How To Talk To Humans
How To Talk To Humans
Vocal Techniques & Training #70
On this episode Larry Wilson shares important vocal training he received from the Master of Opera Technique...Erwin Winward; and he shares actual exercises and methods to prepare and protect your voice and vocal cords. Good 3 min. training to forever improve your voice quality and clarity.
Larry Wilson, a seasoned show business professional, has over four decades of experience working with some of the world's biggest celebrities and superstars. His perspective on the improvement of communication skills is deeply influenced by his rich background. Wilson strongly believes that to achieve personal and professional success, one must continuously work on improving their communication skills. He offers various techniques and tools for effective communication, emphasizing the importance of authenticity and a solid foundation. Drawing on his own disciplined approach to maintain vocal health, he underlines the significance of vocal warm-ups and proper voice usage. Wilson's perspective on communication skills is rooted in practicality, authenticity and the value of continuous learning and practice.
(00:00:03) Authentic Communication Techniques for Professional Success
(00:03:31) Enhancing Voice Quality Through Gentle Warm-ups
(00:09:44) Vocal Health in Public Speaking Practices
(00:15:40) "Stomach Expansion for Effective Diaphragmatic Breathing"
(00:24:26) Gradual Progress for Sustainable Vocal Improvement
Hosted by Larry Wilson
Produced by: Verbal Ninja Productions
Producer: R. Scott Edwards
Sponsored by: The Wilson Method
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Visit https://theWilsonMethod.com
Hi, this is Larry Wilson, and this is how to talk to humans. This is the podcast that shows you how to improve your communication skills. Are you looking to get a better job? Are you looking to find a relationship? Are you trying to do things in your life that have frustrated you and eluded you so far? I can show you so easily how. To change that now. I can only do it with humans. If you're looking to deal with vampires or zombies, extraterrestrials, this is not the show for you. But if you're really looking to improve your communication skills, I can show you what I've learned from 40 years in show business, working with the biggest celebrities and superstars in the world, and their secrets are unbelievable. What I'm going to be teaching you. During the course of this podcast every week are tools that you can use. To communicate toward success. Hi, this is Larry Wilson. Thank you once again for joining me for another episode of how to talk to Humans. In this particular episode, we're going to talk about how cruel my producer is and how he torments me mercilessly. He's particularly interested in Wilson method, I think, because he finds it so useful and so effective, and he will never stop saying, oh, will you teach more a specific training exercise or give these people something that they can do right now? And I say every single episode of this podcast, I'm showering you with pearls of technique that you can use. Sometimes they are embedded, I'm torturing this metaphor, I think, here, but they're embedded in the clamshell of a particular experience or story. But the reason I do that, as I've pointed out in many other places, is I want you to see and hear the authentic experience that surrounds this training, that it didn't just spring from the heavens somehow it's all based on absolutely simple foundational technique that anyone can learn. In deference to my producer, Scott, I'm going to address something right here. We were just about to begin recording, and I realized I hadn't warmed my voice up. And so I did the vocal warm up that I do every single day and have for decades. And Scott got this look on his face. He said, hey, man, I can hear the difference from when you started a few minutes ago. I said, well, of course you can. He said, did you learn that in theater class? And I thought, no, I couldn't believe I haven't shared this. I know in my two day boot camp we go into great depth with this, but that's because it's much more intensive. It's limited to just ten people. And I can really do some serious training in ways that will be a little bit more challenging on a podcast. To get the maximum benefit of what I'm going to teach you now, it's best if I'm live in person with you because there's a very visual element to how you're holding your head and your posture. And I'm going to try and describe it and do the best I can. And I urge everyone listening. If you experiment with these vocal warm ups, the one absolute solid gold rule that you must not break, do not force anything with your voice. If you feel something that feels a little strained or a little bit like it maybe hurts or it's a little rough on your voice, stop. It shouldn't feel that way at all. And I guess the origin point of this is, like so much of the rest of the things I teach in Wilson method, I fell into this. I had no clue at all what I was doing. I was already working in television. I was performing. I was doing all these things. And, you know, I'm working so much now, I should probably learn to use my voice a little bit better and, you know, preserve it. So I reached out just to. I was living in Los Angeles. People I knew, there was a woman. I knew a lovely woman named Shirley Windward, and she was a schoolteacher