Triple Take #12: sirening warm-up, speaking for listening, and how to breathe
- Kaffy Rice-Oxley
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
Voice Confident's Triple Take - your fortnightly trio of tips!
In this issue - a warm-up for your voice, how to speak to listen better, and how to breathe!
Voice - sirening warm-up
A quick and easy way to warm up your vocal folds and the muscles of the larynx is to vocalise up and down through your pitch range.
This moves through the different registers of the voice smoothly and means the vocal folds are gently stretched (for higher pitches) and relaxed (for lower pitches).
This is called sirening (because it sounds a bit like a siren!) and it’s often the first warm up exercise singers do, for a gentle warming of the vocal area.
As speakers we are probably not going to use the full vocal range our instruments are capable of, but by gently stretching and relaxing the vocal folds we will have more agility in our spoken pitch range and prep the voice for use, guarding against fatigue and damage.
How to siren:
Stand or sit up straight with shoulders away from ears; jaw and throat and forehead are relaxed.
Breathe in through your nose, allow lungs and belly to expand.
Breathing out, make an ‘ng’ sound (like at the end of the word ‘rung’) - you are connecting the back of the tongue and the soft palate. Mouth is slightly open, jaw is relaxed.
Start anywhere it feels comfortable - hold that sound for a few seconds until you are happy with it. It should be a nice constant humming sort of sound .
Then move a little above and a little below that note in pitch, sliding around as smoothly as you can. Then move a little higher and a little lower… keep expanding the range of the pitch slide until you run out of breath!
Repeat a couple of times.
It’s particularly good on a morning to get the voice up and running!
Presence - speaking for listening
I think a big chunk of executive and leadership presence is being able to listen. Properly. In a way that makes other people feel heard and understood.
There is a lot to listening well.
And listening can, in fact, involve speaking too.
One way we can deepen our listening by speaking is by acknowledging and encouraging. This works particularly well if someone is expressing strong feelings.
For example, if someone is telling you they are upset about something, often the problem is multi-faceted and because they are upset they might leap about and not structure what they are saying clearly.
If they lose track, you could say something like, “I’m hearing that you found it really difficult to understand why X did Y. Would you like to explain that more to me?”
The key to it being “listening speaking” is that you aren’t offering your own views or judgements. You are helping the other person to be listened to.
This works because it validates the person’s feelings and deepens the connection between you.
Confidence - how to breathe
Diaphragmatic breathing is one of the most powerful tools for stress management.
Use it to show up calm and confident in any situation!
It stimulates the vagus nerve, which acts as an information highway between the brain and organs, signalling that everything is fine and normal function can resume.
One of the great things about it is that no one can see you doing it! And it works anytime, anywhere.
How to breathe:
Relax the abdominal area. Keep your shoulders away from your ears. Face, jaw, forehead is relaxed.
Take a breath in through your nose and imagine the air travelling down through your body into the soles of your feet.
Feel your belly expand out and to the side, as the contraction of the diaphragm muscles pushes down on your abdominal organs.
Feel your lungs rise and expand. (Keep those shoulders relaxed and away from the ears!)
Breathe out slowly and steadily, allowing the belly to subside as the diaphragm moves back again.
For extra relaxation, try to slow down your breathing by breathing in through the nose for a slow count of 4 and breathing out through the mouth for a count of 6. Once you can do this comfortably, try 4-7.
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