How to Become a Rockstar Communicator

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (00:02)

Power women, what does it mean to you?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (00:06)

I come from a background where I think in the context of choirs and bands and a thought that often comes to me is how do we be greater than the sum of our parts? And women naturally congregate into communities. We are nurturers and people that come together collectively by instinct. And I think that that’s the great gift of communities when they’re pulling together is their ability to be greater than the sum of their parts. And that’s what I think is the power of women.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (00:47)

Di Gillett and welcome to the Power Of Women Podcast where we celebrate the strength, resilience, and achievements of women from all walks of life. And whilst most podcasts tell you what’s possible, these women will share with you what it took to get there. It’s a place where women supporting women isn’t just a sentiment, it’s a decision we make every single day. Today I’m joined by a woman who has

 

Built a career helping others with the one thing many of us have struggled to grasp: your voice. She has performed at Royal Albert Hall, the Barbican, and Sydney Opera House. Joining me in this studio, she is the voice and communication expert, a former professional performer and founder of Find Your Voice. Emmanuella Grace, welcome to the POWER OF WOMEN Podcast

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (01:43)

Di, thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here. You can hear that in my voice, I’m sure.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (01:49)

We

 

did share just off camera that the first time we did meet, I told you to stop. I’m not gonna do that today.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (01:59)

I love a woman who knows boundaries and how to put them right in their place.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (02:03)

Maybe. But before we get into the word today and we are going to do some work, I want to know about Emmanuella Grace. What was the defining experience that brought you to this point?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (02:17)

I think we look back on these things with 2020 vision and we can go, that’s the moment that everything changed. For context, I was born in the Outback and then grew up in a little fishing village from the age of eight that was incredibly isolated. And so I used to volunteer to hang out the laundry.

 

In the hope that if I sung loud enough, some tourist who was visiting our little village might hear me and whisk me away like a Disney princess to somewhere where I wasn’t living in a fishing village with 300 people. and through a series of events, by the time I was 16, I was singing with a professional-level ensemble in places like the Sydney Opera House. But part of that constellation of events also

 

Meant that there was a music teacher who didn’t like the sound of my voice. And as an adult, you look back and you go, Well, that was their aesthetic choice. They didn’t like the sound of your voice. But in those formative years, what I heard was, you can’t sing. Your voice is invalid. It sounds awful. You should be quiet. And being the stubborn person that I am, instead of accepting that what I did was withdraw from formal music lessons, ⁓

 

in the school context and actually hire private teachers and start taking lessons with teachers that understood about jazz and musical theater and things outside of the classical world where I was performing. And that became a journey for me of understanding that if you can find the right teachers who can give you the right exercises over time with practice, you can learn anything. And I might not have been the best singer, but I was certainly at certain points in my life the best trained singer I knew. And that’s what

 

gave me the ability to then break it down and teach it to others.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (04:09)

Did your world ever wrap around again to the person who didn’t believe you were a great singer?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (04:17)

In a way, I had my high school reunion last year and there was a whole group of girls there who had been a part of that cohort. And as adults, they were telling me stories of things they remembered, of cruelty that was I guess directed towards me that I’d forgotten about, you know? And they were horrified that that was allowed to happen and they were so proud of me.

 

Some of them were girls that had actually participated in that bullying as well. So it was really healing and really cool to spend time with them and we could look at it as adults and kind of go, whoa, I’d forgotten about that. Or yeah, like, you know, teenage girls are awful. Sometimes teachers are awful. And I’d so thoroughly moved on from the, you know, the idea of speaking from the scar, not the wound. ⁓ turns out twenty five years was just the right amount of time to get over it.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (05:01)

Yeah.

 

There you have it. And speaking of age, because you’re on the cusp of millennials. Mm-hmm. I’m on the cusp between baby boomers and Gene X. I’m curious, does when we were born relate to how we earn our voice? Is there a a difference by generation?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (05:36)

Our voice is the byproduct of a number of things, our physiology and how we learn to use the instrument, our socialization, our culture, what we hear. I feel like there’s probably very subtle components that weigh in to to shape how we use our voice, ⁓ probably with our generation. But what I’m also seeing is that change in the Gen X into

 

millennial into Gen Z, Gen Z now using their voice more as their their perception is changing based on the platforms they’re using as well. So technology didn’t play a very big role in how we used our voice in some ways. It was probably more subtle to do with the vocal habits that we had. I’ll come back to that in a sec. But what I’m seeing now with ⁓ Gen Z and Alpha is they’re seeing social media as a component of their voice. And when I say voice, I mean your words

 

The sound that you make, your body language, all forms of how you express yourself, all forms of how you communicate what’s inside you to outside you. Does that make sense?