when I was in, I think, what people now call middle school, we call then junior high school. And I knew her. She was a lovely woman and so enthusiastic and, and positive and encouraging for all the students. And somehow I didn't reach out to her directly. I reached out to another friend who said, well, oh, you remember Shirley Winward? And I said, yeah. She said, you know, I think her husband, irv, I think he does some kind of vocal training stuff. I said, oh, great. So, as usual in my life, I have no clue what's going on. Somebody says, you should call Shirley Winward. And she says, oh, yeah, irv, of course, ask him to set a time to meet with you. So I go in and meet this guy. He's just like her. He couldn't be nicer. He's so down to earth and cheerful and effervescent and full of energy and life. And I explained to him, I said, you know, I got the feeling that you really work with singers. He said, yeah, yeah. And I said, well, I don't want to, you know, mislead you. I'm not a singer, and I don't have any intention of learning to be a singer. I just want to be able to use my voice. And he said, well, he said, well, we'll do some stuff that we do with singers, but, you know, they work for anyone who speaks, who uses their voice. I thought, this is great. All right. And so I started working with this guy, Irv Winward. Now, his. His full name was Erwin. Erwin. And I said, why do they call you Irv? And he said, well, what are you going to call me for short? Er. And I said, oh, I see. So I always refer to him as Irv, but I had such a great experience with him. I guess I would train once a week with him. And I think it went on for maybe like a year because it was just so great and I enjoyed it so much. The vocal warm ups and the vocal exercise that I'm going to share with you here, something I learned from Erwin Winwer. I'm going to preface all this by telling you years later, 20 years later, 30 years later, I can't remember, but so much longer. Something came up somewhere where, either online or on social media or something, where I made some reference to Irv Windward. And I got besieged with these inquiries from people saying, you trained with Irvin Winward? And I said, yes. Yes, I did. They said, oh, my God. Now, I had no idea he was such a normal dandruff guy. Turns out Irwin Winward was a very big deal. I didn't know this. And it's simply the hallmark of my entire life where I stumbled into something where I have no clue what's actually happened. Apparently, Irv was a big teacher of opera singers, and opera singers would come from all over to train with him. And this was a why he spent his time with me, I don't know, except he was so nice. And one of his students wrote me or texted me or something, said, do you have a copy of his book? I said, I didn't know he had a book. He said, oh, yes, it's very hard to find a copy of now, but I'm going to send you a copy. And they sent me, and it was fantastic. Now, what was so extraordinary is the book that Erwin wrote, so much more advanced than the things he did with me, obviously meant for opera singers, but it was interesting in the context of that. In that book, there were elements that were the things I'm going to share with you right now, which is so unbelievable to me that all this I should stumble into. I also feel obliged to share this with you. There are a great many people who I now know because of Wilson method, there are people who teach public speaking and people who teach presentations and people who teach marketing and all sorts of things like this. And the majority of them are so far advanced beyond my experience in those particular fields. They know things, and they've been doing things for so much longer than I have. And many of them make presentations from stage, from platform, or for big meetings. I was surprised to discover that I am the only one of these people who has never had any kind of problems that required surgery on his throat. Some of them, the one thing I hear again and again are nodules on their vocal cords. I assume this may be because they're using their voice incorrectly, that maybe they never got any training. I don't know. Or maybe they pushed it too hard, or perhaps they smoke or drink alcohol, things I don't do. So I don't know why, but I just thought it was very interesting. And I wondered, working with Irvin Winward, I got into the habit of simply doing these vocal exercises every single morning. I still do, and I never have any trouble with my voice. When I starred in a television show that we shot in Las Vegas, and I can't remember how many years ago, called Madcap magic, and there was some confusion and someone, somewhere, something fell through the cracks. And they had everything covered for this production, but it was a long day's shoot. You know, it was probably a twelve hour day, but they hadn't hired an audience warm up person. And someone just said, well, Larry, can you do that? And I said, yeah, yeah, sure. Now, I mean, the star of the show, and I'm supposed to be in the show and doing all this stuff, but in addition to that, they keep sending me out to keep the audience excited and warmed up and holding their attention. Because a lot of times in television production and film production, there's huge amounts of downtime. Something technical goes wrong, and sometimes you shoot something and the performance is so perfect, and then when it's done, someone says, yeah, sound