So I ran into a fascinating idea recently… About finding your true voice…
And learning to express yourself in an authentic way.
It’s become a new passion project of mine.
And so I thought I’d share it with you.
Because it’s honestly something I’d never even considered before!
I’ve written before on authenticity…
About finding and expressing who you really are.
But this is something different…
Because this time, when I say “finding your true voice,” I don’t mean it metaphorically…
I don’t mean your personality and style…
I don’t mean your inner guidance and intuition…
I mean your actual voice.
As it turns out, almost none of us speak in our true voice…
In fact, most of us have never even heard what our real voice sounds like!
But we can learn.
…and that’s just super fucking cool!
The Psychology of the Voice
It’s no mystery that our psychology changes who we are.
As life knocks us down, and picks us up, we make constant adjustments in our consciousness…
We pick up new wounds… New ways of coping…
We learn to defend ourselves—rightly and wrongly—from all the stresses that come our way.
Settle into routines…
That’s why it’s so important to learn to move your consciousness more effectively.
It lets you roll with the punches… Break out of your patterns…
And undo some of the damage that you pick up along the way.
But what I’d never considered before is how all of life’s bumps and bruises affect your voice!
Though it makes perfect sense in hindsight…
Our consciousness and emotions are not isolated from our bodies.
And some of our psychological wounds have physical repercussions…
We change our posture… The way we walk… How we interact…
Well, our psychology also changes the way we speak!
We change the way we breathe.
We set up muscle memories in our face and throat and chest.
We adopt habitual patterns to our vocal style and pitch and pace…
And our true voice gets buried beneath all that other stuff.
But it isn’t gone for good…
If we reconnect to our breath… And relax the muscle memory… And release the rigid patterns we’ve adopted…
Our true voice emerges!
Connecting to the Breath
I’m not going to try to cover the whole process of finding your true voice.
I’m not an expert on vocal technique. And there’s no way I could fit it all into a single article anyway!
But I will talk about a couple of the basic elements, since they’re so easy to implement…
The first is learning to breathe properly.
I know. It sounds boring…
But breath is to the voice, what fuel is to a car.
If you don’t have enough breath—if you hold it, or you dump it—your true voice can never get moving in the first place.
So you have to breathe.
Now, I’ve known for a long time that most of us don’t really breathe the way we should…
But what I didn’t know, is that if you lie down flat on your back, your body will automatically breathe properly!
And that gives us a template that we can follow…
You should try it!
Lie down, without propping your head up, and place your hands on your ribs.
And breathe…
Feel how your ribs move when you breathe lying down…
Now stand up, and feel how your ribs move there…
The goal is to make them both the same.
Memorize what it feels like to breathe lying down…
And then practice breathing the same way when you’re upright.
Every time you catch yourself not breathing… Or breathing shallow… Come back to those big, rib-expanding breaths that you memorized on your back.
So that’s the first part…
The second thing is connecting your breath to your voice…
In addition to not breathing enough, we also don’t allow our breath to move in connection with our voice.
I think the easiest way to get a grip on this one is to intentionally do it wrong…
First, try to speak while holding your breath.
Like you don’t want to let any air out of your lungs at all…
You can force the sound to come out…
But there’s not enough breath to power an authentic voice.
Next, sigh your breath out with your voice like you’re working on a phone sex line…
Let the air dump out with the words.
That’s the other extreme.
Your true voice lives in the middle.
Not too much breath, where you sound like Jessica Rabbit…
Not too little breath, where you’re wringing the sound out of your vocal chords.
See if you can figure out where in that spectrum you’ve been speaking from. (I hold slightly.)
And then work your way out of the two extremes, and see if you can find the perfect balance in the middle.
From there, there’s all kinds of technique and vocal variety that you can work on…
Ways to connect more deeply to your true voice…
Ways to outwardly express the feelings and emotions inside you…
Ways to turn your voice into a tool for expressing your authentic self…
But that’s way more than what I can cover here!
Tracy Goodwin has a fantastic video course on finding your true voice over at Udemy.
It’s really worth checking out if you’d like to dig deeper!
If you liked this post, please consider sharing, along with a brief comment of what you thought… It doesn’t sound like much. But these small gestures make a tremendous impact on building our community, and helping other wayward rebels find a perspective that they can resonate with.
And if it spoke to you, why not Join the Tribe? It's free.. And this is just one tiny piece of more than two decades of impassioned work...... And YOU probably belong here with the rest of us!!
In any case, thanks so much for stopping by! – \m/ – Z
About Zach Herbert
I teach people to do cool things with their consciousness, and break their brains with beautiful ideas.
Professional heretic. Unlikely mystic. Host to rebels, misfits and independent thinkers.
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Here you go again bringing up topics I’ve dealt with personally! I used to have a voice that turned heads- it didn’t matter where I was or who I was speaking with, someone always turned around to see who was talking. I’m not exactly sure where I lost my voice but I can tell you it’s not the same! People tend to not hear me, not understand what I’m trying to portray, or just turn around when I’m mid-sentence! It’s gotten quite confusing and I’ve given up on trying to figure out where I lost it and just focus on getting it back.
This was funny to read, because I’ve been observing this phenomenon with curiosity. In the recent years I’ve developed quite a sensitive ear. First I thought it’s because I’m a singer-songwriter and trained to listen carefully and I’ve been working quite a lot to get to know my own emotions. On the other hand I thought I’m just imagining the whole thing.
Sometimes it just happens that I can hear some emotional patterns or restrictions in person’s voice even though I wouldn’t even see or know them. Different emotions have different kind of notes. Sometimes people talk and I can hear their notes which are completely conflicting with what they are saying – and usually they are not aware of the contradiction by themselves.
I’ve noticed how my own talking and singing voice has been changed during the years. Fascinating stuff. Thank you for this insightful article!