Does Voice Coaching Change Your Voice?

My clients know that they want to work on their voices. They may want to sound clearer, more authoritative and with a voice people can hear and want to listen to. There is a fear though that they might sound completely different or that they might sound ‘posh’. In other words, they won’t sound like themselves anymore. Since your voice is strongly connected to your identity this an understandable concern.

What Voice Coaching Doesn’t Change

Voice coaching can’t change the fundamental instrument that is your voice. Your voice operates from the integrated function of your vocal folds (chords), larynx, lungs, diaphragm, organs of articulation, body mass, bone density and air capacity.

Your vocal pitch is determined largely by the length and thickness of your vocal folds. Together these anatomical structures produce what we can call the ‘quality’ of your voice - your vocal essence.

What Voice Coaching Can Change: Vocal Expression

Voice coaching can change how you use your voice so that it is more connected to your body and breath. When your voice is connected to your breath, you have a more effective instrument to express your thoughts and feelings. Your voice acquires flexibility so you get across what you mean in the way you want.

What Voice Coaching Can Change: Tone

By increasing how the voice resonates in the body, you can access different tones. A voice that has chest resonance may sound deeper and warmer.

A voice with head resonance is brighter and sounds more. Head resonance will also help you project and be heard across large spaces.

We are aiming to work on all the resonating areas of the body including the mouth, the sinuses, larynx, nasal cavity and chest. Your voice will, therefore, have more colour, depth and variation.

What Voice Coaching Can Change: Articulation and Clarity

Releasing tension from the jaw and tongue can allow you to articulate words more precisely and can create an assurance and clarity to your pronunciation. The ‘essence’ of your voice is still the same and yet you come across as being more confident.

What Voice Coaching Can Change: Pace and Pause

As you begin to breathe in a calmer, more organic way, your pace will slow down by default. Your in-breath will form a natural pause that will allow your listeners to take in what you’ve said. You’ll be speaking at the pace that allows others to really hear what you’re saying.

What Voice Coaching Can Change: Vocal Range

Doing exercises to give more flexibility to your vocal folds (chords), you’ll be able to access lower and higher vocal ranges. The higher vocal ranges will allow you to express emotions such as surprise, inspiration and vision. The lower vocal ranges will give gravitas and authority to your words.

What Voice Coaching Can Change: Volume and Vocal Energy

When your breathing is more resourceful and your vocal folds are working well by making good contact with each other, you will have a voice that has energy and that people can hear efortlessly. You will have no vocal tension or strain in the voice.

Vocal energy and volume make people think twice before interrupting you.

What Voice Coaching Can Change: Presence

Presence is a combination of a particular breathing pattern, your posture, your voice and that indefinable attribute that is you. By working to improve your voice, your presence begins to shine through.

Voice Coaching Can Target Specific Vocal Issues

Everyone’s voice is different. One person may have a strong nasal tone that sounds harsh and makes the voice difficult to listen to. In this case voice coaching can reduce the nasality by working with the soft palate. Also, the voice can develop resonance in areas other than the nose. The result can be a voice that sounds less harsh, friendlier and easier to listen to. The voice structures are still the same but a more harmonious and functioning balance has been restored.

Another person may have a breathy voice so that the voice doesn’t carry and doesn’t sound assured and confident. In this case, exercises to bring the vocal folds together and reduce excess leakage of air would make their voice stronger and louder.

Will your voice sound as it did before? Yes and no. Will people notice the changes? Perhaps, but the changes are subtle, natural and organic.

Does Voice Coaching Change Your Accent?

I’m often asked if voice coaching will change a person’s accent. Unless you have a firm intention of changing your accent and do coaching specifically aimed at this, your accent won’t disappear. However, as you work on your articulation, creating more space in the mouth to form vowels and consonants your accent may mellow as the words become clearer.

Voice Coaching Makes Your Voice More You

Voice coaching doesn’t impose any artificiality on your voice. Rather, it takes way those blocks that may be impeding your vocal integrity and power. This may be tension in the jaw, a soft palate that doesn’t work at it’s optimum or a breathing pattern that doesn’t support your voice.

In voice coaching we take away hindrances that have been accrued over one’s life through stress, habituation, self-consciousness and environment. When you were a baby or a toddler the chances were your voice was free and you could make a huge amount of noise if you had felt the need and had received the permission. In a sense, you could say we are going back to when your voice was free.

In addition, we are connecting your voice to your breathing via the muscles of your abdomen and the diaphragm. We are reapportioning function through the vocal apparatus and connecting you to your body.

Therefore, rather than sounding less yourself, you are more inclined to think your voice sounds more like you.

Voice Coaching Has a Hidden Reward

People want to feel confident. They want to have gravitas and authority and be able to command a room with their presence and voice. Understandably, people assume that if they can work on their mindset, this will happen. Not always.

Doing the voice work above not only improves and connects you to the phenomenon that is your voice, it ultimately gives you the confidence and authority you’ve been looking for.

This isn’t immediate but as you get results from your increased presence, vocal power, poise and mental clarity, your confidence begins to form. A confidence loop is created based on the positive feedback you begin to receive. And then slowly but surely, you become confident. Here, your confidence has come from your body and voice, not from your mindset.

Voice Coaching: Next Steps

If you think you would benefit from voice coaching and would like to have a 30 minute zoom call, free of charge and with no obligation, please contact me here.