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (06:46)

It does. And I think that’s gonna come back to something we’ll touch on later about performative expression.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (06:52)

Right. But further to your question before, what you would see is in different generations different vocal ticks. So I come from the generation of the sexy baby and the upspeak. And you probably come from a generation, definitely the one before you, with the Bacol syndrome, where where you sound like you’ve been smoking and

 

Having lots of whiskey, but that’s not that different to what came back around the the generation after mine, ⁓ millennial into zillennial, where we had ⁓ a lot of vocal fry, right? So that’s something that thoroughly gets blamed by vocal coaches on the Kardashians. I don’t know. I feel like it’s a constellation of things. ⁓ and it’s interesting because that’s a byproduct of not enough tension in the vocal folds. And so it literally conveys, if you think about

 

How w with mirror neurons, that’s something we can talk about later as well. I can feel in my body what’s happening in your body. Literally the lack of effort in someone’s throat can be felt by the person sitting across the table and interpreted as not caring.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (07:56)

I don’t feel at all anxious sitting in front of you talking to you.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (08:00)

My heart not. I’m very friendly.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (08:05)

I know, but your ability to read what’s going on based on my emphasis is is somewhat unnerving. So we’ll we’ll see how we work with that. Because you’re a you’re a performer. I mean you’ve you’ve performed as a as a singer at at Royal Albert Hall at at at Sydney Opera House. Mm-hmm. What work have you done to own your voice to own your voice? You’ve only got one voice on those stages.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (08:36)

It’s something that translates really beautifully into business and probably I didn’t know how to articulate when I was a singer, but now having gone back and studied teaching and studying psychology, I have a way of explaining it that might make sense to some of your audience. Maybe all of them, who knows? It’s the idea that if you don’t own your own voice, you’re kind of letting the team down.

 

So I sang in very elite ensembles where there’s sometimes three or eight or twelve of us. And you might have a full orchestra and you might have a full chorus as well. But I’d be part of that very small group of people that kind of are in charge of representing the voice of the composer as a collective. So as an alto, you kind of have one of the lower lines, you have one of the deeper voices. I have sung soprano, it’s not my favorite. ⁓ I don’t like being the center of attention.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (09:27)

Ha Don’t delete me, but that’s okay.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (09:28)

But you do have

 

No, that’s for the sopranos. ⁓ Leave that for the girls with the high voices. But it’s one of those things where if you don’t take ownership of your own voice and start there, you’ll undermine the entire ensemble. And if you imagine that you have a whole orchestra, a whole chorus, and suddenly you’ve got this one little group that’s doing, you know, let’s say you were doing Vivaldi’s Gloria or something like that, and someone starts to sound like they’re a honking goose.

 

You’ve ruined it for everyone, not just on the stage, but in the audience as a collective. So that’s the first thing. You have to own your own voice. Then you have to learn to blend with those next to you. Because even if you’re singing in tune, you have to learn to blend so that as an ensemble of that size, it becomes a homogenous sound. So everything sounds really smooth and beautiful together. So then you have to listen to the person next to you while holding on to your own voice and blend with them.

 

And then when it comes to things like dynamics, do we get louder, do we get softer, you know, what’s the pace? You then have to listen to the whole ensemble. So there’s your voice in your head, there’s the voice next to you, then there’s the voice of the whole collective. And so when I think about finding my voice with the maturity that came from performing at that elite level, it was about learning to own your voice and the importance of getting on with others and working well with others because

 

It’s never just one person on stage. Like not not in stages that size. If you’re playing in a pub with a guitar, that’s fine. Knock yourself out. But if you’re playing at that level, you’re not one person, you’re part of an ensemble. And so you have to think of yourself as part of a collective as well as taking ownership of yourself. So

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (11:12)

So

 

you could be sitting here talking about how a team works together. Exactly right. Exactly the same way as as you’re talking about your voice blending. Yeah.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (11:20)

And I probably didn’t know how to articulate that well. We did spend a lot of time when I was studying in London, studying collegiate music and ⁓ stagecraft and understanding how to set up stages as performers so that the experience was good for your audience. But I wasn’t really conscious of how universal that experience was until I started working with people in business settings.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (11:41)

There you go. Well that that that raises a point because if we get into the heart of it, you’ve w you’ve worked with women who are professional, capable, articulate business leaders. But a lot of them are not using their voice or not owning their voice. Correct. What’s happening there?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (12:02)

I think you can’t underestimate two things. One, the impact of socialization. So you might have ascended to a point where now you’re a s a a deputy or a CIO, CEO, CFO. So a lot of the technical people, they’re my people. Yeah. There’ll still be a component of you that still thinks of yourself the way you did when you were a child or a teenager. Those versions of you come with you. And if something happens in that moment that puts you back into that component of your identity.

