Today, our voices are being used much less than before, overall, as we mostly work from home and attend work meetings via Skype, Zoom, Teams and so on. Our voices are not so spontaneously heard and attracting attention to speak during a meeting is much harder.
Also, maintaining everyone’s interest on a Zoom call is more challenging than a face to face meeting. There’s less opportunity for chatting and finding solutions through information communication.

How does diminished use of your voice affect your sense of wellbeing?

Our voices are used to express our thoughts. As we breathe in, we inspire through air entering our lungs and this function stimulates thought – it creates inspiration – ideas. When we breathe out, our ideas are transformed into words, we express ourselves as we exhale.

This lovely exchange of thoughts, breath and speech is so important to we humans. It brings us closer and not only that, getting those thoughts out of our heads and sharing them with others empties our heads of all the jumbled thoughts that can trouble us.

We need to speak to each other more, not less. Ideas are generated through chats and informal work-breaks. One person’s idea stimulates your imagination and you in turn come up with a developed idea and so it continues.

Much of my work as a voice coach is morphing into being a life-coach when required. I discuss work issues with my clients, perhaps their feelings of anxiety when being overloaded with work by their line manager, or how to cope with interference in their own projects by other less invested colleagues.

Together, we identify key issues and how to assertively address obstacles. These obstacles might come from previous negative experiences or lack of confidence or reluctance to ‘rock the boat’. Perceptions about ourselves and about others can be very limiting. I help my clients to rediscover their own worth and provide tools to enable them to grow in the most appropriate way. It is very positive and rewarding to help my clients not only achieve vocal confidence in terms of accent, clarity and so on, but to believe in themselves and what they offer their organisation. The confidence they find in themselves transfers to their vocal tone, their body language and posture which is extraordinarily powerful to achieving positive communication outcomes.

During coaching sessions, I encourage my clients to talk about their work situation and the structure / relationship of people involved in their work. Allowing thoughts to be formed and the voice to flow freely and expressed is extremely helpful – it’s cathartic and essential to good mental health and wellbeing.

Connecting breath to thought, connecting that thought to energy and with this impulse to ultimately find your voice, is extremely liberating and helpful. Change takes time and talking enables us all to find our way through challenging situations and find good outcomes and solutions.

Those chats around the water cooler, in the queues for lunch or in coffee breaks at a seminar can’t be immediately replaced, but a good chat with your voice coach / life coach can deliver really good outcomes for you.

Please get in touch if you want to have an informal chat about how I can help with your voice, expression and confidence at work. I’ll be pleased to help. Your wellbeing matters.