How Do You Go From Hating Your Voice to Trusting It? | 001

If you're tired of hiding your brilliance behind

stage fright scripts or playing it safe, then you are in the

perfect place. This is the inspired speaker podcast, and I

am your host, Danielle Benson, professional rebel voice coach,

and your guide to speaking with confidence, charisma and zero BS

around here, we don't chase perfection. We choose

connection. So grab a hot beverage, warm up those vocal

cords and get ready to fall wildly in love with the sound of

your voice. Let's get inspired.

Welcome. I am so excited to have you here, embarking with me on

this journey to your authentic, inspiring voice. This is just

the first step of something truly incredible that we are

going to experience together. And I am so glad that you are

here before I get too excited, before I get ahead of myself,

let me introduce myself properly. My name is Danielle

Benson. I run the inspired speaker Academy, and I guide

speakers of every experience level who are aspiring and

inspiring. They want to get their message out there. I guide

them to fall wildly in love with speaking on stage and on camera,

because this is an important medium, and not a lot of us are

doing it in a way that is authentic and that is connected,

and to be frank, that is easier and more free. A lot of us are

over complicating it. We're getting scared. We're leeching

the life out of it. And that is not the way it's meant to be.

It's supposed to be easy, it's supposed to be fun and free and

flexible and genuine and authentic and connected. And

that is why I am here to help you to discover that now, if you

are listening to me and you're thinking, yeah, sure, that's

fine, it's easy for you to say you're obviously good at this. I

personally am not sure how I feel about that last little bit

I'm working on it. I feel like we are all works in progress.

