A wedding toast, an important meeting, a presentation, a date, a public speech, a personal conversation, a fun banter between friends. These are moments when you emanate what's inside your head to outside your head, through voice and language. All of these have immense potential to persuade and ignite emotional reactions in people around you. Some might even consider one of these moments as most important in their life.
"The effect you have on others is the most valuable currency there is" -Jim Carrey
Thus it becomes important that we project our thoughts and ideas as crisp as they are in our head. A command on your voice is necessary to have it be reflective of your thoughts.
These are the three methods I have adopted to improve my voice
1. Breathe from diaphragm
Mouth breathing has pretty bad rep, chest breathing deserves one too. While mouth breathing is breathing in through your mouth instead of through your nose, chest breathing is breathing into your chest instead of your stomach. What do I mean? Put your hand on your navel and other hand on your ribcage. Now take a deep breath..................................And let go................ Notice which of your hands moves. Hopefully you are able to deduce what's going on here. Ideally your hand on your stomach should be moving [1]. If not, get in practice of breathing into the stomach rather than chest.
2. Speak through your chest
We have a head voice and a chest voice. When you exclusively make sound from your throat it is the head voice. Head voice is shrieked, low pitch and associated with fear. Chest voice is expansive, reverberating and associated with confidence. Speak more with your chest than your throat
"Breathe in through your nose, into your stomach and speak out through your chest" -Me
3. Sing
Developing a singing voice is the best thing to do for your voice. Not only can you impress people with the singing but your voice in everyday speaking also becomes lively with rhythms and intonations. Singing teaches you how to control pitch, intonation and breath. Allowing you to develop a command on your voice.
However, getting anywhere close to a mediocre singer takes years for an untrained voice. A worthy pursuit nonetheless. Just start out by doing bit of vocal exercises and sing your heart out (through your chest)
My Routine
Every Tuesday evening, I do this 30-45 min routine to improve my voice.
- Breathing exercise - 10 rounds of Box breathing. Making sure I use diaphragm by keeping a hand on stomach
- Vocal warm up
- Sing my favorite songs till I get tired.