Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast for you. And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating and a review. Today, I am joined by Susan Murphy. She is a broadcast voice coach who works with anchors, news reporters, and the like.
00:28
But before you assume that this doesn't apply to you, hold on to your seats because there's so much that she's gonna share that every single person across the globe is gonna benefit from and how they can use their voice authentically. Before I go any further, please help me welcome Susan. Hi. Roberta, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you. What a delightful conversation I think we're gonna have.
00:51
I am so happy that you're here too, because after our initial conversation, a lot of things have blown my mind already. But first of all, just give us a little bit of your background. Sure. A broadcast voice coach now, but I've been in the broadcast industry for about 40 years. Started right after college. I was a traffic reporter.
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a news anchor, I was a news director, worked in television, mostly public television. I was a narrator, a voice actor. I taught at two universities too, and I lived on Long Island, New York. I taught at Stony Brook and I taught at Hofstra and I taught upper level TV presentation courses and loved doing that. And then I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina a couple of years ago and continued the voiceover work and got into my head last year after listening to some local anchors and reporters
01:40
their voices could use some leveling up to bring their storytelling to the next level. So I thought maybe I could be a broadcast voice coach, which is really unusual. I don't know of too many others. And I ran this idea past a news director friend and he thought it was a great idea. So I started the business, mostly getting referrals from LinkedIn. And I've been amazed how the business has grown over the last year.
02:06
What I can teach anchors and reporters in finding their authentic voices, as you pointed out, really does transcend job title. Did you know at a young age that you wanted to be in broadcasting or you kind of fell into it? I'm not shy. I kind of crave the spotlight a little bit. I love to act and sing. I just thought I wanted to be on TV, kind of like Jane Paulie. And Katie Couric took over for Jane Paulie and I wanted to host the Today Show.
02:36
That's my perfect job. Didn't happen and I'm really grateful it didn't happen. When it comes to these voices, TV anchors and news reporters, aren't they supposed to have a monotone, don't show emotion type of voice because they are supposed to appear at least objective? Very good question. And that's a bit of a fallacy. And even anchors and reporters fall for that fallacy.
03:05
Yes, we need to be objective in how we report. We need to be fair in how we tell the story. But that doesn't mean we need to be monotone, that particularly for stories of great importance or stories that are incredibly tragic and happen over and over again, you can't not be involved. And if you're going to present the story with your authentic voice, which comes from your diaphragm by making sure you use that.
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appropriate, authentic air and energy, the tone of the story is then very easy to access once you get the pitch of your voice properly done. A lot of people in our business breathe very shallowly, as most of us do in conversation. Most of us, yeah, we don't think about it. Right, exactly. So what happens is we're not accessing the best pitch that we could be using. And when I'm watching you on television or listening to you in a podcast or on the radio.
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I want to be able to enjoy your voice, not be annoyed by it. I want to recognize it as authentic. We all have beautiful tones that come from the diaphragm. It's just that very few people use them. I think for them, it seems like a job requirement, just like when you act. If you put on a persona, I've always had the feeling that news anchors are the same. They get into character. Yes, and that's a shortcoming, as far as I'm concerned.
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15, 20, 40 years ago, you had only a few choices to watch the news. You sat down at six o'clock and you watched the news because you didn't have a phone to distract you. You didn't have other things going on in your life. You didn't multitask. And many people in television back then came up through radio news. Well, now there's not a whole lot of radio news and TV reporters who are coming up don't get trained so much in voice. Now, the young people I worked with at Hofstra and Stony Brook,
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Oh yeah, we got trained in voice because that's what I do. And I'm happy to say that a lot of the kids that I worked with 15 and 20 years ago at the universities are doing very well on air in places around the country. So being able to have a voice that I want to lean into is important on air, on Zoom, in a boardroom, with your family, with your significant other. I like to say if your eyes are the windows to your soul, your mouth and your speech,
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is the front door. People judge you. If your eyes are the windows to your soul, your mouth and your voice are the front door. It's how people first make an impression about you. Maybe not fair, but we judge people on their voices. We owe it not only to ourselves, but the people we communicate with to speak from our authentic selves. When you're speaking authentically, you are speaking deliberately with intention, and you are way more likely
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not to say something you regret, you're way more likely to be more measured in your speaking. That's why I titled it that way, because a lot of people think speaking is communicating only. No, ma'am, right? We know that. Yes. It's how you do it. It's how you use it. When you're speaking deliberately and with intention, you're occasionally taking a pause because you're not going to run at the mouth. You're going to think before you say something, even if it's just the tiniest of pauses.
