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Are you curious how your life might change if your voice was stronger?
If you are a woman and you feel like your voice is underappreciated, strained or you’d like to power up your voice, then read on to learn the 4 often overlooked steps that just might transform your voice AND your health/life.
First, learn how to sustain the phrase. This means cultivating a relaxation response while you are talking. How do you know if you are doing this? Listen in to find out.
Second, do you know what real self care is? It’s not a bubble bath, taking a hot shower, or getting a massage once per year. It’s not adding more to your already long to-do list. It’s changing the system. What?! I know…that’s probably not what you expected to see.
Third, learning how to recalibrate your relationship with stress. Stress will inevitably be a part of your life…but there ARE things you can do to navigate them more easily.
Finally, do the NAP. The meditation that is, although a good nap could be worthy of self-care too! We’ve covered this in more detail in Episodes 1, 2, and 3 of this season.
Hi everyone and welcome back to the Living Well podcast. I’m your host Ginger Garner. In this episode, I want to talk about getting your queen on. Or if we’re going non -binary or you’re the other gender, get your king on. Whatever. Doesn’t matter to me. Don’t care. What’s important is for the most part when we’re talking about
Powering up your voice. We’re generally talking about women or people who identify as female. Why is that? Well, it’s pretty obvious because your voices are the ones that have been so easily ignored, dismissed, marginalized or left out. So let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about getting your queen on. Powering up your voice. I want to give you four steps to that today from…
the bedroom and your personal relationships to the boardroom and your professional relationships. If you struggle with both, right, which is very likely, unless you’ve just landed an amazing relationship where you feel heard and respected, if so, congratulations, that’s fantastic. But there’s a lot of you out there that…
that frankly haven’t and you don’t hear, feel heard from the bedroom or to the boardroom, either one. So I’m gonna include in the show notes for you a couple of posts. One is on finding your own voice to improve your health. And the other is about using your big voice. And also a YouTube video that might be helpful in your practice on powering up your voice. But let’s talk about the four steps.
An inarguable fact that women are discriminated against when it comes to their voice. They are considered less trustworthy, less competent, and less able as a leader the minute their voice is identified or associated with the feminine. And there’s plenty of research in those links in the show notes that I’m giving you.
And if you have something like vocal fry, which is that kind of…gravelly, scratchy sound the voice makes when it is strained, then the scrutiny of you as someone who identifies as female increases exponentially. So if you’re not familiar with vocal fry. Think about singing jazz when someone hits a gravelly note, right? And they reach down really low, but when they do that,
They might have a little “wah” at the end of their sound of their voice, right? While it sounds pretty cool when you’re singing, a lot of us end up doing it because we’re trying to adopt a more masculine, like a deeper voice. And it’s below our normal pitch, and so it strains the voice. And of course, if you do it a lot, like I used to do early on as a jazz singer and wasn’t really aware of what I was doing.
I just know I had to hit those notes. I would vocal fry more than I needed to and in a way that wasn’t sustainable. So I ended up hurting my voice. So that’s vocal fry. But back to our point, women also clearly receive poorer care and less attention in healthcare. Women’s health is less researched. There’s less funding for it, which means we know less about how to take good care of women.
And both of these atrocities hold our society back as a whole. Men and women are hurt when half the sky is held back and treated unfairly. So what do we do about it? We can, and we must, learn to use our big voice. So step number one, let’s dive in.
First, when you’re learning to use your voice in a sustainable way, you need to nurture a relaxation response. One of the ways you can do that is to test your vagus nerve. This is only one of the ways, and I’m not gonna get too nerdy with this, it’s just gonna be a really quick screen that you can go open your mouth, look in the mirror, and say “ah.”
And if the little dangling uvula in the back of your throat, where the soft palate comes together. If it deviates to one side or the other, you might not have a great stress response. Now, is it the only indicator? Absolutely not.
So other indicators, if you have a hard time with your rest and digest and you feel instead wired but tired, like you wanna go to sleep but you can’t.