 

That’s the voice you will use. And if so your teenager thinks, ⁓ no one’s gonna listen to what I’ve got to say, even if you’re at the board table holding the talking stick with everyone’s attention and all the gravity in the room directed at you, if you don’t take that and step into your adult voice, you’re gonna show up as a teenager or the child. I had a client that had a pretty big profile as the ⁓ ultimately the CIO of a very multi billion dollar fund.

 

And she told me when she first started with me how she’d sit at the boardroom table knowing that people wanted to hear from her. But when it was her time to speak, she fell into what she called the white hole. And that’s something that I would say is her experience of something called the amygdala hijack. Have you heard that term?

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (13:20)

I have heard you talk about it but please share shares and details.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (13:24)

So your amygdala’s this little nut shaped part of your brain that doesn’t understand time or context. So let’s say you had a traumatic

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (13:33)

People who object by that all the time.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (13:36)

There’s some people where that might be all they’ve got. I’m joking, that’s not true, you’d be dead. So ⁓ that little part of your brain is very, very old from a from a human development perspective, but it’s the part of us that says, this feels dangerous. Get ready for action. Now it might have learnt that it felt dangerous from something that happened in childhood or earlier in your life.

 

Because it doesn’t understand time or context, it doesn’t have the ability to say, no, but hang on, I’m a grown-up, everyone respects me, I’m safe, whatever. So first the amygdala says, get ready for action. This feels dangerous. It triggers behaviors that we would call fight, flight, freeze, or fall, and there you go. And what a lot of people don’t talk about though is what comes after that. Then you have cortisol that goes, actually it’s okay, you you don’t need to run.

 

You don’t need to go anywhere, you’re safe. So the cortex comes online, you start to think creatively, hopefully you start to think creatively, you start to think contextually. And then you’ll have this big dip afterwards of these low feelings.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (14:44)

White space.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (14:46)

Yeah. Anywhere in there, I think I would say the whole thing is like a wave crashing on her. So that big dip can be shame, embarrassment, self-doubt. And obviously I have tools that I teach people how to navigate that both from a physiological and psychological perspective. But I think it can be so enormous that wave of your brain feeling like something’s dangerous. Yeah. That that it just feels like a wave and you’re taken out.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (15:14)

And that would not be uncommon. No. Particularly if you’re delivering some some some news that is less than than ideal or or trying to push push forward an idea that you know there’s gonna be resistance.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (15:29)

Even

 

just saying no. If if if teenage you is scared of what the repercussions of that’s going to be, fear is part of that constellation of things, right? Feels dangerous. I feel fearful. Fight, flight, freeze, or fall. And fawn would just be like, okay, whatever you like. Okay. Fight would be stuff you. You know. Flight would be, I’m out of here.

 

If you don’t want to do it my way, my way or the highway. You know, you see these people that are really uncompromising in business. That’s a defence mechanism.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (16:04)

And do men and women experience this amyg amygdala amygdala hijack amygdala hijack differently?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (16:11)

No, it’s physiologically the same for all of us. We all have a little nut inside our brain that tells us this is dangerous, get ready for action. What I would say is different is the socialization around it, perhaps how we’ve been taught to handle it. You know, there’s a long history of men being taught, you know, you have to be brave, you have to be bold, you have to fight, you have to behave this way. Whereas women are being told you need to be compliant, you need to be easy to get on with, you need to be nice.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (16:38)

I’ve heard that. I’ve never listened to it, but I haven’t heard it.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (16:41)

I’ve heard it happens too. I do my best to let my children just choose their own adventure with that one.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (16:49)

There

 

you go. Well, here’s something I find I I do find confronting, and I really want your honest take on it, because in many instances we find it’s men champion women’s voices, not another woman championing another female. What why is that? What’s going on there?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (17:10)

I actually have been thinking about this a lot lately because I experienced someone recently in the workplace just being absolutely horrible. And I was so shocked because it was someone who’d built a profile publicly on championing women. And it’s literally all over their marketing. Yeah. And and then when this incident happened, I was so shocked because it beast seemed so disparate with their public persona.

 

And on reflection I realize that any workplace you walk into where people say, This place is great. It’s like a family. That’s a red flag because some families treat treat treat each other awfully. Right. And so I was thinking about I I don’t think there’s any been any research about correlating these two ideas. I didn’t have time to look. Really?