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And every time you pause, you can breathe again, bringing air down into your diaphragm, speaking from your gut. That's why your diaphragm is down there. We talk about, oh, your gut. Oh, my gut told me not to do that. I had to trust my gut on that decision. We don't operate from our heads or hearts. Honestly, we operate from our gut. Reporters, especially, you're out covering a story. What am I gonna ask? What am I looking at? What's important? We have to trust our gut and we have to use it.
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And when we use it for communication, I think it makes the communication way more successful. Here's the judgment part for me. The same way that we were told growing up, don't say that child is ugly. It's not something somebody made intentionally to have an ugly child. Isn't the voice part of that, especially when you think about how we usually assume men will grow up and have deep voices, and then suddenly you meet a guy who speaks in a soprano voice and we judge him.
07:31
Is that something he created? Oh, interesting question. We're all born with unique attributes. Are we using those attributes in the best way possible? And of course you can argue about what's the best way possible with regard to how you look, how you walk, how you deal with other people in any given situation. But your voice, it's a very intimate tool that we have. Everybody has a unique voice.
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And very few of us use it well because we're not accessing the breath from our diaphragm. So I'm not asking anybody to change anything. What I'm doing is I'm helping you uncover the authentic voice that you can use to present yourself in the best way possible in speaking and communicating. And it's up to you whether you wanna do it. I work with men and women in broadcast, more women than men.
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Women don't have testosterone, they don't have a large Adam's apple, and they even have a smaller vocal fold area. What I'm learning about women, and I've worked with some who have taken it to the extreme, where their voices are very girlish, breathy, or very baby doll, Barbie doll. I had a couple of those when I was teaching in college. Even in a professional setting, yes, they went through J-school and TV station did hire them, but on camera, they're still using a voice
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that they used when they were much younger. And what I've learned with young women is very often that breathy or small girl voice is something that obviously goes back to their childhood. They use that voice because it served them well at that time, a domineering mother or father because of a dysfunctional family, because using that voice got them what they wanted or what they needed. And then it never changed.
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as they grew older and they just never knew how to access their authentic voice. And what I'm finding I'm doing in my teaching is they're giving themselves permission to find that real voice, not the one that was put on, not the one that was fake, not the anchor lady voice you think you need, not the I'm a news reporter voice that you think you need.
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It's all about the storytelling, using the voice that comes from your gut because that's who you are. I'm intrigued because it sounds to me like there's a psychological explanation sometimes for how we use our voice. Is that what this is? Yeah, that's what this is. And I'm not a psychologist and I can only unpack it to a small degree. But as I have conversation with these young women,
10:19
All I need to do is maybe suggest that could the voice they use today be something they used in childhood and then little light bulbs go on and pretty soon it's spilling out of them what their childhood was like. And after I show them the beautiful voice that's down there, their eyes fill with tears and they say, this is so healing. Did not see that coming.
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Even when you started this business, for you, it was just the voice. You had no idea there was an underlying issue. And I think even men, to some degree, have a put on voice. When I can uncover their real tone, their best speaking tone, sometimes it's a matter of trying to eliminate a little vocal fry, or sometimes they go too far down to find their anchor voice. I actually have to show them, it has to come up a little bit.
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Whereas women, I very often have to show them how it's bolder and rounder and more beautiful from their diaphragm. It's deeper than they have any idea. The woman explanation, here's my thought on that. You know how when we start dating and they say, oh, as a woman to give a good first impression, you have to sound soft and feminine and sweet so that you attract the kind of men that you want to attract. Isn't there's a bit of a stereotype when a woman has a...
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a relative voice, just like the opposite that I said earlier with the men having a soprano voice. Yes. So isn't a lot of women, that's where they come from. I don't know where it comes from, but it's a default motion that we fall into to get through our lives or to make our family life acceptable or tolerable or to make our dating life what we think it needs to be.
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It's all about what we think as opposed to what we should know about our voices. I am working with one presenter whose voice kind of is deep, which she may have inherited from her dad, who had this big booming voice. Now she's in her thirties at this point. She said, and when he got angry, it was even more booming. So here she is sort of born with lower tones, but she had a dad who just filled a room with that voice. And it often.
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that was said in anger or a raised voice made her cower. So she would back away from her natural tones and she would get lighter and she would speak with up speak and she would just be very light and the opposite of what her dad was because she was afraid of that. And so she kept that up even into adulthood. Yep. I had no idea we used our voices that way. That is amazing. Voice is so intimate. It is so wrapped up in who we are.
