Your help invited

Training lawers

This month I am inviting your feedback, as the Voice Synergy website is being updated and I would love to hear from you.

When you are seeking help with your voice, what is most important to you and what do you want to see on the website that gives you confidence to get in touch and make the decision to get the support you need?

Coming to a voice coach for help with articulation, clarity, volume, accent reduction or to slow down your speech takes courage. Sometimes, it’s not easy to find someone who fits your brief. Often, clients begin with the aim of accent reduction, for example, and through dialogue, arrive at the conclusion that confidence issues are holding them back from promotion or career development.

This is how it works. Getting started on the voice coaching path is fairly straightforward. To begin with I listen to your voice, talk about what you want to achieve and introduce you to how the voice works. The understanding about the intricate nature of your voice is really interesting and leads to conversations about how words are formed, how pronunciation happens and how your voice can carry further.

Voice Synergy started back in 2012 with the aims of voice coaching business people individually, running voice leadership workshops for industry and working in drama school to help young people develop confidence.

These objectives have been overwhelmingly achieved and this month sees the planning for revamping the Voice Synergy website to reflect today’s clients’ needs.

Being a coach has helped me to learn more about your individual needs and become a better teacher. Through the periods of lockdown, teaching has become more on-line focussed, with fewer in-person bookings. This has worked unexpectedly well as most people adapted to their own work requirements and mastered Zoom, Teams, Skype and other apps.

In the early days of lockdown, clients were keen to have help with getting their voice heard in online meetings and that still persists to some degree. When people are physically present in meetings, body language comes into play in a way that is absent in on-line meetings. It can be easier to get the attention of the chair if you are in the room literally, rather than in some electronic-image box on their computer screen.

The theme that has come up consistently over the past ten years, however, is clarity, confidence and status. In other words, clients want to know how to be understood clearly, how to hold the room or meeting and given the respect that is deserved.

A few months ago, I was coaching a roomful of highly experienced lawyers who were undertaking my workshop as part of their organisation’s Continuous Professional Development remit. At the beginning of the course, some barristers were sceptical, to say the least. By the conclusion of the hour and a half, all participants had filled in glowing feedback forms to say how useful the coaching had been and how many relevant tips had been gleaned.

Please do let me know what aspects of the current Voice Synergy website you like (and what you don’t!) if you have time – I’d love to hear from you.

Thank you so much for reading this and I’ll keep you posted on when the new site will be launched!

Voice Synergy – it’s all about clarity, confidence and impact