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (18:03)

Interesting point D.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (18:05)

But if you look at the interpersonal dynamics in a workplace and the interpersonal dynamics within a family, if you had a family where there was a deficit of things like emotional support, strong boundaries, clear expectations, structures on how we do things around here in a clear culture.

 

It is a pretty dysfunctional family. And so the siblings will fight and they’ll be competitive. And they’ll always be looking for who can get ahead and who can prove themselves and how to have one up. Whereas if you have a family with good boundaries, clear culture, lots of love, lots of grace, the siblings are more likely to get on, more likely to be loving, more likely to platform each other and want to work together. Right. So how is that from a social psychology perspective any different from an organization where historically

 

Even if women are getting opportunities now, historically they’re starting from a lower base in that they haven’t had the support and resources that men have got. So even if things are starting to tip now and the scales are evening up, we still have a history of women having a deficit of resources. And I think that that might be something worth looking at as an explanation for that.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (19:14)

And we’ve got the added complication now of AI dipping back into history as it’s learning. And all of this is all the things that we’ve been trying to put to bed and move on from get bubbled up because AI’s learning has been ingesting all this information of past and I think that threatens to bring it back to the fore.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (19:37)

I I would also say that I’m not an expert in AI. I I work with a lot of people who are literally at the forefront of this industry, mostly because I love working with geeks and really highly technical people and helping them translate their technical messages into something that normies like me can understand. ⁓ but what I do understand is that AI learns from us. And if that behavior is still happening in the corners of the internet and it’s getting clicks and platform and attention, that will inform

 

the learning that it develops. So it’s not even in the past die. It’s still happening now. Even if the bubbles so what’s happening is humans are becoming more siloed. We live more and more in our own bubbles. The algorithms reinforce that. And so our sense of reality is more and more becoming just what we see and what we know and and it feeds itself. So we start to think that that’s all there is. We’re kind of in a way creating our own villages again. And

 

If that stuff’s happening outside of our sphere of understanding, but AI is sweeping the whole of the internet, the whole of the internet will inform how the AI robot develops its logic. Yeah. Yeah. I just a caveat there, as I said, not an expert in AI. This is what I’ve gleaned. If if I’ve given the robot a name when in fact it’s a piece of software.

 

You’ll excuse me. I did have Siri jump in on a conversation the other day in the car. She was uninvited. She wouldn’t work when I wanted her to. But then I said to my daughter something about Siri being a robot. She said, actually, I’m not a robot. I’m a piece of software. Shut up. I don’t understand. I said, play the song, shut up and dance with me. I don’t understand what you want me to do. Shut up. ⁓

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (21:20)

Yeah, then that’s gonna increase as I understand.

 

Yeah. I’m not not I’m not gonna contextualize that further. We could we could do ourselves a disservice.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (21:36)

You

 

know you can choose the voice though, right? There’s a really sexy male Irish one. Sometimes I think about putting him on just so that I can have someone say nice things to me in a sexy male Irish accent.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (21:39)

Yeah ⁓ thank you.

 

That’s really sad.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (21:50)

Voice does affect us, right? And this is why I feel on some level quite safe because because of the way our brains work, AI can replicate some components of the human voice, but to date it can’t replicate exactly the experience of the human voice. So I often think about all the songs where it says your voice does something to me, your voice makes my heart beat fast, your voice makes me want to so far.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (22:16)

Well, I imagine for your husband living with you with a with a trained voice in the same way as I my my partner, my husband, has a highly trained voice. Mm-hmm. And knowing how to use that can be extremely powerful. We’re at a disadvantage. Well I’m at a disadvantage. Your husband may be at the same disadvantage. Well I am.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (22:34)

You’re assuming he listens to me.

 

Twenty five years of marriage. I think I’m starting to get some cutthroat.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (22:44)

Well that’s an interesting point. So let’s let’s get back to you you talked about the woman hitting the white space. ⁓ and that can happen to any any one of us when we’re standing in front of a microphone. Yeah. Presenting on ⁓ on a on a stage. What is she is she afraid of? Is she afraid of the audience reaction or is she afraid of her own voice?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (23:13)

love that question because it’s one of those things that helps me realize I do know something that’s useful. I think you have to zoom out even further and understand that it starts with fear. That’s the common thing there. The logic of what she’s afraid of takes a different part of the brain. Right? So all she’s feeling first is fear. And yeah, it doesn’t matter what she’s fearful of. ⁓

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (23:38)

Everything else is irrelevant.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (23:43)

And then you can unpack it, you know, where did that fear come from? What is it that you’re fearful of? But this is where we understand from research self talks really, really important because all of our actions ultimately start with a thought. Right? Whether it’s a subconscious or an automatic thought or a conscious thought, it starts with a thought. So you can feel the fear. You you remember that book, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. I think it’s it’s it’s really a book about self talk.

