The voice and the vagus nerve
As an entrepreneur, being visible is important. It’s even more important to have an impact on your audience. Your voice is an essential tool in every entrepreneur’s toolbox to create maximum impact.
Biology of Sound
The human ear is designed to pick up the sound of human voices and to interpret whether they're a threat or not.
When we hear a low voice or a low tone of any description, the way we hear it is through our jaw bone. Hearing is a vibration, so the vibrations of a low tone will be received by our jaw bone and then that in turn, vibrates little bones in our ears and that allows us to hear the sound.
Hearing Danger
Biologically we're designed to hear it in our jaw first because that's where the vibrations are received, we sense that as a predator. Unfortunately for men, or the male voice, there is a slight disadvantage because a lower voice it is inclined to send that signal regardless. However, men don't completely lose out because more important than the tone of the voice is vocal prosody. Prosody is the variations and tone of the voice. It's not monotone, but a sing-song kind of voice. This type of voice has the most appeal to our physiology and our biology.
If you go into a presentation and just shout at people at the same level you're going to be sending little vibrations to their lower jaw saying this is dangerous and then if there's no prosody at all in the voice, there's no kind of pauses or intonations, regardless of how powerful your content is it's going to send these unconscious messages to your listeners biology or audiences biology that there's a danger present.
Safety in a Smile
Another way we take in information around whether somebody is safe or not is through their smile. But it's not the smile that comes from their mouth, it's a smile that comes from the eyes. The vagus nerve is a cranial nerve and it travels down the face, it innervates the muscles of the eyes, down the face, through the lips and chin and down the side of the neck to the sinus of the heart. This is why the heart meditations of HeartMath Institute are so powerful because when we connect into the sinus valve of the heart that is innervated through the vagus nerve we're connected into our relational field.
That's a field where we can smile from the eyes, we can hear things that feel like they're bringing in more safety. When we hear the perfect voice for the human ear it is somewhere around a female voice. Again, females do have a slight evolutionary advantage around their voice but it's not entirely so. It also needs to be modulated.
Sounds of Safety
What happens is that instead of hearing it through our jaw bone, which is how we hear the sounds of unsafety or danger, we actually hear it through these little muscles in our ear. There are floating bones there and around the floating bones, there are muscles. It’s the same with how danger is sent through our jaw bone. Safety is sent through these floating bones in our ear, they're not in a fixed position so when they vibrate we get a sense of safety. A perfect pitch voice will vibrate those little floating bones in our ear. We know that there are male singers or male actors who do that, so it's not just a female thing, but women do have a slight advantage that seems to hit that particular frequency that vibrates those bones in the ear in a way that can elicit the biological safety response.
Intonation and Prosody are Key
We have to be really mindful about our voices and the best way to do that is through intonation and prosody variation. You can practice in front of a mirror by simply talking to yourself out loud. You see what it's like to talk to yourself in different ways, loudly or a whisper. If you do that you can notice your hearing changes. You can tune in to your voice in a different way.
Transforming your Voice starts with your Nervous System
You can make your presentations better by paying attention to your voice. I've worked with singers and I've also had a similar experience with my own voice. When singers finish nervous system training with me, many found they had a completely different voice. What I'm suggesting that you consider, is that there is this deeper possibility when you get more space in your nervous system, then you can have a completely different voice.
We sing and speak through all the gaps in the cavities of the body so any little spaces that you have, we can direct the sound for those spaces. Singers know about directing through the sinus cavities and so when we create more space in the nervous system we have this opportunity where our voice has changed dramatically. I've had that with other singers, performers and speakers in the past where people I've worked with have also been similarly surprised by the change in their voice.
Learn more about the dysregulation of the nervous system here.
Create more Space
Expansion Training for Healers: Rewire your Nervous System for Spaciousness can help you create space so your nervous system can expand and hold more of all the things you want. The focus is on learning how to inhabit a safe container of embodiment in the present moment, which increases your capacity to be more magnetic. Find out more about embodiment training below.
Harnessing the collective power of a small group to exponentially expand your nervous system and experience infinite possibilities.
The next round of Expansion Training for Healers starts on May 9th, 2023. Book a co-regulation call to find out if it’s the perfect fit for you. I’d love to meet you!