Or you end up having responses that are kind of knee-jerk to situations where you realize later, wow, that might’ve been what Daniel Goleman calls an amygdala hijack. Where you made a less than best decision and you realize it later. That’s a whole other issue if you’ve made a bad decision and someone else has to recognize it for you. So that’s a few of the ways that you can recognize if the vagus nerve is doing okay.
So the other step two piece of that is creating a solid self -care routine. Now notice I didn’t teach you how to nurture a reliable relaxation response in step one because there are many ways to do that. And of course it’s outside the scope of what I can teach you in 15 minutes or so. But know that it’s important. And if you’re going to be able to cultivate a sustainable voice and we all depend on our voice,
then you have to have a good, healthy relaxation response. So if you struggle with hoarseness or losing the voice, or your voice just doesn’t sound the way it used to, or the way you want it to, then that’s a good reason to dive deeper.
Next, whether it’s mindfulness, meditation, or joining up with one of the programs that I have. Next is to cultivate a solid self-care routine. And this word is overused so much that I just want to tell you what self-care is NOT first. Self-care is not taking a shower.
And you know what I have used? I have used that as self care before. That is bottom of the barrel. Like you’re definitely not getting what you need in your life if the very act of taking a shower and washing off your body, you consider self care.
Like…You’ve had to keep your expectations so low from other people that even taking a shower feels like luxury, right? And self-care shouldn’t be luxury. That’s why self-care is not simply taking a shower or lighting candles or running a bubble bath. It’s not that. That is blame shifting how society doesn’t take care of women and saddling women, saddling you with more shit to do.
Like if you only…took a nice hot shower and breathed deep and maybe light a candle that cost 30 bucks, then you’d be able to handle functioning under a system built for men by men where you don’t have equal pay and you have no maternity leave and you’re more likely to die from being medically gaslit due to your health concerns being dismissed. Right? So we should call BS on that. Self -care is actually changing the system.
Self -care is deciding what you will and won’t take. Choosing relationships that truly nurture and respect you rather than being stuck in ones that drain you because all you do is babysit and stroke egos. Self -care is setting non-negotiable boundaries, not just getting a massage once a year. And literally like that’s me, you know.
Like I’ve done so many years, I did that for so many years. I considered self-care being able to go to the pharmacy alone and linger in the aisles for a little longer before I had to go home and be just inundated again. That’s not self-care, right? That’s not even getting your basic needs met. So I’ve been guilty of that, but instead of saddling myself with another long list of stuff to do for self-care.
It’s actually calling out what’s wrong with the system to begin with and then setting boundaries around it. So what does that look like for you? My suggestion is decide what you cannot live without doing and then go do it.
Whether you have to take less money when you’re already getting paid about 30% less than men anyway. Whether or not you have to take less money in the end on your deathbed, you’re gonna be happier regardless, regardless of if we ever get equal pay, which we probably won’t in our lifetime. But regardless of whether or not you get equal pay, you’ll have been happy with the life that you built instead of bitter and resentful, right?
And you won’t have also blamed yourself. If I had only taken that walk and drank more water and bought that essential oil and that face cream and whatever. Take the burden off yourself for self -care and start setting boundaries around your time as being precious because it is and ask more, right, than a shower or a trip to Walgreens or CVS where I can linger five more minutes because I’m getting a little bit of a breather.
So, decide what you cannot live without doing and do that. Next, step three.
Step three on powering up your voice. Recalibrate your attitude about stress. I’m not trying to give you a hard time, definitely not. There’s enough people in the world that want to give you a hard time about what you’re doing and how you’re not doing it right.
What I’m saying is, if we rethink stress. Like just this morning, I realized I had something big to do at 9 am and I totally forgot until 8:53 am And so instead of freaking out and going, Oh my God, you know, I just calmly got up, got my water, plugged in my computer and I said, this is fine.