 

Right. It’s about right, you feel the fear in your body and now what do you do? So ⁓ that feeling, if you kind of let it wash over you, lasts about ninety seconds is a keynote talk I give where I I still get that every time I go on stage and my hands sweat like they are now and they shake.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (24:31)

Is that not a good thing though? That that is. Well I think that gets you ready and you’re that’s the competitive edge that needs to do you to do your best.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (24:33)

I think it’s

 

Yeah. ⁓ it’s about do you let that physical sensation and your subsequent interpretation of that drive the bus? Or do you choose how you want to handle that? So I’ve been working with some of the guys at the Air Force and they can, you know, fly a plane, no problem. But when it comes to getting up and speaking, that shortness of breath that came with the release of adrenaline that said, something’s gonna happen, get ready for action. Remember the amygdala?

 

I said to them, is there a way where you can trigger that before you go on stage? So that you’ve had that 90 seconds, you’ve let it wash over you, and you’re on the other side of it. Where, huh, this is like you’ve got to remember most audiences want you to do well. I can’t think of a single audience that wants to see you fail, right? Yeah. So if you can get into the mindset of, look, at least 30% of the people in this room are gonna love me, they’re gonna think I’m great. Maybe 30% are on the fence and 30%

 

Just wanna be doing their shopping, getting their toenails clipped, literally anything else, just don’t want to be here at this conference. And intuitively what we want to do is focus on the thirty percent of the people that are giving us the dodgy vibes because we wanna try and win them over. Because we’re herd animals. We want to bring people into the herd. That’s the mistake. You’ve got to focus on the people that love you. The people that are like, You’re amazing, we want you to do so well, you’re so great. Because what what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna draw the attention to that really nice

 

virtuous cycle that we have with them and the people that are kind of on the fence will go, ⁓ that’s where the fun’s at. I’m going over there. So that’s how you end up with most of the audience on side.

 

Sorry. That was a left hand turn. I didn’t see us going there. There was a

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (26:25)

And I was just I was just wondering which one you’d gone back to when you did that. So

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (26:34)

Well that that’s what shouting ⁓ as an audience sounds like when you’re right on top of a microphone. Because if I actually shouted into your microphone, like I’d blow blow blow it up. Yeah, I’m pretty I’m pretty loud. This is me at about a two.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (26:50)

Well I’m talking with Emmanuella Grace and coming up we’re going to talk about what it takes to reframe your voice.

 

If you’re loving the Power of Women podcast, be sure to jump onto our YouTube channel and hit that subscribe button to ensure you never miss an episode.

 

How far can you project your voice?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (27:17)

I’ve never really tested it, but there’s this thing called the singer’s format. So I get asked a lot about my accent. Would you like to ask me about my accent? It’s a hot

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (27:26)

Your accent is a complete mishmash of there’s a tinge of an American, there’s a European, there’s there’s this good old Australian within the mix. Again I put that down to generational because I think anybody millennial and b and below has an American tinge coming into their more performative or spoken voice.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (27:52)

So what you’re hearing as American is actually called twang. And it’s a sound that I use to help project my voice with very little effort.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (28:02)

So it’s deliberate?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (28:03)

It’s the byproduct of probably twenty to thirty years of training and also we speak Norwegian at home. So if you look at how the American accent developed, you have Irish, Italian, Norwegian, they’re all languages and accents that really pronounce their R. Mm-hmm. And the tongue shape sits in a way where the sound bounces up and forward. Whereas with the Australian accent, our tongue’s a lot flatter and further down at the back of our throat forward.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (28:29)

More with feasure than I do.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (28:32)

forward. Yeah. ⁓ so what you what you’re seeing is the the dorsum or the back side of the tongue is up towards your molars and then it kind of waves forward and the tip of the tongue lands behind the lower teeth. And what that does is relieve pressure from the from the throat and it makes it easier for your voice to resonate. But there’s also this idea called the singer’s formant, which is what opera singers or classically trained singers use, which I was originally, which when you’re having to do music that is not amplified,

 

You have to go to a concert hall, and then you have to go to this venue, have to go to that venue. And between venues, you have to create a consistent sound. So this singer’s format enables you to change the ⁓ angle of a a part of your throat called the aeroepoglottic schwinker. I don’t expect you to remember that. ⁓ which changes the resonance of the voice and can make it bounce further or less by adding more frequencies within the sound of the voice. So that

