The final session of the day was very… quirky in nature. The speaker was a voice coach, and the entire presentation involved singing, yelling, chanting, and strange noises. I was definitely out of my comfort zone, but I thought hey, why not?
We all have our own talents and skills, and our voice is how we get our talents out. We were asked to describe our story about our voice. This is a confusing question to me… what does that mean? My story is that my voice often times lacks confidence. I tend to phrase my knowledge as questions with inflection to my tone, and I know this comes off as lacking credibility. One interesting thing about this exercise was that we realized that everybody was able to identify drawbacks to their voice and areas for improvement; nobody is perfect.
The speaker then outlined the 5 element framework, which is a tool for opening the gifts in your voice. She emphasized the full voice principle, that you have a choice about your voice. I’m just going to provide an outline of this 5 element framework, because I feel like I can’t completely capture what was explored in this session because you simply had to be there to experience the noises, tones, voices, exercises, etc. But, in a nutshell, here’s the 5 elements:
- Earth: authority, grounding
- Fire: passion, personal power
- Water: speaking from the heart, caring, affirmation, compassion, apology
- Metal: amplification
- Air: possibility, storytelling