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Healing the soul's voice

Great advice from the Water Board???

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I just read some of the best advice I’ve seen recently about how to communicate – from a place I would NEVER have expected.. the chair of the CA State Water Resources Control Board!

Felicia Marcus happens to be a Harvard classmate of mine, though I never met her there. She and the Board have the incredibly difficult job of creating new water plans for our drought-stricken state with stake holders whose interests often seem to be diametrically opposed.

Herding cats. On steroids. Lions and tigers and…

Yet, they’ve managed to get some great stuff done. Her attitude towards communication has A LOT to do with it.Continue Reading

This made me cry…

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12779274_1073492029359804_4494323776771849535_oThis photo shows my favorite moment from Bill Baren’s Big Shift Experience in San Jose. Even though I brought home a serious cold/flu from the event, which I’m still recovering from, I’ll always remember this moment with tears and gratitude.

A woman stepped up to the mic to share an Ah Ha she got from a partner exercise. Bill invited her onstage. She acknowledged her male exercise partner for the respectful, loving and compassionate energy he brought to her that made her feel safe enough to work with him.

She brought him up onstage with her to hug and thank him, and she shared that she had been abused by many men for much of her young life, including her father.

Then, this happened.Continue Reading

True partnership in action

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sagelevineandarianaI had the great good fortune to attend the Women’s Leadership Summit last weekend at the beautiful Asilomar Conference Grounds in Monterey – a place I always love to go to for any reason.

This was Sage Lavine’s event – the goddess I’m hugging in this photo. I love this woman, and the way she leads and does business. She’s a beautiful example of the new paradigm of business, and of true partnership – with self, others, work, community, spirit and nature.

(I wrote about partnership last week. Read that article here.)

I love how she combines conscious business coaching with spirituality, mutual support, and giving back. I love how she speaks in her whole soul’s voice.

​​​​​​​Partnership in work: She demonstrates partnership with her staff – acknowledging them and celebrating them more than any other workshop leader I’ve seen.

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Power over? Or power with?

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power over? or power with?

Power.

Does the word make you uncomfortable?

Conscious people who’ve done a lot of work on themselves are often uncomfortable with the idea of wielding power. The word has a negative connotation for us – of force, domination, control…

But – as change agents, we have to get comfortable with power. We have to be able to handle power, leadership and influence. However, to create the change we want, we need a different KIND of power – power WITH instead of power OVER.

This is another piece of the new project I’m working on – upgrading the 3rd chakra to handle power in partnership – power WITH, instead of in the old dominator model – power OVER.

I’m really excited about this project, and how it’s coming together. It’s going to be a wonderful new tool for Healing Your Soul’s Voice, which means being able to speak from the Partnership model of power (among other things).Continue Reading

Your mp3 habit is messing with your voice and your brain…

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Did you know that listening to mp3 music can mess with your brain, and your voice?

I love my digital music. But I make sure I listen to CDs and high definition recordings, too.

Why? Because I know from personal experience that we can train our brains to stop paying attention to certain frequencies, and that’s BAD news – for our brains and our voices.

In last week’s article, I talked about how we don’t hear our own voices accurately. This is another piece of that important discussion.

When I had to stop performing as a singer, part of the reason was because I actually could not hear my own voice accurately in the heart of the soprano range. When I sang, I heard my voice as matching pitch with the piano, or another singer – but I wasn’t. Here’s the freaky part: I could hear that I was flat if I heard a recording of myself – just not while I was singing.

I found out how to fix that when I read about the work of Dr. Alfred Tomatis in a singing magazine. I had to re-train my brain’s ability to perceive all the frequencies in my own voice.

I had an audiogram at the beginning of my listening retraining program that showed a dip in my hearing at 2,000 hz in both ears.

After my listening program, that dip was gone. So was my inability to hear when I was singing flat. (I still had to retrain all the bad muscle habits that made me flat, but that’s another story. I couldn’t have fixed those without restoring my brain’s ability to hear my own voice accurately again.)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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