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How to allergy-proof your voice
Pollen or dust, cats or mold. Allergies can make you hoarse for a number of reasons:
Allergens irritate the vocal cords (just like they do the nose or eyes), impairing their function.
Allergy medications like antihistamines dry out the vocal cords, irritating them further.
Post nasal drip can irritate the vocal cords even more, and obviously make it harder to breathe easily.
But wait! There’s hope!
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Is your speaking voice too high?
The short answer is: probably not.
When people say they want their voice to sound lower, what they typically mean is that they want their voice to feel more resonant, warm, rich, and potent. Read on to learn how depth and richness are not necessarily related to a lower pitch, even though that’s how it might appear on the surface.
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Your “tone” might be making you look bad at work
“Don’t use that tone with me!”
“Your performance is good, but there is an issue with your tone.”
“Did you hear that tone in his voice?!”
We communicate tons of information with the tone of our voice. It’s so powerful that if there is incongruence between the tone we use and the words we say, people will believe the tone over the words. Imagine all the ways someone might say, “I’m fine” in a tone that makes it clear they are not, in fact, fine.
A lot of people find their way to me as a coach because they have gotten feedback about their tone being a problem. Let’s look at what that means and how you might choose to adjust it.
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Why you need to keep your voice moist (That’s right, I said “moist”!)
Sometimes the most important things in life are also the simplest. Being well hydrated is one of the most meaningful things we can do to care for our vocal cords and voice, and yet it is so easy to let it slide.
Your voice requires hydration to work optimally. Here’s why and how.
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The hidden cost of not hearing live voices
It struck me recently like a lightning bolt: I miss live voices. For almost a year, the vast majority of voices I have heard have come through a speaker. Quarantine has resulted in very little in-person conversation for me, even less without the auditory filter of a mask.
While electronic speakers convey enough auditory information for us to comprehend the words, they do cut out some of the acoustic spectrum so we are hearing only a piece of the true voice coming though them. We get the information and lose some nuance. But there is much more to the problem.
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