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I take it as an honor and a serious privilege to help these people uncover things about themselves that have just been repressed for whatever reason, to watch them blossom and bloom. This is my reward, is to watch you bloom. You know, I can quickly show you ways to access your best vocal pitches, but then to see you step into it. Because when you're using that voice, man, confidence grows, confidence in whatever you're doing.
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You know the phrase, find your voice? Yeah. I've always assumed that it means you speak up for yourself. Even if someone hurt your feelings, most people cower and don't say anything or they don't want confrontation. For me, that phrase used to just mean you speak up for yourself. I had no idea that the voice attached to that, the actual pitch was part of the equation as well.
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Sure. Although if getting you to speak up for yourself, to share your feelings with someone who has hurt you or whatever, and if you have to do it in a little voice or a high voice, just the fact that you are speaking up is a milestone for you and yay, I applaud that. But think of how the other person is hearing that. It's part of communication. It's two-way. If the other party is not hearing authenticity, is not hearing somebody who is communicating based
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in speaking from their gut and honoring their own voice and truth in the proper pitch, then you might not be taken so seriously. You mentioned the bird room earlier, do the same principles apply? Sure they do. Oh yeah. Women traditionally, and I'd like to think it's changing, but women traditionally don't speak up because they think they're in competition with how men sound or how the boss sounds, depending on what their gender is. And they're afraid or they don't like.
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or they don't think their voice means anything. Well, if you step into it from the point of authenticity, oh yeah, it's gonna mean something. You're gonna make the room turn around. You're not gonna make the room turn around if you just meekly raise your hand and you're speaking so softly, people go, what'd you say? Say it again, what? Doesn't take much to build resonance. It doesn't really take much to raise volume if that's what you need. It's all part of the game we play in business hierarchy, I guess.
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It amazes me in how many aspects of our life we always think, play the part. Don't be you. Put that aside. When you step into this room, you have to play the part. You have to be the part. Be the part. And so that's why we keep all of who we are suppressed in a sense. Speaking of the diaphragm, I used to think that voice coaches of singers are the ones who focus on the diaphragm to bring out their best voice. Yeah.
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What I teach is a conglomeration of everything I have learned over 40 years in the broadcast industry and taking singing lessons 20 years ago. I mean, I love to do regional theater. I love to be in the ensemble and speaking part, great. You know, I'm your girl. Got cast in a musical where I had to sing a duet with another woman. You want me to sing a duet? Okay.
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So I took what I call triage singing lessons. I had about seven weeks to get my voice and I had to sing the alto part. I wasn't even singing the melody. I worked with a vocal coach and we just dug in. We worked hard and everything she told me, I took to heart and I practiced. Her coaching, by the time we finished, I realized what she has taught me in terms of how to sing better, perfect for speakers too. I use a lot of what she taught me as well.
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So starting today, we will all speak from a diaphragm, not just from the throat. Right, oh sure. One of the quick tips that I have to help you speak better from your diaphragm, and this is something that the singing coach taught me, it was revelatory before you begin to speak. Lower your shoulders, relax your shoulders, why? Where do we carry tension and stress and anxiety?
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shoulders and back of the neck. That's why when you ask for a massage, when you, oh, it's very tense. So if you can let go of the tense muscles in your shoulders, what that automatically does is it relaxes the muscles into your neck and into your jaw and into your face. So that as you take that belly full of air with very heavy shoulders, you know, if I say to most people, take a deep breath, they're gonna go, taking a deep breath should not involve your shoulders ever.
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You take a deep breath and that air expands way down into your diaphragm and it pushes out against the waistband of your pants. So if your shoulders are relaxed and you breathe in into that diaphragm, take your fist and you put it right below your breastbone and just above your belly button. You push. That is the area, give or take, where your diaphragm is. So as you breathe in, the only thing that should move is that diaphragm, which is like a balloon, a muscle.
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that expands and contracts. And when you take that deep belly full of air with really relaxed shoulders, the next thing you say, if you're doing it right, if you're not in your head, get yourself out of your head, you're going to speak in probably the range, give or take, of where your best pitch is. That's the simple version of how to do it. And every time you take a breath, you can reset your pitch. You can reset where that air and energy is going to come from every time you take a breath.
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I have done this on occasions where I meditate. Yes, very similar. But then it's almost like there's a separation. I meditate and I do what I think I'm doing it right, at least. And then when the meditation is done, I get up, back to my old habits again. How do I keep this up? Easy, easy. Again, from my singing coach. She said, Susan, you've got six or seven weeks to get this. So here's what you're gonna do.
