Your Anxious Voice.

...All Choked Up...

...A Lump In Your Throat...

...Voice Quivers...

In this TedTalk, Jackie Gartner-Schmidt, a Speech Language Pathologist, talks about her research on the voice and how feelings of anxiety manifest in your voice.

Productivity, confidence, and communication all go hand in hand for me. If I’m meeting my goals and ambitions, I feel confident about myself and my efforts. If I feel confident about what I’m doing, I am eager to share or communicate my thoughts about my specialty or industry.

I know I share this process of confidence building with many people but there’s a group of people who can be communicate confidently without productive work. There’s a group of people who exude confidence and communicate clearly without necessarily doing the work. There’s also another group who is extremely productive and effective but lack the confidence and communication skills to speak about the amazing work they’ve completed.

This TedTalk resonated with me because it bridges the gap of SLP work and public speaking.

People can be amazingly intelligent and competent individuals who are doing life-changing work. But there can be a disconnect between their work and their ability to talk about their work. There can be a disconnect in the way they let other people know about their work.

Gartner-Schmidt explains that from an evolutionary perspective, the vocal cords were initially a protective mechanism. Their primary function was to protect the airway, one of the tubes in your throat, from aspiration or the act of food/liquid entering the windpipe. They do this by being a gatekeeper and tightening up to close shut.

Only as a secondary feature have we as humans hijacked their original purpose of opening and closing for sound production and voice.

Gartner-Schmidt and colleagues have identified that high stress situations induce vocal cord closure or tension. Your throat is trying to protect you from choking in the only way it can - by tightening up your throat.

Now, this is great for protecting you from physical risk with choking but it backfires when you’re not in a physically stressful situation (like in mentally or emotionally stressful situations).

Interviews, presentations, high-stakes phone calls, pitches - your body can go into high-stress fight or flight mode and that includes your throat. Your vocal cords want to tighten up to protect you.

And this maladaptation is a shame for modern-day stressful situations. Nowadays, stressful, ‘fight-or-flight’ scenarios are less to do with running from predators and more about emotionally-stressful or high-performance interactions like speaking engagements.

“We want our voice to reflect the true us we want our voice to be congruent with our identity we want our voice to reflect our strengths not our weaknesses” - Jackie Gartner-Schmidt

This is why HOW we sound is so important. None of us want other people to know that we feel stressed or anxious. Feeling stressed is a natural process and an important part of knowing when stakes are high. But being stressed doesn’t take away from all the work and effort and knowledge you’ve put into your work.

Whereas before, when non-verbal communication, gestures, and physical charisma played bigger roles, in the height on our pandemic world, the voice is becoming an increasingly needed aspect.

Well, What Can We Do About It?

1. Gartner-Schmidt recommends one simple exercise.

Take out your finger and blow on your finger with a nice, steady airstream while ascending and descending in pitch. The demonstrated sound was similar to what you would imagine a cartoon ghost would sound like “ooooOOOOOooooo” . Do this five to ten times before you speak because this deceptively simple exercise essentially relaxes the vocal folds, it establishes breath and air flow and voice stability.

2. Another deceptively easy exercise would be to take a nice deep breath and yawn or sigh, imagining you’re stretched out on a poolside lounge chair.

We’re looking to reset your system, establish good breath support and relax your throat. An intentional 2 minutes focusing on you, your voice, and your tension can help prepare you.

So the next time you need you depend on your voice in a high-pressure situation, take 5 minutes to prepare.

Warm up your voice. Relax your shoulders. Calm your breathing. And Execute.