 

twangy sound that you hear makes a clearer sound, it makes it easier for people’s ears to hear it, I could remove it. There would be less of it. But you would have to work harder subconsciously to hear me.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (29:41)

I’m still trying to remember a mix of the hijack and you throw that at me. So there you see that he’s getting really true.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (29:51)

Now you can see why I get on with these technical geeks, right? It’s there’s so much about how do you take something really technical, like sound waves or anatomy, and translate it into something that can be understood by someone who doesn’t have training that doesn’t have the time, they just need the information and need to apply it.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (30:07)

Wow. So let’s see how much of that has got something to do with reclaiming our voice. So we’ll get into it because I want to talk to you about what’s happening in the body when when fear kicks in. Because it’s not just mindset, is it? It’s more than that.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (30:23)

Hundred percent, it’s physiologically as well. So you have a thought, which is psychological. You have your mind, which is how we interpret it. Okay. And then you have what does your body do with that? And one of the first places that people often feel that is in their throat, because our throat naturally starts to close as a way of protecting the lungs. Right? So you can have a brain that’s no longer functioning and your body, your organism organism is technically still alive.

 

Mm. But if you’re not breathing, that’s it. The show’s over. And so the body is going to intuitively protect the lungs and the part of you that’s breathing.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (31:02)

And that’s when we’ve got no chance of speaking.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (31:05)

No, and so and so this is where so much of the work to be done around finding your voice, I believe, is psychological. It’s about first getting command of your mind. I I talk about this idea all the time that high executive function leads to high executive presence. Yeah. Right. So a lot of the time f I I ended up doing this job

 

As a result of the frustration I felt when I went to lovely events and barbecues with my husband who’s in the finance world and spoke to his very introverted peers, ’cause all of us would end up in a corner drinking wine trying not to c talk to anyone and I would ask them

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (31:46)

Three four dinner. ⁓

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (31:48)

You

 

know, ⁓ how did you find the public speaking training? You just had your bank spend, you know, four K per head for the last two days on and I’m like, it’s good to have a day off but, you know, the best part for me was the ten minutes where I had a one on one training session. I was like, Good lord, why don’t we just do that with everyone then? Yeah. You know, I can save we we can do it for that much. And so, ⁓ until that point I’d had a vocal coaching company in London and then in Melbourne and then we started saying, Okay, let’s coach everyone.

 

Mm. Let’s have a department that’s f you know, the d the deans and the the research guys and the quant analysts. Give them the superpower.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (32:26)

Although Well

 

and that’s the interesting point. You’re talking about ⁓ positions and character traits and and if I think of possibly CIOs, engineers, even CFOs, I often think those individuals tend to be introverts more readily than extroverts. But most of us would believe that extroverts are better at getting on stage or standing out front.

 

I’m speaking. But I think you say experience tells us a different story.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (32:57)

Yes, and

 

Yes. So there is an idea in the public speaking world that actually the most intr interesting speakers are the introverts. I would say that the bias that extroverts are have more to offer is a byproduct of the post industrial revolution where ⁓ we were living in a world where we had to rebuild after two wars and we had to really give a lot of credence to the people with the gift of the gap because they could get things done faster and bigger and

 

And ⁓ but not necessarily more sustainably, right? Yeah. And so the deep thinkers, the philosophers, the value of these people, the perception of their value is diminished in that era. And we’re kind of living in the after effects of that now. Have you read Quiet by Susan Kane? my God. If you are an introvert, buy the book. It’s so good. And if you’re not feeling like reading a whole book, go and watch her TED Talk. It’s 17 minutes. It’s good for you.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (33:50)

No I

 

And

 

as an extrovert? What would somebody get out of it?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (34:04)

As much. You know. Okay, I was going to say something snarky. No, no, I’ll it’s not about you. More about my husband. Yeah. He’s gorgeous and he gets away with a lot because he is. But culturally Yeah. He’s he’s ⁓ you know, marry your best mate, right? It’s been twenty four years of of twenty four, twenty five years, good Lord, of us being together and probably about

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (34:09)

Not I’m not defining myself as

 

to get into the sidehouse.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (34:33)

12, 13 years into our relationship, we just had this weekend where I was like, my God, I’m so done. There’s all these things that I should be looking forward to, and I’m just feeling really anxious. And so I picked up a bottle of wine and a copy of Quiet and I said, I am going to the park and reading this book. And you are going to go to all the parties. Because what we’d started to realize was he was a shy extrovert. So shyness comes from fear and comes from conversation.

