and the voice has no life in it. See Chapter 11 to find remedies for these blocks.

The throat’s proper purpose in speaking is as a channel for sound. Someone called it ‘a chimney for the heart’, the conduit for sharing your real feelings and energies with the world. For this it needs to be open and free. See the sidebar ‘The fifth chakra: Self-expression’ for another take on the throat’s importance.

Giving yourself permission to speak

If you talk to someone in a quiet voice, you produce sound naturally from your throat. That’s fine, though if you speak always from the throat, your voice doesn’t have much variety in it. A problem arises when instead of using the resonance of head and body to vary the sound, you try to produce different tones by forcing your voice at your throat.

The throat is vulnerable to what is going on in head and heart. Fear, excitement, inhibition, nervousness, apprehension – all affect the throat physically in different ways. If you track your well-being, you may be aware that sore throats sometimes coincide with periods of tension, and colds and congestion with challenging upcoming engagements.

Writing my first book, Voice of Influence, was an extended personal journey for me. After having looked forward to its publication with excitement for months, I suddenly began to worry about what may happen when my personal thoughts and ideas were officially (and permanently!) out there for anyone in the world to question or ridicule. A week or so after publication I was due to give a speech about the book, and just before the speech I caught laryngitis and was unable to speak. The gatekeeper had put up a block. Yes, I do appreciate the irony of the voice expert losing her voice!

I notice when people come to me for coaching that success in speaking with different resonances depends upon their giving themselves inner permission. If you’re unable to speak firmly with chest resonance, for example, the reason is seldom because of physical incapacity but rather that you cannot see yourself as ‘that kind of person’. In other words, you don’t give yourself internal permission to be that way. This lack of permission is particularly noticeable with the joyful enthusiastic head voice. If you don’t give yourself permission to be child-like or playful – to do ‘whoopy’ – you find yourself separated from your head voice.

The journey of your voice is psychological as well as physical. Granting yourself permission to express your different energies is the biggest step towards a freer voice. Though joyful and freeing, the experience can be cathartic too.

As you get to know your voice better, you become aware of all the signs of your ‘gatekeeper’ throat pulling up the moat when you get anxious. Perhaps your throat tightens and your shoulders stiffen. When that happens, just remind yourself that you’re most powerful when you don’t close down. The psychologist Karl Rogers, who found public speaking daunting, used to remind himself on such occasions, ‘I am enough’, and those simple words gave him encouragement. See Chapter 11 for other ideas for combating fear when you speak.

Using Your Whole Vocal Range

I discuss each main resonator separately in the preceding sections, but the voice isn’t designed for resonances to work in isolation. When you speak, your various resonators interplay with each other.

If you have a voice that is completely free and open, you can create wonderful subtlety in the sounds you make; resonators come in and out of play to different degrees by the moment. For instance, you may start with a relaxed comfortable sound, resounding in your throat and chest, and then a slight element of surprise increases your energy and adds higher vibrations to your voice. As you become more excited, sounds are released into the resonators in the skull, while meanwhile you feel an empathy that gives your sound an element of softness as resonance finds the lower body. So, as you continue, the sounds are constantly varying combinations of resonances, interacting with each other, producing harmonics, and creating wondrous nuances that make meaning for the aware listener. That’s the ideal free voice!

If you want to be able to express yourself fully, you need to be able to use all your resonators. Doing so has physical advantages too:

Speaking just in one or two resonators, such as your throat and chest is much harder on your voice. If you resonate throughout your body, your voice is working more efficiently.

Resonances work together so, when all are available, your voice sounds richer and fuller.

If you include your head resonators in your kit, you have the ultimate tool for being heard anywhere.

Breathing and using all parts of you in expression is good for your physical well-being.

Celebrating your own box of sounds

You can discover your own potential most surely if you take a playful approach to practising resonance. Following are a few of my favourite ideas.

Pretend that you’re a Shakespearean actor working for three different directors, each of whom requires a different style of performance. You need to exaggerate in order to make your point.

1. The first director demands Harold Pinter style – banal, ‘kitchen sink’ and understated. Make your statement dull and indifferent.

2. The second wants extreme over-the-top declamation, almost to the extent of insanity. Speak smoothly and grandly, extending all the sounds, and cover an enormous range from high to low with your voice.

3. The third wants psychological intensity, where every thought comes from deep within your brain, heart and very soul. Read the speech as poetry, connect to the meaning as if you’re speaking to yourself.

The text for your practice is the famous Hamlet soliloquy where he contemplates ending his life:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;

This exercise gives you the opportunity to practise the four main areas of resonance that I cover in this chapter. Listen in to Track 33.

1. Find a subject to make a short speech about.

Although you’re only going to speak for approximately four sentences, choose an interesting topic – perhaps a project you’re working on or a personal activity.

2. Taking each of the main resonances in turn, make a statement which fits each resonance.

Start each sentence as follows:

• Head resonance: enthusiasm and excitement. ‘I’m very excited about . . . ’

• Chest resonance: confident facts and logic. ‘The most important facts are . . . ’

• Heart resonance: feeling and emotion. ‘This makes me feel . . . ’

• Gut resonance: deep instinct and inner truth. ‘Fundamentally, deep down . . . ’

3. Join up the four statements to create one flowing and convincing speech on your topic.

Exaggerate the resonances to distinguish clearly between the four different voices. Enjoy exploring your range!

Exploring your limits

Resonance is revealing because your missing voices let you know which ways of being you allow or don’t allow yourself.

If you care too much what people think, you have problems finding your centred chest resonance.

If you’re not able to show your feelings, the softer heart resonance isn’t heard in your voice.

If you take life too seriously and have forgotten your sense of excitement and fun, your voice won’t find your exuberant head tones.

If you play a role of any kind, you’re not able to speak from the deep authentic place in the gut.

If you resonate just in the head, life’s emotions and gut instincts are beyond limits.

You need your whole voice to be fully expressive. Any resonance that’s ‘locked out’ reveals a part of your life that you aren’t expressing – or living.

The following meditative practice enables you to connect your thoughts and various parts of your body. Use some simple thoughts and feelings, for example:

I feel curious.

I am determined about this.

That’s beautiful.

Relax and be quiet for a few moments. Take a few deep breaths. Now, say one of the statements in your mind and tune into the sensations of your body. Place a hand on the part of the body that most responds to the words. For example, many people point to their heads when they tune into curiosity, while others feel strength in their chests when they think about determination. What you feel is individual to you.

If you find yourself intimidated by the process of discovering aspects of yourself that you haven’t given expression to, consider the power of ‘as if’. The great theatre director Constantin Stanislavski called it the key to unlocking the imagination. You don’t have to commit to being a particular way – you just ‘try it on’ for a while. If you were happy right now, how would that be? How would you stand, sit, move and gesture? What would you think? How would you feel? How would you speak? When you follow the ‘as if’ path, nothing is off limits and all is possible.