I did a tiny, taster session for the Own Your Spoken Voice workshop last week.
Networking Group
I recently joined a networking group for women in my village. It’s in the gin shop and run by a fabulous woman called Zöe, Yes it is a gin shop. Check out Gin and Pickles here.
Zöe asked for volunteers to present and I knew that I wanted to move on with the own spoken voice work so I volunteered. Then I made a note in my diary to look at it a month before.
I did look at it a month before and I did make a plan but I knew that beyond looking at body release and breath release in a very speedy and superficial way (because the whole workshop takes an hour), the work would be led by what the group brought.
The main challenge is that most of the people in the group are really confident speakers; and I knew that it could be unkind to pick on the people who aren’t fans of public speaking as they’ve not signed up for a voice workshop, they’re just there to network.
What we did
I started by explaining that the work is useful for public speaking (oration if we’re being posh) but the work is deeper than that.
Own Your Spoken Voice is about taking up space. It’s about being as big as you would be if the world hadn’t told you to be quieter, if the world hadn’t told you to be smaller. How you would be the world hadn’t told you that you were too much.
We did some alignment work, some abdominal bouncing and abdominal release work, (this is what people usually mean when they say “using the diaphragm”). That took about 10 mins and felt really rushed to me as I would usually take hours over this work because it’s so important.
Then I worked on a one to one basis with one brave volunteer.
The Brave Volunteer
Two things stood out to me from when she spoke to the group.
The first thing was that she is really tall. I find that most short people stand really tall and most tall people either stoop a bit or drop their heads. It makes sense as tall people have to accommodate shorties, (like me) the whole time and it becomes a habit for them to look down to make eye contact. But looking down all of the time almost always involves a degree of misalignment.
To help our volunteer we all had to stand on chairs so she was able to own her marvellous height. This won’t solve any issues she may (or may not, we are all different), have in standing tall when presenting or more widely in life but it did give her an experience of being a shorty and how easy it is to stand tall when you’re the smallest.
The other issue was that it felt to me that she wanted to be more playful.
So I got her to connect with the more playful side of herself and her voice. I asked her to share her elevator pitch1 and it was so serious.
She said afterwards that she was a teacher for years and there is so much judgment on teachers nowadays. It’s astonishing to me how we take on rubbish from the wider world that doesn’t serve us!
Everyone gets a go
Then we all went round the room and took up space. And then we had to take up more space and more space.
It reminded me of the thing I wrote about how radical it is to take time to breathe.
I kept telling them to take their time to breathe and I hope, that after being told to breathe over and over by me, that at some point over the next hour, or day or week they will catch themselves holding their breath, or rushing their inhale or speech and slow down.
I hope they will take a bit of time to own their spoken voices and be more present or powerful.
Also at the end several people said that they felt more positive than when the arrived that morning. They all seemed surprised. As though a workshop about owning your spoken voice wouldn’t be a lovely opportunity to take up space and make a big sound.
Zöe has written a lovely summary of the taster that I’m copying below.
Zöe Pawelczyk’s Summary of the Taster Session
Speaker: Rebecca Schwarz – Owning Your Spoken Voice.
It is tricky to do a write-up on Rebecca’s fabulous talk because a lot of it involved us making funny noises, standing on chairs and jiggling our bodies! But there was, of course, far more to it than that.
She introduced it by saying there is something healing about owning and taking up space and I can say that I think everyone left feeling uplifted, empowered even.
It was an introduction to a whole day workshop Rebecca runs, which involves body work, breath work, theatrical work and, as she described it “healing woo-woo”! Expanding into your space, slowing things down, remembering to breathe, commanding and being aware of your own body, being authentic.
Super interesting and definitely beneficial. Also thanks to Rosie for being a brave guinea pig! Rebecca’s next course is on Sunday 1st February in Alvechurch, location TBC, so get in touch to book on, and check out ownyourspokenvoice.com
Thanks, Rebecca, for sharing this with us.
- An elevator pitch is a term for when you have 30 seconds, or 1 minute with someone to tell them all about you and/or your business.
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Join the next Own Your Voice workshop and start being being heard