 

culture and comes from being told to behave a certain way to be socially acceptable.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (35:03)

word put together but I totally relate to that.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (35:06)

Yeah. So for him there was a fear response. So my girlfriends used to say to me, Does he talk? And I’d like, Yeah, not to you. But he loves being around people. He loves being in the middle of everything. He loves interacting. I’m just like, Good Lord, when can we leave? ⁓ it’s really lovely to see you, but I’d rather have three people over for dinner and we have some really deep discourse. And I could do that all day, no problem. And then I’ll, you know, people know

 

When we have big parties at our house, after a while I might just wander off and read a book. And that’s fine. I throw a good party, everyone else is having fun. But I’m quite a confident introvert. Music has taught me skills that enable me to communicate with both individuals and giant audiences alike with confidence. But it does take something from you, something I’m willing to give, something I love giving. But I do also need time to reboot up.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (36:03)

Yeah, I can relate to that. Nothing nothing I crave more than just some complete silence and me time.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (36:11)

And you might be an ambivert as well. That’s someone who ’cause it’s a spectrum, right? If you imagine extroversion at one end and introversion at the other. And a lot of the people that I work with that are let’s say they’re working in a very technical environment but they’re known as the one that everyone gets on with and everyone really respects, they’re obviously somewhere in the middle.

 

Yep. And so what can happen is they’re really good at the pitching stage and they get really social and they have a great time, but then they don’t allow themselves that rebooting time that they also need. And so a lot of the work we do together is planning to manage your energy so that you have your peak energy when you’re in front of your audience and then you have time to also regroup.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (36:50)

No different training as an athlete. Same scenario.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (36:52)

Well, I was actually trained by a sports psychologist as a musician.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (36:56)

Yeah, that makes so much sense. So we touched on it before because we are in an era where performative behaviour is absolutely increasing. I’m seeing it everywhere. But there’s a difference between learning to project sound and reclaiming the thing that is that is yours. What does it mean to find your voice and how do you know when somebody has actually nailed it?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (37:24)

I was thinking about that this week. There’s a word that has had such a thorough bashing, I’m loath to use it, but it is at the heart of this, I think you can guess. It and it’s authenticity, right? Yeah. But sorry for those of you on the other end of that microphone.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (37:35)

Go on.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (37:46)

You can feel it.

 

Yeah, look, I can’t I I use AI sometimes to check for spelling mistakes, but I given

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (37:54)

Yeah, so let’s kick my a that

 

quick cause I’m gonna give you permission.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (37:58)

To So I I think you can feel it, right? Let’s talk about do you know what a mirror neuron is? It’s so interesting. ⁓ it’s this neuron in our brain and deficit of them in sociopaths and psychopaths, which I think is interesting. But for example, Di, if I kicked my toe, you’d feel it. Or if I leaned on a hot hot plate on the on the oven, you can feel that because your body

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (38:03)

Not really.

 

Yeah.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (38:26)

is simulating inside you what I’m experiencing. Now if I am a fr Well, you know, apparently they’re the only people that can tickle themselves. ⁓ But can’t use that one at work. And No. but heads, shoulders, knees and ⁓ toes.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (38:32)

Afraid just isn’t

 

Wow.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (38:55)

What are we teaching? Right. For those of you listening at home, Di I have just gone off on a tangent on how to behave at work. ⁓ heads, shoulders, knees and toes is a rule that they teach children at school on appropriate touching. I don’t know. I don’t really want anyone touching my toes at work.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (39:13)

I don’t want it touching my toes just quite apart from part from my my manicures, but yeah.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (39:21)

Yes. Well if your manicurist is touching your toes.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (39:24)

She’s

 

in the spot. Yeah, thank you.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (39:26)

Getting this back on track. ⁓ you can feel the fraud. I had a meeting years and years ago with ⁓ one of the representatives at the record label I was with and I took him some songs. And he was just like, Well, these are technically good, but I feel nothing. And then he played me some songs and he said, This girl’s fourteen and you just

 

Your stomach dropped when you heard her and it just moved you so much it turned out to be a young adult. And he said, you know, g go go to some music festivals, go camping, take some drugs, and then write some songs about that. And I thought, Well, I don’t camp and I don’t take drugs, but I went away and wrote about other things that I knew, things that were really painful that I was ready to talk about. And they were the songs that were nominated for awards and were used on films and ⁓

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (39:59)

Wow.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (40:23)

think the easy songs the songs that are written quickly are sometimes the best because we’re not getting in our own way. But they’re not always the easy songs to write.

