***Capitalize on the Voice You Don't Know You Have

By Nancy Daniels, The Official Guide to Public Speaking
The official guide to Public Speaking

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Most people are unaware that voice training is something they can do for their personal and professional development. No, it is not just actors and politicians who study with a voice coach. More and more people are discovering that they are not stuck with the voice they hear on their answering machines or voicemail.

If you are too loud or too soft, too fast or too slow, too breathy, too wispy, too whiny or wimpy, you do not have to live with it. Change is easier than you think. And, the good news is that you do not need to practice an abundance of exercises to change any of those characteristics.

Perhaps you have chronic hoarseness or loss of voice by the end of the day. Even a persistent sore throat does not necessarily mean that you are sick. It may be vocal abuse which, like hoarseness and voice loss, is not going to go away on its own. Again, you do not need to practice various exercises in order to stop this abuse.

All of the characteristics or traits that I have described above will disappear automatically once you make a change in your voice placement. Currently, you are powering your voice primarily by means of your voice box and throat cavities. You probably think this is normal. While you must use those two resonators for voiced sound, you have a much larger and more powerful resonator that you have not tapped into, namely your chest cavity.

We actually have 5 resonators responsible for the sound of the voice. In addition to your voice box and throat cavities, your mouth and nasal passages also add to the vibrancy of your speaking voice; however, it is the chest cavity that is still missing in this picture, a cavity that the majority of the population does not make use of. And that resonator, the largest of the five, is responsible for the voices of Diane Sawyer, Dennis Haysbert, George Clooney, Julia Ormond, Vin Diesel, Kathleen Turner, and, of course, James Earl Jones.

You have a better voice inside that you can capitalize on. It is richer, warmer, deeper in pitch, and resonant. It will require that you break your old habits and instill some new ones. The good news, however, is that once you make your ‘real’ voice a part of your life, it will just continue to get better as you age.

You don’t have to live with the voice you hear on your answering machine. Discover the real one inside of you that is just waiting to be come out.