10 TIPS on how to take BETTER CARE of your speaking VOICE

1. INTRO: Hi guys. [MUSIC] In this course, I will give you tips on how we can prepare our voice for a lot of online speaking, speaking that we were forced to do more and more in the last couple of years. We'll, together, create a small piece of paper that we'll be able to put on our computer and that will remind us on how we can use our voice in a more efficient way. I'm Natasha. I'm a doctor of medicine who decided not to work as a doctor and teach voice instead. For the past 17 years, I've been working as a vocal coach with singers, speakers, teachers, and also with a lot of people who would just like to explore and develop their voice. Two years ago, when because of the quarantine all of my teachings went online, was the first time in my career that I started to face vocal problems. I started thinking, "What am I doing wrong? What am I doing differently compared to when I taught in person?" I found out that when I was teaching online, I was way louder, I was speaking with more energy and faster, almost like I wanted to push my voice and energy through the computer to people. I started researching how to take better care of my voice when I speak online. Over this course, I will share the most important tips that I found with you. Welcome to How to Prepare Our Voice for Online Meetings and Calls. If you have any questions and comments, please feel free to ask, and, see, see you in the classroom. [MUSIC] 2. SIT UP STRAIGHT: [MUSIC] Tip number 1, sit up straight, instrument for our voices are our whole body. Everything in our body is connected so every excessive tension in your body can affect our voice. Vocal cords are in our neck, so also our neck position affects our voice. You hear my voice now and you hear my voice now. When we are on the telephone, when we are on our computers, a lot of time our neck is not in a really balanced position. We're having our neck like this or like this. Now you can see on the picture [LAUGHTER] how most people sit behind our computers. Do you find yourself in this? When I started to teach online, I didn't even realize that most of the time I was like this, like almost I was trying to push myself through the computers to my students. So it really helped me when I wrote down like sit up straight and I also wrote out lean back. They can see you. They can see me from like this and this is really healthy for my body posture and also for my voice. I will give you three exercises that you can do that will help to put your head and your neck in a better position. First one, pull your hair up. You can just imagine that somebody is pulling your hair or your head like a string up and your head will go in a better position. Then the second one is tuck your chin in. Then the third one is, put your head left and right. Try to imagine that your hair is on a ball and it moves freely. So not like this, this is tight. But like this and this is really great because we relax our neck and we relax our vocal cords and our voice can really work at its optimum. You can also do this three exercises in your head. When you're in the middle of the lecture and you start to feel tense, just think about tucking my chin in, pulling my head up, and relaxing my neck. So this will not only be good for your voice, but also for your body posture. Let's write this down. Number 1, seat up straight [MUSIC] 3. WATCH YOUR LOUDNESS: [MUSIC] Tip number 2, watch your loudness. They can hear you. That's what I wrote on my computer. Watch your loudness they can hear you because our ears get used to the certain loudness that we use. If I start to speak loud then my ears in time they feel that this is a normal loudness. But if I would record myself, I would see that I'm almost yelling. That specially started to happen when I was teaching online because I felt that I need to really give energy to people, that I need to be exciting for them. That's why I was really loud. When I started to take care of my loudness and started to be less loud then my voice felt way better after a long day of talking. That's not only my story, also in my Academy of voice, we have seven other teachers and they all said the same that when they're teaching online, they're really yelling. I remember one time I came to my waiting room and Christian, this is one of our teachers he was really loud, like yelling. I was like what is he doing? Yelling on the students but in a nice way, in a good energy way. I opened the doors and he was just having an online lesson. I was like, "Hey, what are you doing?" Then he lowered loudness. It's almost like we don't even know that we're too loud. I sometimes say to my students, just record yourself or do this. Try to put your hands like this and talk 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Now you will really hear yourself that if you're going to be too loud, it's going to hurt your ears a little bit. This is a cool exercise that you can do to put your voice in a little better like a normal loudness. Especially we do this loud thing if we're excited about a topic. One thing that really helped me the most [NOISE] besides this was having microphone and headphones. If you speak a lot and if you have a lot of meetings, then this is the best thing because it will constantly remind you. It's almost like you would have your hands all the time like this. It will constantly remind you if you're going to get too loud and so you're going to get less loud. Let's write down, watch your loudness. [MUSIC] They can hear you. 4. NO RUSH, PAUSE, LISTEN: [MUSIC] Tip number 3, no rush, pause, listen. A lot of times we're speaking too fast, trying to tell a lot of things in a shorter amount of time, especially if you're an excited teacher or excited type of person and you really want to put all your passion to people