 

That’s your voice, right? But you have to choose how much of that you want to share and and that’s the mastery of it, right? That’s the craft is learning how do I demonstrate being candid and being real ⁓ but also keep some of myself for myself because we don’t want to emotionally vomit on everyone.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (40:52)

Yeah, and that’s that’s an interesting point because it it’s that’s one one part of this exercise that we’re talking about of how to find your voice. But to your point, how much of it we want to share. That’s that’s something that I personally struggle with and you know, it’s suggested that we need to do more of that in terms of elevating our own brand, but sometimes I I struggle with that.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (41:05)

Right.

 

Yeah, my coach constantly pushes me about that as well. But I think it might be different for dudes as well. Like maybe they don’t have such a deep understanding of their emotional landscape, so maybe they don’t have as much to share. No. But I I don’t know. That’s not really something I think that much about. But I do think that there’s a lot to be said when it comes to resonance.

 

And and if you can feel that your voice is resonating with another person, like if your your mirror neurons and my mirror neurons are vibrating together. Yeah. I think that that’s where you’re moving from being technically correct. Like you can order a coffee, the data is correct. I can give you an analysis of something that’s happened. Versus me having mastered the ability to share that information and share that experience. So when I went to uni,

 

What I saw when I came over to Australia to do my masters was that there was a demographic of students that were technically brilliant. But when we moved from doing an honors degree or a bachelor degree into doing a masters, they really struggled because they ha that’s where you start to have to be an artist. You have to have mastery of the music beyond the technical components. You have to start to have your own perspectives and your own interpretations of things and your own ⁓ discovery around what did the

 

Composer want here. And now what do you want this to mean? Right? So you start to have some agency. And these students had only been taught you just keep practicing until you’re perfect. They hadn’t been taught what happens beyond that. And I think that’s life. Yeah, but I also think that’s finding your voice, right? Is that I say to people, look, when it comes to communication skills, if you can order a coffee, you’re conveying data from one person to another, job done. But if you’re looking to influence a movement, that’s something else.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (42:48)

Yeah.

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (43:06)

And that’s the area that I want to play in. How do we move people? How do we while you still feel like you’re you, you’re not becoming jazz hands and shouty. Even in your beautiful, quiet way, how do you bring that gravity into the room where people feel psychologically safe with you and they feel motivated and they feel moved? Because we know from research that people don’t have to agree with a leader to believe in them and want to follow them. So it’s about how do these leaders

 

Demonstrate to their cohort, demonstrate to their peers, demonstrate to the board they’re trustworthy. And that’s moving beyond conveying data from one person to the other.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (43:45)

That’s getting really masterful in on your OS. Well, before we wrap, I’ve got a a couple of rapid fire questions that I’m going to shoot at you today. What’s a lesson you had to learn the hard way?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (44:03)

Not everyone’s going to like you and that’s okay.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (44:06)

I I’m still on that gym. What’s the most BS thing women are being told about how to communicate?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (44:16)

To focus on the end product first, like your pitch, your pace, your volume, your gestures. It’s never going to work if you start at the wrong end and work backwards. You have to start internally and work outward.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (44:29)

And where and when are you most yourself?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (44:33)

In my garden with the kids.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (44:35)

There we go. Yeah. Beautiful. Finding your voice or find your voice is your business. And where do we find you?

 

EMMANUELLA GRACE [GUEST] (44:41)

Find your voice.

 

Just ⁓ Emmanuel Grace dot com or find your voice dot com dot AU either of those things will get you to me. Or LinkedIn.

 

DI GILLETT [ HOST] (44:52)

Brilliant.

 

Well, I have learned a whole lot of words that I can’t pronounce today. But I’m going to put them in the show note and and probably need to put a link on a a few of them because they are beyond my voice to even pronounce some of those. They are quite quite wordy. But seriously, thank you for your honesty and depth in understanding that. There really is a a mastery around how to find your voice and and what you were touching on toward the close of today of

 

You know, you can have a degree taking it to that next level to really invoke change, go beyond the ordering of a coffee to actually inspire piperish behaviour and have everybody follow you off the cliff is a whole different different ball game. Yeah. So much of that can be done in your voice. So thank you for that, Emmanuella. Thank you. I ⁓

 

I’d love you to share this episode with somebody in in your network because I think finding our voice is something so many of us really do need to to get a grasp on and at different points in time we know we stand there and we see that white space and we’ve lost it. So please share that. You can follow both of us on on LinkedIn. Both of us hang out there quite a bit and write a review because that’s what propels these podcasts and allows others to find us. Until next time.