Ariana Newcomer

Healing the soul's voice

Do you let your voice out to play?

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do you let your voice out to play

Being creative is essential to our success – in whatever we do. I wrote 2 articles recently about the process of creativity – Are You Crazy?, and The Art of Serendipity.

Here’s another crucial piece of your creativity that no one is telling you about: Your voice.

I’ve seen it over and over again with my clients. When you free up your voice, when you learn to play with your voice, and gain a greater range of self expression through your voice, your creativity sky rockets.

Your voice is an expression of your essence.
So, if you’re holding your voice back (which most of you are doing without realizing it), you’re holding back your essence. And you’re holding back your creativity, which is tied to freely expressing your essence.

Here’s what I recommend:
Read out loud regularly, especially from books or poems that are just silly and fun, so you can actually PLAY with your voice. 10-15 minutes 3x a week is enough. I love Dr. Suess books for this practice.Continue Reading

You’re not as good as you think

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Yes, I acknowledge it. This is the opposite of what I usually tell you.

Most of the time, I’m all about getting women (especially) to understand that you are better than you think you are, so you can stop hiding out and feeling like a fraud. So you can own your value and the value of everything you have to offer, and we can hear that in your voice.

But there’s a time when you’re NOT as good as you think you are.

It’s when you’ve finally gotten yourself to get out there and speak. You’ve got some experience. You feel like you’ve got your story down. You’ve given your talk or presentation many times, and you’re getting some good feedback.

You think you sound pretty good, and you think you don’t need a speaking coach anymore.

Or, WHEW, you’re glad you never spent the money on that speaker coach you talked to. I knew I could do it myself, you say.

Ooops.

You’ve forgotten a crucial thing about your brain. Or, maybe, you never knew this – your brain is messing with you.

You don’t hear yourself accurately. Or more correctly, you don’t LISTEN to yourself accurately.

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The Art of Serendipity

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IMG_0489Want to be creative? Cultivate the art of Serendipity!

Serendipity is such a wonderful word, isn’t it?

It makes me think of happy chance, and it’s related in my mind to synchronicity, another word I love.

I just found out that we can actually cultivate serendipity. This is exciting to me! Here’s a lovely story about the origin of the word:

In 1754, Horace Walpole wrote some thoughts on a Persian fairy tale that entranced him about 3 princes from the Isle of Serendip who had extraordinary powers of observation. Walpole suggested this tale contained an important idea about human genius: “As their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” (NYTimes 1/3/16) He proposed the word “serendipity” to describe this talent.

So, serendipity is not something that happens to us by dumb luck. It’s something we DO. It’s about paying attention, casting a wider net, allowing plans to change based on a feeling, using an accidental encounter or happening to chart a new path or open new doors, or make new discoveries.

It means that having too narrow a focus or being too perfectionistic can actually prevent you from finding creative solutions to problems in your business and in your life.Continue Reading

Hold Your Tongue!

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How many times have you been told to “hold your tongue” or “bite your tongue”?

How many times have you “swallowed your tongue” or “held your tongue” when there was something you really wanted to say, but couldn’t (or didn’t think you should)?

These are common phrases we use to stop ourselves or someone else from talking, or from saying something in particular. They’re ways we hold our voices back.

You need to know 2 things:

1. Holding, biting or swallowing your tongue are not just metaphors for not speaking. They actually cause physical tension in your tongue, which can really mess with your voice.

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No, no, no!!

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Do you struggle sometimes to say that little word, “no?”

Yep. Me, too.

I led exercises in how to say NO at the FEM Talks event, “How To Set Nourishing Boundaries and Say No With An Open Heart”.

I asked the women when it was hard for them to say no. Some of the things they said were:Continue Reading

What Do You Do When Things Don’t Go As Planned?

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Oh c**p, I couldn’t load the program I needed… Here I was for my carefully prepared talk to the Association of Women In Science in Palo Alto, CA.

Since this is a science group (and because it’s really fun), I had planned to use my Voiceprint program to demonstrate the acoustics of voice projection towards the end of my presentation.

My regular slideshow was up and running on my Macbook just fine. But the Voiceprint program (a spectrograph representation of the frequencies in the voice) lives on my old PC laptop, which is still running Windows 7, and hadn’t been booted up in about 6 months.

I DID boot it up the day before so it could do that interminable Windows Update thing. Unfortunately, the next day, it had 78 MORE updates to install, which took FOREVER, and it was still slogging through that as I began my talk. Aaarrgghh!Continue Reading