and then you were talking really fast. This one was really big one for me. I found this out when I one time recorded my online workshop and I was like, Oh my God, I'm really talking too fast. I don't even know how people understand me. But it was almost like I felt that I need to be really exciting for people and that they're going to get bored if there's going to be a small second of pauses and silence. I've found out later that pause and silence is actually really good because it allows people to think what we're talking about. It allows them to think and then to ask questions. This one, I also started to teach myself how to listen more, so how to listen when somebody else was talking to me, how to wait until they're done, and then wait for a couple of seconds of silence and then I start to talk. Especially if we don't wait, like in an online environment when we have online meetings with more people, that what happens is that we are talking over each other. Two years ago I started to work with one of the Slovenian theaters, I started to have online workshop for all the actress. We had like 90 minutes with women and 90 minutes with men, so it was like altogether three hours of talking. I can't explain you how my voice was exhausted after that. I was like, Oh my God, I can't even do anything more because it was three hours of me talking, [NOISE] and that's why this was really big one for me and I put it on my computer, I wrote down, just that one, no rush, pause, listen. I can't even tell you how much that helped me. Every time I started to rush, I just saw this, I was just like, okay. My intention is that I give them my knowledge and I don't need to rush for that. It's not that I lost my energy and my happiness or whatever, it's that I just started to be more easy, and that was really amazing for my voice. If this one is big one for you, then write this one in a little bigger letters. If not, then just write it down in a normal letters. Let us do it. Number 3, no rush, pause, listen [MUSIC]. 5. ACCEPT THE AIR: [MUSIC] Tip number 4, breathing in, accept the air. Why is breathing important for our voice? Because with inhale, we put our vocal instrument to a certain place. If I breath in like this, then my voice sounds like this. If I breath in like this, then my voice sounds like this. See I put my vocal cords on a certain spot, depending on the way I inhale. Exhale is important because exhale actually starts the vibration of a vocal cords. Exhale actually creates our voice. It starts with vibration [NOISE] and our vocal cords create voice. The tip about breathing that I found important for us at this moment is accept the air. Inhale should be just letting our body to accept the air. What I mean here, if I say to my students, "Breath in," they do this [NOISE] like really a lot. When I say to them, "Just accept the air." It's almost like breath in is not the right word, it should be accept the air. [NOISE] Because then we just let our body to do its thing and we are relaxed. Before we do an exercise together, let us talk about do we breath in through our nose or our mouth. Our nose is actually designed for breathing. When we do any activities besides talking and singing, it's really good that you're breathing through your nose. But when we talk or when we sing, it's completely okay if we also breath in through our mouths. We're going to breath in now through our mouth and we're just going to try to sit up straight, relax, and just let our body accept the air. To feel this is really great, it puts oxygen in the right lungs. Not only this will be great for your voice because it will put your vocal cords on the right spot, this will also be great for relaxing you through the day. Especially after talking for a long time, what I found with myself is like my breath was getting shallowy. It was almost like, here, here, here almost like I'm waiting until the end and my breath is here and when I had it written down like accept the air, I remember it. Relax, accept the air, pause, and no rush and talk. This goes together with the tips before. Let's write down breathing is [MUSIC] accepting the air. 6. BROAD SHOULDERS: [MUSIC] Tip Number 5, broad shoulders. The way we have our shoulders affects our inhale. If my shoulders are like this, then I can't really accept the air, my inhale is very shallow. It also affects our exhale. That's why it affects our voice and our neck muscles get tense with this. That's why our shoulders really affect our voice. We want to have broad shoulders. Not only that this will be better for our voice, this will also give us a way more confident look and also a way more confident vocal color. I think there is also a phrase where you guys in English say he is broad shouldered enough. That means that he or she is capable of doing certain kind of things. So this is really good then. When we're under stress or we're afraid, or we're on the stage and we have stage fright, most of us do this, or hide ourselves. Now I will give you a really cool, just like a short exercise to relax our shoulders. We're going to roll our shoulders. Then we're going to massage our pectoral muscle. You'll see it on the picture. We're a going to try to make it longer. Now look at my left shoulder. We're going to try to make this muscle longer and pull our shoulders back. Do you see this one compared to this one? It's different. So let's do it on the other side. Try to make it longer. I'll see I look way more open, way more confident and this is really good also for my voice. They say that shoulders should be like clothes hangers. See it's a resemblance. We want to keep it like this all the time, when we talk, when we inhale because we don't want to do this. Now, they're not like clothes hangers, right want to leave it like this. Great. Write down broad shoulders and try to