was no good. Something happens, some problem takes place. So I just remember that I must have my beloved wife, who at that time was merely my enamorata. She was there. And later on she said, I can't believe you must have done five or 6 hours with the audience just ad libbing and talking. She said, your voice never got rough. Never got. I said, oh, oh. I said, yeah, that's Irv windward. That's why that is. She said, but she said, after a couple of hours, she said, some of the stuff you were improvising was just crazy. I said, really? I have no memory of it. She said, yeah, it was weird. I said, well, I clearly ran out of material. I don't know what I was talking about. She said, I just remember at one point you were saying, come with me. We'll all go and live in the land where we eat pomegranates. I said, really? I said that? She said, yeah, I really didn't know what you were talking about. I said, well, I certainly don't understand what that means. She said, yeah, you were just going off in left field someplace. But the good news was, as deranged and nonsensical as the words I was saying were, at least they sounded clear and mellifluous. That's what we owe to Irvin Winward. So the key to a lot of what Irv taught me was that this is a muscle. He saw this as physical exercise. And there's a number of different elements. I'll try to cover them here, but I sincerely hope if there's something that's not clear, you will reach out to me so that perhaps I can clarify. It involves two different things. Air is passing through your vocal cord. This is how we make sounds. So, one, we need air. We need lots of air. You want to be able to take in as much air as you can and control the flow of that air. You think, well, I'll expand my chest and take a deep breath like this. But that's actually contraindicated. It's really the opposite of what you want to do. Inside your chest, there's a membrane that stretches across under your lungs called your diaphragm. When it is pulled down, it creates a vacuum, which makes your lungs want to fill up. So we want to breathe using your diaphragm. Or sometimes you'll hear singers or speakers refer to as diaphragmatic breathing. Very easy to do. You expand your stomach. It's nothing to do with your chest. It's lower. Because if you expand your stomach outwards and you can see here, or you can imagine, this is why, if I'm in the same room with you like I am in my boot camp, I can see instantly whether you're doing it or not. It's a little harder, but I can give you a technique right now that you can see for yourself a little bit better. And, of course, this is from Erwin Winward. If you lie flat on the ground on a hard surface and you put a hard bound book on your stomach, you can see that book rise or fall. This will give you a good idea. If you're breathing diaphragmatically when you expand your stomach to draw air in, that book should rise. I also hasten to point out, this is not like a secret information. I don't think it's unknown, probably maybe being taught in every theater or drama school in the world. I don't know, but I'd never been exposed to this before. So you're lying on the ground. You have this hard back book on your stomach. When you take in a deep breath, your stomach should be expanding outwards. And as it does, it's the act of your stomach expanding is drawing your diaphragm down, which is creating a vacuum which will allow your lungs to fill with the most air. You can now control how that air is expelled using your abdominal stomach muscles. You're in control of it as you tighten them. You can feel as your stomach's now squeezing in. You're controlling the flow of air. This is the first element. The second element, then, is you want your vocal cords to be warmed up and flexible. You want your jaw, your tongue, your lips to all be warmed up and loosened up and relaxed using your voice. And it's not just about singing. It's about speaking. Whether you're speaking on stage or making a presentation or even speaking here in a podcast, you want to relax all those muscles. And one of the things, you can hear me hedging here because I worry since I can't see you when I'm there with you face to face, it's much easier for me to show you what it looks like when I'm doing it. And it also allows me to look at you. But you don't want to tip your head back. You want your head perfectly straight. When you lower your jaw, you want to imagine that you can lower your chin to touch your chest. Obviously, you can't really do that, but that's what you want to picture, because you want that jaw to be loose and relaxed. It's hard when you're learning new things. It just takes practice. It's not hard to do. It's hard to be conscious of it. And remember, you're thinking about breathing diaphragmatically. Then you're thinking about relaxing your face, your lips, your tongue, your throat, your jawline. And so Erwin Winward would have me do these vocal exercises. I would start sometimes by saying, yah, you. And we never want to force anything. We're just saying, yah, you. I'm not a singer, so I not only do I not sound like a singer, but I also don't know sometimes official terms and the actual names that they use for certain things. But when you say yah, you, you want the you to be a higher pitch than so yaw. Hu. And when you say that yaw, you want your jaw to drop so loose. You want that chin to come down and touch your chest. Yaw. You may