In more ways than one, we often find ourselves in situations and communities that make us feel uncomfortable. The only way to break from that feeling is to have the courage to step up from your comfort zone and start unleashing your voice.
Susi Vine sits down with voice coach and professional singer Monifa Harris to talk about:
- The merit of the theory “fake it till you make it”
- What prevents people from stepping up + being seen
- How important it is to get comfortable working outside the comfort zone
- The possibility that what you fear is not real
- Why developing your voice helps you step into your personal power + excel in all areas
- How singing balances your vagus nerve
- The value of unleashing your personal authority
Book a call with Monifa to discover your Vocal Superpower
Learn more about the Impact Online Voice Studio
Join the Get Vocal community on Facebook
Check out the eFEMeral: Voice Matters podcast
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Watch the episode here:
The Power Of Using Your Voice
Have you ever felt invisible or struggled to be heard? Do you have a message to share but hesitate to speak up? How would it feel to free yourself of the stress of being limited in your success because you don’t know how to express yourself? In this conversation with Monifa Harris, Voice Coach and professional singer, we discuss how anyone in any field of expertise benefits from the discovery and development of their singing voice. Learn how you can build overall confidence and unleash creativity so you can take center stage in your career and feel more fulfilled in life.
I’m happy to be back and to get to introduce to you my dear friend, Monifa Harris. Monifa is a professional voice coach and singer. She is committed to helping those in any field discover or restore their singing voice and build overall confidence through vocal work. Monifa has vocal programs that help professionals from all areas of expertise raise their voice with ease, passion and presence. She has translated her knowledge of voice, breath and spirit to help others sing and speak authentically and with certainty, even if they never felt comfortable using their voice before. She would love to help you discover your true voice and inner strength for deep confidence on stage and in life. Monifa Harris has performed on stages in Florida, California, North Carolina, Washington, DC, New York, Greece, Canada and Bulgaria. Connect with Monifa Harris and discover how connecting to your voice helps connect you to your innate power and full expression of creativity. Monifa, thank you so much for joining me.
It’s my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me, Susi.
This is a treat. To start off, I know you have a long and winding path, not unlike myself. What are some highlights about your journey to find yourself center stage?
When you say center stage, it brings up all the butterflies and they’re like, “I have been in a center stage.” It’s a long journey because I started as an introvert. I’m still an introvert in so many ways, I prefer being by myself. When I think of myself center stage, I think of what it took to get me there, and that was passion. I was super passionate about singing and about the music. I figured out a way to be a part of it. I was super passionate about getting out so that you don’t have to subscribe to the idea that because other people don’t recognize your worth, you aren’t worthy. Helping people understand the value of themselves and their voice and the value of whatever they’re passionate about because it’s not what mainstream people are passionate about. It doesn’t make it less valuable. Honoring that and not making it something that you’re ashamed of and all of that thing. I felt the craziness had to stop around sidelining what’s important to you.
That’s such an important discovery because it’s easy to struggle with that balance of what’s a smart choice versus, “What do I keep getting called to come back to and share?” When you try to turn down the volume on that, it gets a little bit louder and more insistent. Being authentic is the best way to tap into your creativity. I’m sure that you cover that with your vocal students.
It’s the way that we source our energy, but it’s the way creativity flows. If you should go too far off of that thing that feels good for you, then you end up out there looking weird. We’re all trying to avoid it. If you’re going to look weird, it might as well be how weird you are and not some other weird that you stumbled upon by accident because you’re trying to avoid authenticity.
It reminds me that lesson that you learn at school. Hopefully, you learn it in school because otherwise you’re destined to years of pain and misery. You always remember looking back to the person who tried hard to fit in or to be something that they weren’t. It was some imperceptible difference that made it so much harder for them to fit in because they weren’t authentic. It was something that didn’t land right with others. Even if you feel being authentic doesn’t fall in line with perhaps a group or an occupation that you feel you should be in, stepping into it and to yourself, letting your freak flag fly makes it easier for everybody. If it’s not the right place for you, the right place is going to show up as long as you’re being authentic.
Don’t bother fitting in when it’s only going to be comfortable for both ends but for so long. You’re making each other miserable because you’re both faking it by that time. It also reminds me of the fact that your unique characteristics are very much the things that people remember you before. One of my favorite business coaches is Samuel Leslie, who talks about making your own course. A big part of how she sets her people apart is that they are supposed to add what she calls a culture add. It means that any experience you’ve had in your life, anything that’s an identifier for you and your culture or your experience is also something that will make you stand out to the group that would most likely want to work with you. It’s something people were so intimidated by the fact that we do have things that don’t quite fit in with people that seem successful, that we want to hide those things. We forget that actually if you hide the stuff that makes you special, then you’re no longer visible.
You’ve got to step into that scary space and hold that space until you can fill it. I have some issue with fake it until you make it but there is a point at which, and when I worked in theater, I wasn’t center stage. I chose to keep myself backstage, but that training certainly comes into play. I don’t believe that we should fake it like put ourselves out if we don’t have what it takes to back it up. Do it scared, do it anyway. You might not feel you’re 100% ready, but you’re probably more so than you think you are. When you go out on faith, that’s when the rewards start coming in.
There’s something weird to me about the idea of fake it until you make it. It’s like, “Fake? That cannot be a good thing.” I correlate this to being onstage. When you pick up a character, when you pick up whatever to perform on stage, you’re not that character. If you wouldn’t be honest with yourself or anybody in the room, there’s a part of you that could be that character. There’s a part of me that likes the character, no matter how bad or good or whatever, how flaky. Some part of you is, “I wish I could do that in my real life.” One of my favorite things about being a mezzo and therefore always having the mean roles or being a maid, either way, it’s sulking in the background. It’s very much a part of my personality or you’re mean, which is also pretty cool because you never feel like you can be mean in real life. You’re supposed to be nice.
