I have been away from the blogger sphere for a while, working on my debut solo album thats releasing in two weeks on April 8th - follow developments on that at www.anettenorgaard.com - ...but I am not going to talk about that today.:-)
I think it's fair to say that teaching anybody anything is a bit of an endeavour, and teaching people how to use there voice not just correctly, but in a way that communicates who they are and what they think and feel is....well, I dare say impossible! So how do I do it! The answer is - I don't teach as much as I create a space in which the student and client can learn. I have a lot of knowledge about the voice and how it works in our efforts to communicate, and I have struggled probably through every single voice problem you can imagine, so most of all, I am standing in that learning space with the student asking them to explore some new sometimes uncomfortable, territory with me.
Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don't and in my classroom both of those are equally valid. In the beginning, I am mostly there to giude the process by pointing out what works and what doesn't, but most of all my job persists in teaching people to take a risk, fail and be uncomfortably vunerable and courageous with their voice. I do pass on knowledge, it is part of it, but mostly I find, I pass on courage, willingness to fail and the ability to think of your voice as a shaped, learned part of your identity - not the unchangeable box of tricks you somehow were given at birth and what you by your life have been conditioned to be.
Recently I have had more corporate speech clients who are in need of a similar skill. The ability to make your voice sound authentic, professional and authorative is highly in demand. As we can now get facts and knowledge on most anything via google and other technology platforms, the ability of communicating your knowledge and your opinion on it, seems to be ever more important. How do you seem trust worthy, reliable and honest? It's interesting to approach voice quality and voice work from this perspective, and I dare say that some of these clients who come to me from corporate environments, are a little (read very) uncomfortable with the constant failing and risk taking it takes to learn in my classroom, but to their credit they soon get the hang of it - and once your daring goes up, your learning curve goes up with it.
To all that human and gentle bravery - I salute you!