look silly while you're doing it. Well, it doesn't matter. No one will see you doing it. You can do it in the shower, you can do it in the bathroom. You can do it someplace no one will ever see you. Although in my home, my wife and son find it a never ending source of amusement and entertainment. And they mimic me, making fun of me. Thank goodness I pay no attention to that. So, yeah. When you say the you, you still want your chin to be going down. We never want your head to be tilting back or stretching your neck or straining. Ya. You. Yaw. You. As you start to warm up now we'll start to do, I'm hesitant to call them scales, but we want to do step down from the higher pitch of you going lower. And we're not trying to sing here, so you don't have to worry about being on key or hitting certain pitches or anything. We just want to say, yeah. O. That's all we're doing. We're just warming that up. After we've done that a little bit, we'll use some other sounds. They aren't really words. We might say, use the two syllable like we had. Yah. You. We might say draw tra as you do this, especially if you look in the mirror while you're doing it. You will see it's moving different parts of your face. It's moving different parts of your jaw. That's what we're trying to do, is loosen all this stuff up. Draw, draw. That's all. We'll just do a few of those. We'll do vrouw fra. Now, I'm just guessing because I never saw these written down. Irv would just say, you know, do vrofra. So I'm guessing that's v r a f r a. Vrouw fra. That's all. Now, there are a couple of ones that are very weird, but those are the basic ones. Just draw tra vrouw fra. Ya. You. Then he would have me say grulla crulla. I have no idea what that looks like in print. Grulla. Maybe that's g r u l l a. Grulla crulla. Maybe that's k r u l l a. Growla crawla. If you look in the mirror, you'll see? Ooh, it's moving your nose around. It's moving your whole face in a different way. Growla crawla. Growla crawla growla crawla grow. And then there's the most difficult to explain, especially when I'm not face to face with you. I don't know how to describe this sound. It's something way at the back of your throat that sort of sounds like it's a combination between swallowing and gargling and yodeling, maybe. And it sounds a little bit like, in my mind, I think unga d u n g a sort of like you're swallowing, I guess. But again, if you do this while you're looking at yourself, you can see a different part of your face. Your throat is being moved by this. Do not attempt to change your lifelong vocal patterns in one day. Don't overdo this. You'll hurt yourself. It really is physical. It's a muscle, is what we're doing. Just like the girl I knew a million years ago who decided she was going to get ready for bathing suit season. She never worked out, but she decided, well, what's the difference whether I do 50 sit ups a day or I do 5000 in one day? So apparently she tried this. Someone I really knew. She wound up in the hospital. She was doing. She tried to do so many sit ups, like she strained or broke or ripped her stomach muscles. You know, this is not how real progress is made. It's always best incrementally. Consistency is so much more effective than trying to make one gigantic push in everything we do. So try this. Try this gently warming up. Even if you don't feel like you're seeing any difference right away, give it a try. I frequently I do this in the car. If I'm driving. I do it sometimes in the shower. You really can't go wrong. If you do this every day for three minutes, in a couple of weeks, either you'll notice that your voice feels different or you'll be able to hear more texture, more color, more animation in your voice. You'll be able to use it in certain ways. You'll start to recognize when you hear people speaking or singing, you'll hear, oh, that's how that person's able to get that sound. And it's because they've warmed their voice up. If you seriously do three minutes a day for two weeks, you will hear a difference. You may even find that other people comment to you. Bear in mind, the power of communication is such that they don't always know why they're responding to you when you use a facial affect, when you use a warmed up vocal cords, they may not know that's what they're responding to. And so they may say to you something like, oh, you look like you're really on top of the world today. They're getting some kind of feeling from you. In a prior episode, I talked about the tone of your voice is why you're able to communicate with your pets. Even though they don't speak English, they can feel something from the tone of your voice. Well, that's the same thing that's going to happen when you've warmed your voice up. I hope that everyone will take away this concrete, real lesson so that my producer will quit bugging me about it. Once again. I'm hoping to see you next week on another episode of how to talk to Humans. This has been larry wilson. I want to thank you for spending. This time with me, and I hope you found this information useful. If you're looking for more, you can find it@thewilsonmethod.com. There'S a ton of stuff there. In fact, if you want, you can. Even speak to me because I'm human. Send me an email@infoilsonmethod.com. because I read every single one. I hope that you'll join us next week in this continuing journey, and you'll be with me for the next episode of how to talk to Humans.
