Does Anyone Really Like The Sound of Their Voice?

Years ago I was working with a student who wanted to free her voice and connect with it from a place of ease. She was a professional dancer and had always struggled with the sound of her voice. Of course this made singing even more challenging because whenever she opened her mouth to speak a part of her contracted or pulled back because there it was again, that sound. I knew right away when this person joined one of my programs that I wanted to give her a positive and new experience of her voice. My main thought was “it’s got to be playful and it’s got to be easy”. 

So I went along as I often do in first lessons and in the first several months of working with a student. I introduced her to vocal warm ups focused on releasing the voice. And I often broke the patterns down into even simpler exercises because she was new to singing. However, despite being new to voice lessons this student had a great ear for copying the sounds I made. After a few warmups her voice would start to glide and follow mine with great skill. It was still a bit harder for her to capture this smoothness when speaking but over time it didn’t distract her as much.

Then one day  I invited her to enjoy the sound of her voice, to enjoy the feeling of singing. She looked at me like I was a little crazy. Pleasure and the voice had been two entities that never overlapped but I put it in the context of connecting to her body. As a dancer and mover, she was accustomed to the pleasure of listening to her own body through movement and even stillness. So we began the same kind of witnessing while singing.

Low and behold she started to focus less and less on how her voice sounded and more and more on the release of breath and the joy of singing! Are you yearning for a simple and pleasurable experience of your voice? Email here to find out about my 3 month group program.