But if you do look at me and think there's no way I could get

there. Let me tell you, it has not been an easy ride. It has

taken me an extremely long time to get to be as good as I am,

and I am not where I want to be, but even so, I acknowledge, you

know, we all, we're all somewhere on our journey, and I

have things that I can share to help you get from wherever you

are to better and on your way, and hopefully even surpass me in

your speaking prowess. Because this is all just technique. This

is the magic about the way that I have approached speaking, the

way that I learned it, and the way that I'm going to share with

you over this this podcast, is that it's it's technique, it's

repeatable, and you do it you do it again, you do it again, and

you improve. It's a skill. The same way that playing a piano is

a skill. Some people are born more talented than others, sure,

but without technique, you will never become a concert pianist

without practicing, without technique, without learning. You

may have an inherent skill there. There may be, you know,

you maybe have a step up over other folks, but you still have

to do the work. Technique is what allows us to trust

ourselves, to feel safe to understand this art. That when I

began this journey, I was so disconnected from myself. I was

terrified. I had this voice that I hated. I was so scared of

being humiliated, of saying the wrong thing, of people judging

me. I was really scared of doing this, and I failed a lot, but as

well as this big fear, I had this big fire inside of me, and

it would not be ignored. And so I persisted, and eventually I

figured it out, but it took me a while, because I didn't even

realize that I could change certain things, like my voice,

like the sound of my voice, I didn't realize I had power over

that. I didn't realize that I could never mind how no one was

there to teach me. I was learning breathing techniques, I

was learning elocution, but I wasn't learning how to connect

to myself. My stage fright had me so neurotic, and in my head,

I was so disconnected. It took me a long time, but eventually I

found someone who could teach me practices, breathing practices,

grounding practices to get into my body. Not just to work on my

body, but to inhabit it, to use it, to drive it from the inside,

so that I could use my body as an expression tool, so that I

could live in it. And by learning these techniques and

going through these exercises, it was a very physical practice,

but by doing that, I learned how to come home to my voice. I

changed my relationship with my voice. You know, so many people

think that their voice is like their height. It is what it is,

but your voice is more like your posture. You have the body you

have, but it's what you do with it that shapes it. And so I

learned what I was doing and what I wasn't doing, which

muscles were overworking, which ones weren't working, enough,

how I could connect to myself so that it was me that I could

hear, because that sound of my voice that I didn't like that I

heard. It wasn't me that I didn't like it was what I was

doing. It was the posture of my voice. If you think about it,

it's lots of little daily habits that create the way we stand,

the way we sit, the way we walk. So if you do the same thing over

and over, but it's bad for you. You will eventually maybe, if

you're constantly leaning over a computer, for example, you may

eventually develop a stooped posture. But if you find a

physio early enough and they give you some exercises, you can

change that. You can even undo a lot of the damage that you've

done. And the same is true for your voice. It's habit, habit

that has become so normal that it feels like you can't change

it, but you can. You can through small daily habits, through

practices, through learning and understanding how it works. So

this was huge for me. And as I was doing these exercises, as I

was building this relationship with my voice, I felt that my

voice was changing like the sound changed. Just because I

was doing these, these physical exercises, my tone changed and

my attitude changed, and I realized that those things that

I was listening to, they were my judgments. They were the

defensiveness I had, the despair I was in. That's what I was

hearing, that I was reacting to. And as that melted away, and I

became to enjoy this relationship with my body and my

voice, I began to hear that in my voice. I love the sound of my

voice. Now it feels good. It should feel good. We don't

really address self love in speaking training, but I feel

like we should, because it's a huge part of what's going on. If

you are a speaker, you are standing up there, and you are

sharing your essence, you are exposed, you are speaking about

your passions. You're standing for something. And if you don't

feel confident, if you don't love what you're talking about,

and you don't feel at least some type of love or acceptance for

yourself, it's going to create a barrier. Those insecurities are

going to create a barrier between you and your audience,

and all they're going to see is the insecurity, because that is

a it's like a mask that we wear, and it covers everything else we

have to get rid of that we there's so much we need to undo

all those defense mechanisms and those insecurities so that we

can be seen for who we are, and it's only then that we can stand

in our truth and be heard, because speaking takes courage.

And then what's cool about that is I learned that by being

authentic, by being transparent, by being humble and earnest and

honest about where I was, letting myself feel the fear,

letting myself feel everything

I didn't have anything to be scared of anymore, because when

you are being totally transparent and standing In your

truth, no one can hurt you. They can hurt you when you're

pretending, when you're pretending to be more confident

than you are, when you're pretending to know more than you

do, when you're pretending to be more together than you are.

That's when people can hurt you, because they can see the chinks

in your armor, and they can poke and they can say, oh, but that's

not true. And oh, but that's not true. This is where imposter

syndrome comes from. By trying to inhabit something that we

don't feel and reality might be something different, like maybe

you really do know what you're talking about, but you don't

feel it. If we don't bring those feelings with us, that imposter

syndrome is just going to get bigger, which is why embodiment

is so important instead. Standing in your truth is

everything, because then you are safe again. You know your truth,

and everyone can see it, and it feels vulnerable and it feels

exposing, but it is also so strong and so courageous, and I

learned too, that by stepping into that courage, I wasn't

waiting for confidence to come along. Competence is a side

effect. It comes later. Confidence is the reward you get

after doing the hard work. You have to prove your competence.

You have to stand up and be courageous. Courage over

confidence. Courage comes first. Confidence is your reward. You

don't need your reward first. You need to find your engine.

What drives you? What is your passion? Is it longing? Is it is

it anger? Is it frustration? Is it love? What is it that makes

you go? I want to speak. I have something to say. When you can

find that you can tap into that, all this kind of self

insecurity, self image stuff doesn't become it falls away. It

doesn't it's not important anymore, and you can stand at

who you are. It's a beautiful thing. That's what we need right

now. Your voice doesn't need to be beautiful. You don't need to

be perfect. You need to be expressive. You need to be

transparent and flexible and fun and fragile and agile, all these

things we need more human communication. A perfect voice

is not useful. A transparent voice, one that shows what's

going on, one that connects on a human level. That's what

technique is for. Is to help you find that agility, that vocal

variety, if you will, that energy to connect with other

people. Because now is not the time to be quiet. Now is the

time to speak your truth. It is your time to be loud, not to

shout, but to be fierce in your compassion and your courage and

your message. Now is the time for you to speak more than ever,

we need people who are aligned with who they are, who are

compassionate, who are human, who are loving and empathetic,

who have a message and have something to say. So I'm so glad

that you're here. I am over joyed that you are here. We are

going to have so much fun. I'm going to share everything that I

can with you about speaking techniques, how to look after

your voice, how to have fun with it, how to throw your script

away, rip it up and use it as confetti to celebrate this new

way of speaking that is free, that is fun, that is flexible

and human and connected, because that is what the world needs

right now. So I hope for you today, find some time to connect

to your fire. What is your engine? What makes you want to

get out there and speak, connect to that today, and I'll see you

in the next episode.