Find Your Voice

I had an amazing insight with a student this week. Pam has been taking lessons once or twice a month for two years. One of her goals was to find her voice. At our first lesson, Pam said, “The more I find my voice, the more I find myself – in the rest of my life, too.”

What does it mean to “find your voice?” There are dozens of books with “find your voice” in the title or sub-title, about everything from singing to writing to speaking to psychology, politics, leadership, acting, self-worth, communication, even a title which directly echoes Pam’s comment, Find Your Voice, Find Your Life.

Our voice is our soul print. We are born able to make a wide variety of essential sounds. As we freely explore these sounds and mimic the sounds around us, we learn language and the subtleties of communication. Along the way, we also learn how to constrict and silence our voice. Finding your voice means re-discovering your authentic voice, peeling back the layers of expectations, have-tos, shoulds, and efforts to please and sound like others, hearing your original voice, the voice your were born with, your soul print.

In our lesson this week, Pam shared a valuable insight. She realized that in this process of finding her voice, she did not need to find it somewhere else. Pam said, “Finding my voice means releasing the voice I already have.”

WOW! Just writing this I had to stop and take a breath. That seems so obvious once it’s said, but, in fact, it’s a very common, subterranean and damaging belief. Students start lessons with the goal that they want to “sound better,” and when they do, their voice will sound like somebody else, a friend, a teacher, a singer who’s achieved some fame. All the voice reality TV shows have this fundamental belief. They are molding singers to fit a standard of “good” that is predetermined, narrow, and external to the individual singer. The singers themselves have made it to the show because they already sing on that narrow highway.

Pam continued, ”The voice is in me already. It’s like a plant or a child. If I give it the right conditions, it will grow and flourish.” The right conditions are tools that allow students to express themselves, to grow and develop the fullness of their resonant voice. Pam’s tools include learning about breath, posture, and flow, releasing muscle constriction, finding resonance, and vibrating every cell in her body back into alignment.

In the last two years of lessons, Pam’s voice has grown in color, confidence and authenticity. I realized that our authentic voice is the one that puts us back into alignment with who we are. It’s the voice that fits us like our skin, the one we already have, not the pleaser, the comic, the critic, the belter, the mimic, the whiner, or the diva, but the unique voice with which we were born, blooming and precious. The tools help us to get out of our own way. Singing and feeling the vibrations of our authentic voice, we are home.