keep it in your mind when you speak online. [MUSIC] 7. RELAXED JAW: [MUSIC] Tip number 6, relaxed jaw. Appreciation consists of jaw, tongue and lips movement. That's why the way we have our jaws, if it's tense it can really affect our voice. Everything here is connected. If my jaw gets tensed and my voice get tense, and if I'm talking like this all day long then my voice can get tired faster. Look at this picture. You will see a muscle. This is called masseter muscle. Put your hands here and just do a bite. Could you feel this muscle? We'll try to relax this one, and if we're going to have this one relaxed, then our voice will be able to be free. This muscle gets tense a lot of times when we're angry, when we're fear we do something like this, or this muscle is tense because it's just our habit. Certain cultures have this muscle more tense than other, like Slovenian language, for example. Most people here in Slovenia are talking like this. We have a really closed up language and we all have this muscle a little tense. Most of the time when students come to my lesson, a first couple of lesson we're just trying to feel this relaxing feeling in this muscle. What we're going to do, we're going to put our hands here and we're just going to massage this muscle. Try to make it longer. It feels really great. This will not only help your speaking voice, it will also help you accept the air, because if your jaws are like this, then you can't really accept the air. Great. Do you feel this relaxing feeling? Now, we're just going to try to relax our jaw in our minds. What we can do in the middle of online meetings, we can do this. But we can just think about jaw. I'm relaxing it, I feel better now. It's just like starting to fuel your body, what's going on. A lot of times when we speak for a long time, we're getting tenser and tenser and we're getting more and more tension in this part. Just think about it, relaxing, and this will help your voice a lot. Let's write this down. Relaxed jaw. [MUSIC] 8. RELAXED TONGUE: [MUSIC] Tip number 7, relaxed tongue. Why tongue is important for our voice? Because it's really close to our vocal cords. Look at this picture now and you will see that the back of our tongue is really close to our larynx and to our vocal cords. That's why when the back of our tongue is tense, our voice gets tense and if we talk like this all day long, then our voice gets tired faster. Also, why tongue is important for our speaking is because the tongue is actually the muscles that allows us to speak vowels and some consonants. Without tongue, we wouldn't be able to speak. Tongue is a conglomeration of eight muscles, so it's not just one muscle. One cool thing about tongue is the only muscle in our body that can actually move in all of the directions without bones and ligaments, which is awesome. For this course, we're going to try to relax the back of our tongue and we're going to do it like this. We're going to put our tongue down and we're going to touch with it the back of our lower teeth, and then we're going to push it forward like this. Really push it hard [NOISE] so that you will feel the back of your tongue to get relaxed. Let's do it again [NOISE]. If you would do this like 10 times, you will really feel like this relaxation in the back of your mouth. We'll do another thing, we're going to roll our tongue around [NOISE]. The other way [NOISE]. This is a really cool way to warm up your voice before you do the speaking, so you can do it in the car before you're in the job. With this one, you will relax your back of your tongue and you will also put the energy in the front of your tongue because we need our tongue to be intensive and moving. We don't want it to be relaxed, we just want the back of our tongue to be relaxed. You're going to put on the paper, relaxed tongue. When you see this on a paper, you will just try to relax it in your mind again. Just try to think of it and try to get that feeling that you got after that exercise. If you're going to do this more often through the day, then the habit of tension in your tongue will slowly be replaced with a habit of relaxation in your tongue. Let's write this down. [MUSIC] Relaxed tongue [NOISE] [MUSIC]. 9. WORKING LIPS: [MUSIC] Tip number 8, working lips. Lips are really important for our pronunciation, they are actually the last one to shape the color of our voice. If I speak like this, my sound sounds different than if I speak like this. For a healthy speaking, we want our lips to move. Sure, not too much, but also not too little. If our lips are not moving enough, then it's easier for us to tense our neck, and with that, we're at tensing our voice. Let's do this one together. Put your hand over your neck and try to tense your neck. Do you feel that tension? Now, put your lips forward like this and try to tense your neck. It's impossible, right? That means that if we're going to have enough energy on our lips, then it's going to be harder for us to tense our neck and our voice will stay healthier and in a better shape. Go in front of the mirror and look at yourself when you speak and just try to think to yourself if your lips are moving enough. If they're not moving enough, then this will really help you when you're going to have it written down and I will remind you on using your lips a little more. If you feel that you move your lips enough, then you can write down this steep were a little smaller letters. I will also give you two exercise that you can use to train your lips to move more. First one is this one. [NOISE] With this one, I have relaxed neck and I have my voice, and I also have energy on my lips. [NOISE] This is also a really cool exercise to just warm up your voice before you go speaking all day long. You can go up and down. Because also your voice is not only on one note, but it goes a