So we're going to start with your voice, the voice, the instrument that we all play. What's it founded on? What's the basis of your voice? its breath. Your voice is actually just a breath, moving across your vocal cords resonating them. So breath is incredibly important.

It's useful to understand it and we will be doing breath work later on in this course, to improve the way you breathe and to give you mastery of breathing in a way that perhaps you haven't had in the past. breath is known in many languages as synonymous with life prana in the Indian languages, means life as well as breath. So does Chi. If you think about Tai Chi, or Chi Gong. That means breath and life at the same time. In ancient Greek, and I think modern Greek as well.

Numa means breath. It also means soul, or spirit. And in fact, the word for inspire. And all of those kind of breathing words come from the Latin spiritus, which means breath. So breath has been synonymous with life with spirit with all sorts of fundamentals of being a human being, for a very, very long time and with good reason. It's how we live, of course, you breathe in oxygen, it gives you energy, it oxygenates all your cells, and it also gives you the basis with which you speak.

Now your lungs need to be trained. We most of us don't breathe very well. Most of us breathe, like a bird just to the top of our lungs, you know, tiny little breaths. Once the last time you took a deep breath, try it now. We will be doing breath work later on. As Jay mentioned, he will be doing a lot of that with her experience in yoga and martial arts.

She's a master of breathing, she'll help you to have techniques, which will really powerfully impact on your ability to breathe effectively. Now, you can train your lungs to ridiculous degrees. Actually, you may not even know the development of this over the years with, for example, free diving or static apnea, as it's known where people lie on the water not moving. Guess what the world record is for static apnea. Whatever number you're guessing, I doubt it's as large as 24 minutes. 24 minutes on one breath underneath the water.

That's how long your lungs can work for or people's lungs can work for if you're fully trained. We can All move a long way from where we start. And by having a breathing practice, you will make your speaking that much more powerful. So watch out for that later in this course. Of course, it's not just your breath because there are muscles involved too and your whole body. It's actually true that your breath is you in the world.

It's how you project yourself. A very big part of your identity, of course, and that's because all of your muscles and physiology are involved in speaking. Now you have a diaphragm down here at the bottom of your chest. your diaphragm is what contracts to breathe air in, it draws the air in by expanding your lungs. That's my diaphragm moving and then it pushes the air back out. Again, we'll be looking at exercises to improve your control and the power of your diaphragm later in the course.

Then, as the air comes up through your larynx, your vocal cords boards, what happens is these strips of muscle vibrate, and that's what creates the sound of your voice. Now, if you treat the vocal cords in inappropriate ways, your voice is very affected. If you, for example, put your head right back on your shoulders like this, it doesn't help. And equally if you really extend your neck, try this with me you can't speak very well because your vocal cords are so elongated and stretched that way or so compressed that way. So, we'll be looking at posture later on because posture. Again, it's very important to make sure your vocal cords are in the right position.

Your vocal cords are a wonderful little device. They create all this amazing richness and possibly think of Pavarotti singing, or your favorite singer, whoever that might be. All of that coming from these little muscles in your throat. It's important to keep them well lubricated and I Don't mean with alcohol Actually, that's probably not good for your voice and it's a very good tip not to go out on a heavy drinking session the night before a big speech. Alcohol tends to dry out your vocal cords coffee also can do that. If you want to lubricate them, the best way to do that is with room temperature water or warm tea.

Herbal tea is very, very good. Honey in tea and tea is excellent to keep the vocal cords lubricated and smooth and working well. Now again, we haven't got to the end yet because you don't just create sound with your vocal cords you resonate it. resonation is very important in sound. different bodies have different resonant frequencies and your entire body has its own resonance frequency simply because of your bones muscles. The way you're made up, you resonate your voice in various cavities in your head for example, your sinuses, which in my case, are not reading And eating particularly well today, there are other little cavities in your head which resonate your throat.

And also, your chest, of course, is a really big resonant cavity. So it's important again to start to become sensitive of those. And we will do that as we look at the vocal toolbox. And we start to understand how to move your voice around, and how to resonate powerfully in different areas. And we still haven't finished with the creation of your voice. Because we have a huge number of muscles in the structure of your head, your mouth, your lips, your tongue, all of these things, your palate, all of these things are moving all the time.

It's how you create the sounds of speech, and has a huge amount to do with how intelligible you are and how powerful you can put your message across. Of course, many people have issues with these things physically. And in that case, a speech therapist is the way to go. But if you don't have any serious physical conditions that stop you from detecting men, it's going to be down to habit. It will be habit. You've learned certain habits and speaking, it might be that you blindly mumble a bit like this, or it may be that you don't get things out particularly well.