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You're going to take four post-it notes. And on the post-it notes, you write, I will notice my breath or breathe. One on your steering wheel, one on your refrigerator, one on your computer, one on your bathroom mirror. And every time you pass the post-it note, stop. Now there's more to the posture, which I would get into later if I were doing the long lesson, but in this case, lower your shoulders, breathe from your belly. And I like to do in on four.
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and then out on six. Out on six, make sure you have really exhaled all the air, which is something we don't do. We never think to completely empty our belly. So I like to practice that. In on four, out on six, and you're gonna do it for a minute. It's about six breaths. Stand or sit, do the six breaths, and then go on about your day until past the post-it note again. When you do that,
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your breathing becomes a little bit more second nature. And when you need to access it on air, on Zoom, on stage, in a conversation with your spouse, you can do it. You can get into it real quick. And then that breathing serves you well for whatever you're presenting. It becomes second nature to you the more that you do it, just like most things. Sure. Because we have such shallow breaths, I only notice on a meditation session.
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And why is it that we literally have to be told in a sense to remember our breath? If we're too busy, what is going on? It is that we're too busy, but it's also, I think that we walk upright. This is gonna sound weird. If you look at a baby, babies are born knowing how to do this. They just naturally, instinctively do it. If you've ever changed a baby who doesn't wanna be changed or you're getting her ready for a bath and she doesn't wanna get in the bath, what is she gonna do?
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suck in all the air in the room and that belly is gonna like, whoa, and she's gonna let it go. She's gonna fly with that. Babies do that. They instinctively know how to breathe. Sometime after we start walking, particularly as we get into three and four and our conversations or our speaking skills, our words start to develop and we are in conversation with people, it just goes away. This is so interesting. I'm literally thinking of
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They're changing a baby's diaper like they said, they don't want to. They take that quiet few second breath, because you can see the mouth is open and the eyes are closed and they, those quiet few seconds and they're really drawing this out of, you can see it. And they go, ha! We should learn from that. We should all learn from that. Maybe that's where primal scream comes from. I don't know, but we could learn a lot from babies.
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Out of the mouth of babes for sure. Literally. So when it comes to, like you said, we do public speaking coaching on this podcast. When you are presenting in front of people, let's say you've been called to do a TED talk and you apply the same principles, speaking with your authentic voice, your authentic pitch. Does it make a difference that everyone gets given a mic? So we're going to hear them anyway.
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Or they think I need to bring out my best voice for anything that projects onto the mic. Or do people think, oh, I've got to be giving a mic even if I speak softly, that's fine. The short answer to that is no. Microphones work to some degree, but if you rely on them to get speech and communication out, you have made a dreadful mistake. Speech and communication come from your gut. So you don't have to shout. And a lot of my reporters at the beginning,
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No, no, no, no, no, don't shout it. I didn't say do it loudly. I said, do it boldly, do it with intention, do it with determination. Because shouting can still come from the throat. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And you can really hurt yourself. Yeah. So you're not shouting. And if you're doing a Ted talk, you better be passionate about what you're talking about. So that passion will bring your breath and your sound into that, not loud, but very bold range. I just think of it as being bold.
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It's not loud. And microphones, you know, whoever is running your soundboard can adjust. That's why you do a mic check. Hopefully they can turn down the microphone because you're being big and you're filling the stage or you're filling the screen with your personality and with your passion, not cause you're filling the stage. So don't rely on a microphone, not ever. Even the in on four, out on six for a minute, you know what you're doing is you're activating your parasympathetic nervous system.
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so that your blood pressure is lowered, your heart rate is lowered, and you have sort of put a protective barrier around your sympathetic nervous system, which would release the chemicals and hormones that would do fight or flight. It's what makes the butterflies in your stomach. It's what prompts those voices in your head. When you're breathing and focusing on the breath, it's like it shuts all that down. It allows you to concentrate on the presentation at hand.
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You need butterflies, it provides the energy. But the breathing, as I like to say, just puts the butterflies in formation and they work for you. So please explain a little bit more about the nervous system part. I've had a guest before who spoke about focusing on your breathing helps calm your nervous system. That's how he put it. Right. Would you please explain a little bit more about that?
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Oh, I'm not a medical person and I don't have all the physiological nuances down, but you actually have two nervous systems, central nervous system that is actually the smaller of the two nervous systems. And your central nervous system is very much attached to your brain, your pancreas, your liver, your thyroid, your thalamus.