little up and down. You want it to go up and down because then your voice is more like exciting. The second exercise is we're going to put our finger between our teeth. Then you are going to talk like this, hey, how are you? I hope you are enjoying my class. If you're going to talk like this for five minutes, you're going to feel all the muscles, you're going to feel the muscles in your cheeks and your lips is going to hurt a little. That means that they're working. So you're going to start to teach yourself how to use your lips more and in a better way. So this is a really great exercise. If this one is big for you, write it out in big letters, working lips. [MUSIC] 10. WATER: [MUSIC] Tip number 9, drink plenty of water. Why? Do you know that when you talk, your vocal cords clap, or vibrate around 200 times per second. That means that are around 200 times per second, they do this. [NOISE] Can you imagine how many times they clap, if you talk 10 minutes straight, it's crazy. That's why our vocal cords shouldn't be dry. If they're dry and they're clapping that fast, they're way more prone to injury, or we are vocally tired way faster. How water gets to our vocal cords? Water first needs to get to our stomach, then it goes to our vessels, and then it slowly goes into our vocal cords. Water doesn't go straight to our vocal cords, it needs to go in our vessels, and slowly to our vocal cords. We need to be hydrated. We need to have all body hydrated to get water into our vocal cords. For that, we need at least two point five liters of water, a day, if you don't do sport, or if you don't sweat a lot. If you do sport or sweat a lot, then you need more liters of water. We're going to put this tip down in a little bigger letters, because we really want to be reminded on this one more often. Let's do this. [MUSIC] Drink water. 11. TAKE BREAKS: [MUSIC] Tip Number 10, take breaks. Vocal cords are like any kind of muscle. They need to rest after work. I would say that after 45 minutes of talking, we would need a short break. But from my story, when my voice got really tired at the beginning of the quarantine when I started to face vocal problems, I got myself a speech therapist. She gave me a questionnaire on how I spend my days using my voice. You know what I found out? That I don't really take breaks. Even I'm speaking like 45 minutes or teaching and then I have 10 minutes of break but I'm not using it for a vocal break. I'm actually talking on the phone at that time, talking to my mom, talking to a colleague, or talking to my kid. I don't even take a break and then I go teaching again. Then in the break, I again talk to my friends or whatever. I never really took a break for the whole day from eight in the morning to 10 in the evening hours talking straight. Then she was like, ''Well, that's really not normal for your voice. It's some muscle, it needs a break.'' That's why I would say to you that if you talk a lot, like maybe after 45 minutes or an hour, just take 10 minutes. Ten minutes of quiet time, do other things. Just not talk. Then your vocal cords will regenerate in this time and then you'll be able to talk again. I think we also do this in life a lot. We're a lot of times just working, and then when we come home, we're not taking time for a real rest. We're going straight to, TV, or talking to our friends, or going out with our partners or whatever and we don't even take time for just being with ourselves. When was the last time that you were sitting in the room without your phone, without music just with yourself, and just letting your body to rest. If our body's tired, then also our voice is tired. We're together on the first step of this course, everything in our body is connected, so not only that, our vocal cords need to rest between meetings, also, our body needs rest, enough sleep, and taking time for you, just you. I would also say that let's write this down also in big letters because I think that a lot of us need this one. [MUSIC] Yeah, so I came almost to the end of this class. Our paper is done and now we can put it on the wall. In the last lesson I prepared for you, a short vocal warm-up that you can do daily before you start your day full of talking. It's like jogging before sport. See you there. 12. TRAINING: [MUSIC] Welcome to the short morning routine. First, we're going to move our head just three times in one side and the other. Now we're going to massage our neck muscles from up to down. First on one side and then on the other side. Now we're going to relax our shoulders. Let's put shoulders up and down. [NOISE] Up and down and the last one up and down. Now let's roll our shoulders three times back and three times forward. Now let's massage our pectoral muscle, try to make it longer. Let's make our shoulders broad and on the other side. Now we move our attention to our jaw and we're going to massage this muscle here. We're going to try to make it longer, three more times. Now relax the back of our tongue. Push your tongue forward and now let's roll our tongue five times in one side and five times in the other direction. Great. Now we're going to do a lip bubble. [NOISE] Try to make one long note. [NOISE] This will start your lips to move. Now let's go up and down. [NOISE] We're going to end this routine with humming. Humming is really healthy for our voice. It puts our voice to the great position for speaking and also it has so many good affects to our body. It releases happy hormones and it strengthens our immune system and it has so many other effects. Let's do just a normal hum. [NOISE] Do it on your note. It could be lower [NOISE] or higher [NOISE] and then play with your voice up and down. [NOISE] Great. This is a short morning routine. [MUSIC] It's going help your voice to warm up and it's going to prepare you for a long day of speaking.