It’s pretty simple, really. Smiling when you sing will make your voice sound better. Not just because you’re smiling, but because it helps the function of your voice be more free. But guess what else, it makes your life better too… because smiling releases oxytocin, dopamine, adrenaline. All the feel good hormones. This is just a little bit of what it means when we talking about singing changing your life.

It is not uncommon for someone to come to this work and shortly after beginning it, find themselves leaving their job, ending a relationship, feeling a spiritual awakening, moving, or questioning family systems.

Of course that’s not everyone, and I certainly don’t expect it, but it happens often enough that now I just sort of chuckle when a client shares with me the big change they’ve decided to embark upon on in their life.

It’s not just the singing, but the singing is often the catalyst for the change in the whole.

What we all share in common is that these stories about our voice are inevitably about our experience as humans. If you know much about me, you know that I don’t see this work as just voice work… I see it as life work. We are not just voices, we are whole humans. A constellation of stars and stories and I’ve learn over the years that we need desperately to tell these stories… so that ultimately, we can let them go.

When you sing, or use your voice for that matter, there is a conditioned feedback loop around what you feel and hear as you make the sound. Based on your life experiences, you’ll to want to assign the binary of good and bad to what you hear and feel. This conditioning is more pronounced in singing than it is speaking because the sound is sustained and the body and ear have more time to collect info. Read: pass judgement. This is also one of the many reasons singing can feel so vulnerable, in that the sound is very literally exposed.

See, the thing about the voice is that while we all share similar anatomy, we also have individual instruments with unique conditioning. So, while in theory, yours functions just like mine, how you use it is probably veeeeery different. 

This is one of the most wonderful and mysterious aspects to the voice and why a one-size-fits-all approach is always problematic.

Singing is risky, isn’t it?

For some, this is cause to lean in, but for others, the prospect and pressure of it all can overwhelm, literally closing our throats. This isn’t just because of a superficial desire to “sound good”, but because, like my friend shifting nervously near the piano, we have a deep knowing that, “This is about more than just singing, isn’t it?”

In 2020 when the whole world was rudely interrupted by a global pandemic, many of us scrambled to take our lives online. From live streaming concerts, to church services, to school, book clubs, fitness classes, and so much more, we were catapulted into a deluge of online gathering. While I too had to make significant adjustments into our new virtual reality, one area which I did not was in the realm of teaching and coaching voice on Zoom.

There are physical functional truths to your head voice and chest voice. There are objective qualities to the sound! But, there are also metaphorical, archetypal truths that are particularly evident when your voice isn’t balanced, and let’s be honest, it never is. There is a yin and yang to your voice.

When I work with people in private voice coaching, it is almost always the case that the ways in which their voice is out of balance corresponds with what I observe about their lives. Too much yin and not enough yang, or vice versa.

There are so many false narratives around singing and the voice that it can be hard to keep up with them all, but one of the most common mythologies is related to what is required of our breath to make a free and beautiful sound. Often singing teachers and voice coaches will spend an exorbitant amount of time on breath, framing it as the source of one’s problem, when truthfully, it is more often a symptom.