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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Becoming Fearless (Or Not)

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I was in a coaching program for a while with “Fearless” in the title. I learned a lot, but I didn’t become fearless.

Lots of people out there want to teach you how to become Fearless!! – to banish fear, to get rid of it, to stop it – because fear is BAD. Fear is negative, and we can’t have any negativity in our lives if we want to succeed. Or so the story goes.

The truth is, it’s not actually a good thing to get rid of fear.

There are 3 pieces of this.

One: Fear is actually a very valuable thing that tells us something is wrong, or could go badly wrong. Sometimes it is necessary to survival. That fear you feel when you’re thinking about whether to get into an elevator with a shifty-eyed, bad-energy-pouring-off-him guy is a good thing. It says, “Danger! Don’t go in there!”

Two: Making the automatic judgment that fear is negative usually misses the point.Continue Reading

Should I Just STFU?? Part 2

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STFUBlogBannerPart2 Last week, I wrote about why you can’t claim your habits of speech are “feminine speech,” and critics of your voice should just STFU.

My experience in coaching hundreds of women to shift their old voice stories and their disempowering habits of speech, and watching their whole lives open up afterward (businesses taking off, relationships healed, creativity unblocked, money flowing, confidence soaring) shows me how vital it is that you NOT accept this stupid idea.

If you haven’t read last week’s article, read it HERE, otherwise this won’t make as much sense to you.

So what are disempowering and/or injurious habits of speech? Why are they disempowering rather than just “feminine?”

First, some info about our brains. Hearing is the act of collecting sound. Listening is what the brain does with what it hears, and that involves lots of complex functions in the brain called “auditory processing.” If you want to be truly heard and understood, you have to give people’s brains the opportunity to do all this auditory processing in a way that results in actual listening, not just hearing.

Actual listening results in communication, more often than not. Hearing does not guarantee listening. Speaking to create communication is a skill most of us need to get better at.

Disempowering and potentially injurious habits of speech actually IMPEDE communication. Here’s how:
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Play With Your Voice

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Play With Your Voice:

The fastest way to make your presentations more compelling is by adding more expression to your speaking voice. In this video Here’s a simple tip to do it easily. Try it. It’s fun and it works! BTW – you are probably using way LESS expression than you think you are – bump it up!Continue Reading

Enthrall Your Listeners

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Enthrall Your Listeners: How the heck do you keep your audience engaged when delivering a talk or presentation? One of the best ways is to use vocal variety (like adding character voices to your presentations). Watch this video and see how to bring your talk to life.Continue Reading