***Improve Your Speaking Voice for the New Year and Watch What Happens to the Rest of Your Life!

If you want a New Year’s Resolution that can improve your life, both professionally and personally, you might consider voice training. I am sure that you are questioning how this is possible. What is fascinating about the techniques for discovering your ‘real’ voice is that those techniques will directly influence a number of other aspects of your life.

From better sleep to greater endurance, from less stress to lower blood pressure, voice training which prioritizes diaphragmatic breathing will do just that. It is truly a marvel how this works.

If you were to ask 99% of the population to take a deep breath, they would:

1. pull in their lower torso region;
2. throw out their chest; and
3. lift up their shoulders.

Sounds correct, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, that type of breathing is known as shallow, lazy or upper chest breathing; and, it is not correct.

What is one of the basic fundamentals of yoga? Breathing with the support of your diaphragm. Do you know why? Because respiration in this manner is relaxing and relieves your stress since it eliminates the toxins in your blood. Shallow or lazy breathing, on the other hand, has the opposite effect. It actually increases those nasty toxins, thereby increasing your stress.

When I teach voice improvement, diaphragmatic breathing is one of the prerequisites of my approach because I want you to learn how to power your voice by means of your chest cavity. If you are a lazy or shallow breather, however, using your chest as your primary sounding board is not possible.

Yes, we are a population of lazy breathers; but, we are also a population who overtaxes the voice box and throat cavities in order to produce voiced sound. What results are voices that tend to be higher in pitch, thinner in quality, and young-sounding.

When you learn to breathe with support and use your chest to power and amplify your voice, you will discover a richer, deeper, more mature sound: a voice that has resonance. And, in the process, you will find that if you make diaphragmatic breathing a habit, you will be able to greatly reduce the stress in your life. The result is lower blood pressure, better sleep, less pain, and greater physical endurance.

Imagine improving your life, both professionally and personally, just by learning to breathe with the support of your diaphragm. And, in the process, you will discover the voice inside that is just waiting to be found!