There are lots of habits that we fall into where we think we're being very intelligible. But actually at the other end, the board is not going over the net. So we'll challenge some of those habits in this course and make you conscious of them. The final element in understanding your voice is the way you listen to it. Because your voice comes about from what you've heard, you know, you've grown up in a family environment, you've grown up in a culture, you've listened to the way people speak, and you listen to yourself. Speaking, you have this feedback loop all the time.

Now, if you've ever heard your voice recorded, you might have the experience of going that's not me. That's sound so thin. The reason for that difference is that as you listen to your voice, you are largely listening through bone conduction. It's not coming out here. And going in here. It's traveling through bone conduction from the rest of your body through your skull.

And that's how you're hearing it. Now, bone conduction is very good at lower frequencies not so good at higher frequencies. So you tend to get a rather distorted view of your own voice, one, which is rather deeper, perhaps, than the voice that other people may hear. Of course, recordings aren't necessarily absolutely accurate either because they're biased to meet, emphasize certain frequencies. So the great way to understand how your voice really is, is yes, record it, record it. And it's the first exercise I'm going to give you in this section of the course.

Record your voice, you can do it on a phone, you can do it on a digital recorder. Anything you've got handy, record it and listen back that really Is you probably more accurate than your own listening through bone conduction, although it's not perfect. So getting comfortable with that is very important in the first place. You also have certain assumptions that you've made about your voice and how it's received by other people. Because you've got assumptions about how people listen, how listening works even, and how you're genuinely being received. Check in.

If you've got a few friends that you know really, really well, you could ask them for feedback on your voice. How easy it is to understand how well you enunciate how clearly you speak. Whether your voice is high or low, are there any things that you think my friends, I could improve in my voice? Another very good piece of feedback as well as recording yourself, asking your friends. So far, your voice has been probably Largely unconsciously generated unless you've done any formal vocal training. Most of us who haven't done that, don't think about it, it's just something we naturally do.

We haven't been trained. We haven't even thought about the fact this is an incredible instrument, and one which we can become a master of, and practice, just as you would practice scales on a piano on a violin. So you can do that. Your voice also is very associated with your self image. So how you think of yourself in the world. I'm a quiet person.

So I speak very quietly, I'm really dominating person, so I speak extremely powerfully. Now, neither of those may be effective all the time. They could both be effective at some points. Nevertheless, our entire self image tends to put restrictions on the way we can communicate. And again, that's worth challenging and being at least conscious of so that you can start to play with it. habit is huge habit in terms of how you generate the sound and what you're used to doing it.

Maybe you have a particular infection that you use all the time and you don't even be conscious of it and you're doing it over and over again. Many people do that, for example that can be regional. Here in Orkney, there's a particular singsong inflection which I will try and emulate right now. I'm not very good at mimicking dialects or languages but it's a very, very clearly discernible Arcadian accent and way of speaking, which has a lot of rising terminal and it just like Northern Irish, for example, you're going up at the end of everything. And it's it's kind of like that, that will carry your speaking, you may or may not want to challenge your natural accent, the accent of your birthplace, or where you grew up. Again, all I would suggest is it's important to become conscious, that this is the way I speak Then you can think about do I want to do that all the time?

Do I want to change it? For example, you can get accents which have negative connotations. In the UK where I come from, then there is a connotation if you think of West Country, Somerset accents, which are a bit like this, my lover, you know, will be a bit rustic, and they are associated with being thick, completely unfair. There's absolutely nothing thick about anybody from Somerset at all. But that is the way that accent is taken. And you won't find many CEOs or leaders in the world speak a bit like that, you know, they have changed it, if they came from there.

They've trained themselves out of it, and they now speak in a much more neutral fashion. So, accent can hold you back, or it could be an advantage. All I'm saying is become conscious of it and ask yourself the question is this how I want to be perceived. So recording yourself, listen to your friends feedback, get comfortable with the way you have been speaking, because we're going to move on from that. And we're going to make a voice for you in the future, which is conscious. It's all about commitment, really commitment to speaking as effectively as possible focus on the process of speaking.

It's like anything else at the beginning, it will feel clunky and a little bit artificial. But as you get used to it, you'll become a master of it with effortless ease. Consciousness is the key. And through the whole of this program, we'll be working on the range of your voice, extending your range. So you have much more power and much more capability to change the way that you speak according to the listening, you're speaking into. As we discovered in the last section, listening that you speak into is absolutely crucial.

You're always speaking into a listening and you need to adapt your voice and you will deliver Every so that you hit the bullseye of that listening. Now, we're going to move on and look at hearing and then listening. Can you look at hearing, we're going to consider and discuss hearing and listening, for which I'm going to move back to my office and talk you through slides and some sound effects so that you can understand them better. So, enjoy