Mechanics: Like Riding A Bike

One harsh reality about skills is that they are not permanent. If you stop working on something, it will slide — eventually out of reach. Even the ubiquitous adage about riding a bike is only partially true. Anyone who has ever taken many years off from riding a bike has felt this. The process looks more like doubt and/or fear, instability while starting, and only slowly regaining of the ability to proceed. An ability that we don’t interrogate to determine if we are matching our past skill because we are just excited that it worked.

Muscle memory, as we like to call it, is a lovely thing but when we are trying to improve ourselves as voice users achieving the lowest bar isn’t helpful. We want to be continuously in growth if only because vocal development is rarely about the voice alone. Voice development works in tandem with confidence, leadership, clarity, and authority — all things that help us command the spaces in which we use our voices.

So today is an invitation to make practice a daily commitment to yourself. To begin to understand what your body feels like when it is ready for optimal voice use. To warm up to speak and sing with purpose. If you don’t know how to get started seek the information you need. There are some good starter videos on the GROW Voice FB page if you need a direction. I invite you to think about your voice use as an extension of self because, unless you don’t use the voice to speak, it is how you enter the room.