I’m gonna take this stress moment and realize that, you know what, I can’t live without stress, which is the truth. That’s the point. We can’t live without stress. Our job is not to eliminate stress. It’s to learn to wrangle it so we can get stronger. Right? For example,
Osteopenia, osteoporosis, nobody wants it and no one has time for it. And yet you cannot build bone density without doing what? Pounding the pavement. You have to literally stomp around, right? Sometimes walking is not enough. Sometimes like climbing the stairs with a heavier footfall matters more than just taking a walk for building bone density. Same thing for muscle strength. We can’t just move the groceries from our trunk to our refrigerator and expect that that’s gonna build enough muscle strength, we have to lift weights. Now that could be lifting your own body weight, right?
But the point is, we have to lift the weight, we have to manage the stress, we have to pound the pavement. And that is not a bad thing. That’s not a bad thing. That is what makes us stronger. What you don’t have to do, is subject yourself to unnecessary levels of stress, right? Or get stuck in a sympathetic nervous system response, which is fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. And that’s the real problem, is that our body can get stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. What is fawn? Fawn is people pleasing.
And I close my eyes and I shake my head, because I’ve been guilty of that so much, so, so much. I’ve been guilty as a woman also being in freeze of accepting levels of mistreatment that I should have never accepted. But I did because as a woman, you’re really conditioned and culturally and socially taught to do that.
For example, even when you’re a little girl, he was picking on you, teasing you, pulling on your shirt or your dress or, you know, poking you in line. That’s because he likes you. What a load of crap. Why are we teaching girls to tolerate unnecessary amounts of stress when that’s not the way we would teach boys, right?
We’re not teaching, little girls that girls will be girls. We’re only teaching boys that, boys will be boys. You get a pass for that. Boys are less mature than girls, are they? Or do we allow that to happen? So decide what kind of stress is going to make you better, stronger, more resilient, more graceful even, but only you can decide what kind of stress you want in your life, nobody else.
And that’s the other piece of this. Is that women are conditioned to just tolerate whatever society wants, whatever, and usually it’s gonna be a man. Whatever that man says or does, they should just absorb it and somehow learn to work around it, right? We accept the bare minimum all the time.
And this isn’t to just talk about patriarchy essentially because that could be treatment from a fellow colleague, you know, female, non -binary, whatever, at work, whereas a person identifying as female, as a woman, as a she, as a her, that’s what we’re culturally conditioned to do and it’s not acceptable.
So only you can decide when you’re going to say no to that and start to realize that you actually have a human right to take care of yourself and to put your own oxygen mask on first. And that’s what I’m talking about when I say recalibrate your attitude towards stress. I’m not trying to give you a hard time and say that you have a crappy attitude towards stress and you have no resilience. You actually probably have more resilience than you need in a lifetime.
If you’re female because you’ve had to put up with so much inequity and unfairness and a lack of justice and not being believed or listened to or even helped when you go into the system of healthcare into the space that should be very, very safe, right? Even healthcare has not been a safe space for women and that’s huge and it’s not okay. So.
No one else can decide what kind of stress level and what kind of stressors that you will allow in your life. But I will help you try to discern which ones you should allow. And that means not allowing yourself to get stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn by someone who’s mistreating you by a system that’s not listening to you. You’re allowed to speak up. You’re allowed to take up space. You’re allowed to create waves.
Someone will call you bitchy or aggressive. That’s fine. That’s their problem, not yours. You definitely can’t please anyone. And if you’re a woman with a voice, you’ll rarely please anyone. And you have to get used to that. You have to say, it’s okay. It’s okay if people don’t like me. It’s okay if I’m not liked, because that’s the truth of it.
Okay, so step three was recalibrate your attitude about stress and know that you have more power and control than you think that you do. You decide what stressors you want in your life and set up a boundary and kick the others out.
Finally, the last thing that I want to share with you, step four in powering up your voice is to try the NAP. The NAP meditation. So if you have not listened to episodes one, two, and three, the first three episodes in season three essentially. Which each stand for N, A, and P. The acronym NAP.
Which is a meditation about improving your voice to pelvic floor connection, then I encourage you to do that. And the link to that will be in the show notes. So thanks for listening until the next episode. Keep living well, keep setting those boundaries, and keep claiming the power of your voice.
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