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all the organs in your body that release hormones and chemicals that keep your body in balance. Okay. Your parasympathetic nervous system is actually longer and goes to more parts of your body, but they're not associated with the parts of your body that release hormones and chemicals. So your parasympathetic nervous system is what counteracts your nervous system. And that's breath and that's your gut.
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And that's your belly. And in fact, scientists say your gut, which we also refer to as your digestive system and your stomach and your intestines, the gut biome has as much to do with your physical and mental health as anything else in your body. And scientists are now figuring out, yeah, your gut has way more to do with your general overall health and wellbeing than they ever thought before. So by activating the parasympathetic nervous system,
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through breath and relaxation. And what I teach you to do is just concentrate all the energy from your gut up past your lungs and esophagus, past your vocal cords, and then out through the mask of your face. I don't want any energy being used anywhere else. I mean, unless you have to, if you're holding a mic, got your phone in one hand, because you're gonna read something from the phone. The idea is to just condense and relax. You know, it protects you from those crazy chemicals that are coursing through your body, causing you to panic.
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I like to say to my reporters, let's say you're in the newsroom, all hell is breaking loose, you're 45 minutes to air, you don't know what to do next. Oh my God, should I go call that person? Should I edit this piece? Should I write this? Should I go talk to her? What should I do? Close your eyes for a minute. Try to take a few breaths, four, five. If you can't even do the whole minute, just breathe. Open your eyes. The breath clarifies things. If you try to tune out the circus that's going on around you and tune into the breath, you're gonna open your eyes and go, okay, this is what I need to do. Boom, boom, boom, boom.
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You are more productive by calming down instead of rush, rush, rush, rush all the time thinking you're getting a lot more done. And speaking of calming down, use a pause. Occasionally, we all are so afraid of not having sound around us. When you're in the middle of a conversation or you're presenting the news or you're explaining something to your team at work, don't go a mile a minute. Take pauses. Two reasons. One, it allows you to reset your breath and it also allows your
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brain to get a little ahead like, okay, this is what I'm going to do next. But the pause is really for me, the audience. I need to absorb what you've just told me. So a pause lets me catch up. I'll say to the reporters, you've been working on this story all day. You know it backwards and forwards. You could tell it every which way to Sunday. And then when you go on air, your viewers have no idea what this is. You've been on it all day. So walk me through it. Pause. Let me catch up. Let me breathe and digest.
28:06
Exactly. Susan, this has been mind blowing for me. Anything voice related, I've only seen it through a public speaking perspective and it's only been voice and tone. I had no idea there were underlying issues connected to that. Thank you so much for sharing this with us. The time has gone so quickly. We could sit another hour and keep going on this because there are so many tangential areas that we could get into that technically go back to your voice. Sure.
28:35
I've loved every minute. Thank you so much. I have enjoyed talking to you as well. And I'm sure the listeners will greatly benefit from this. I hope so. Yeah. That's my hope is that you come away with a little bit of an actionable, I could try this. Let me think about that. Yeah. That makes a little sense. Let me see how I can work it into my own life. I tell my reporters, I'm going to teach you to eat an elephant, but we're not going to do it all in one bite. Nope. We're going to do a little bit at a time. So practice a little bit at a time.
29:03
Please repeat that statement about the eyes and the mouth. If your eyes are the windows to your soul, your mouth, your speech are the front door. Susan Murphy, the broadcast voice coach has opened our eyes to so much. And more than anything, we've learned some of the breath work we can start doing in order to find our authentic voice. Yep, yep, well done. Before you go, Susan, please tell us where to find you on social media.
29:33
My little company is called Vosat, Better Broadcast Voices, Vosat, V-O-S-O-T. If you're in our business, you know what Vosat is. It is broadcast shorthand for voiceover sound on tape, which is what we write. Like if a reporter has gone out and done a story, but it's just a little story, she'll write it up and the anchor will read it. And it might have a voice cut in it.
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but the anchor is reading someone else's story that's voiceover and then a sound on tape could be a cut from a person in the story. My website is susanmurphyvosat.com. You can certainly find me on LinkedIn. Find Susan Murphy Broadcast Voice Coach. Susan Murphy Broadcast Voice Coach. Thank you so much for being here today. Delighted to be here. I hope I can come back in the future. Of course. You will always be welcome on this because we have so much to unpack from this topic.
30:26
Exactly. Yes. Thank you, Susan.