There’s something I love about playing mean in a role because it becomes this thing where you’ve got to feel all those things that you’re not supposed to feel. You’re not supposed to be angry. You’re not supposed to be bossy. You’re not supposed to be all of these things. It’s not this thing where you’re saying, “I’m faking being this character.” It’s the thing where you’re calling up the part of you that feels that way. You don’t want to fake it until you make it but you do want to admit to the parts of you that are that. A lot of times, people don’t see themselves in authority because they haven’t historically been in authority. They want to be a leader and they want it to be a leader of the office. When you fake it, you start doing things that people that you think you aren’t are supposed to be bossy and hard-nosed and all these things, that’s not a real thing.
It’s something that’s in your head because you haven’t had the experience yet, when you can be like the parts of you that want to get things done. I’m super laid back until I have to put on a performance of any kind. I put on a lot of private performances in North Carolina and all of a sudden, I’m like, “It goes this way. This is the entrance. You have 4 minutes and 24 seconds on your song. Let’s keep it within the minute.” I am specific because I have specific things in mind for what’s going on the stage. It’s also how you create a supportive system for people that need direction, to feel more supported. It’s never something I try to be when I became that. People are like, “You’re so laid back. I didn’t expect that to be that way,” but about music, I am. I am very specific about music. It wasn’t something about I became a different person. I called it with things I thought were necessary for the work I wanted to do. It’s a very different process. You’re never too far from that person. You have to admit that to yourself.
That’s brilliant because there are many different aspects that we end up in the different roles we serve, whether that’s with family or friends or work professionally, and then we get our playtime. That’s brilliant. You can call in what you need of yourself to do what you need to do in that venue. Be that totally relaxed and play, and restore yourself or get down to work, turn things out, it’s time to shine. You can sit back and step back into your more relaxed mode once you’ve delivered. One other question that I have for you that came from a conversation we were having when we decided we had to get this on record is how do people struggle with not being seen? What is it that keeps people from stepping up and showing up so that they can be seen?
Most of the time, people are scared of being criticized for what makes them stand out. For people like me, if you feel like me, then when you were younger, you were a nerd. You were a little bit too smart who wants to read books all the time, not interesting. What made me different was something that most people weren’t looking for in a friend in middle school or high school. It’s very uncomfortable to show up when you haven’t historically been valued. Often, it was probably in your best interest in school if you didn’t flaunt the fact that you get straight A’s, and you don’t flaunt the fact that you doing dumb things to other people like, “This stuff I got from band camp.” You don’t have those conversations around the groups that weren’t there with you.
It’s this thing where you learn to hide different roles for different cliques because that’s how schools work. Different parts of personality for different cliques. I tried to be fairly cool for my friends that spoke Spanish and came from different countries. I went dancing with them. When I was in bands, it was one of those things, I practice all the time. Of course, I read sci-fi. You say what’s in your personality so that you can fit in. As students are called to stand up by yourself, it becomes a totally different characteristic. Case in point, the difference between being part of a chorus and being a soloist. In the chorus, your purpose is to blend. You’re supposed to fit in. You go along with the crowd, otherwise, you’re called out for the wrong reasons. That’s the way it is in the chorus because they want a cohesive sound.
As a soloist, you have to take all those things that you dampened in order to fit into the chorus and you’ve got to turn it up 1,000% because now if you can’t be seen, if you can’t cut through and be present to the mass audience against the background of hundreds of people, then that’s a problem. It’s like you’re not up there. That’s what people forget, especially for stepping up in a business, a solopreneurship, any leadership. All of that takes this recovering of all the things that you’ve probably been hiding for a long time to fit in and get along, and then putting that to the forefront so that you can cut through the noise. We’re talking about this because it’s not easy to undo that training. It takes a lot of self-examination. I’m totally in that process right now as I speak about it.
I love that that’s two sides of the same coin. We’re going from talking about the way that we would shape ourselves to fit different molds, and in a different but somewhat same capacity, we would dampen ourselves so as not to come out. We’ve narrowed ourselves and we’ve squished ourselves into this mold. When our opportunity finally comes that we want to stand out, we want to rise to the top, we want to excel in business or get the promotion or whatever it is in whatever aspect, we’ve got to take all that training and recognize it served a purpose over here. Now, this is why it doesn’t serve us. It’s time to step out of that shell.
You have to call all those things back to you. Honestly, even when I’m giving instructions to the chorus, one of my biggest pieces of advice as to sing out because the more you sing out, the more the people that are with you can. It creates this nice place where everybody feels comfortable being their full selves. An ideal environment would be that anyways. If you can lead that charge, you’ve now become the leader of that group as well. You can do it in baby steps as well. It’s just that you have to be intentional about your purpose in doing that, and then not be scared to be like, “I did this and this on Friday. I’m hoping that you guys, bosses, managers, like this because I spent five hours on it and I wanted to put this together to show you what I got,” and not being afraid to do that either. It’s like, “I want to be noticed. I’m here to be seen.”
That leads me to another great question that I’m sure in your private coaching and work that you do with your students, you do have to get out of your comfort zone in order to make the music that you are here to bring to the world. How do you support people in getting comfortable working outside their comfort zone?
For me, it’s about building a core base so that they can know that anything that happens is good. I built an environment out of experimentation. This is so funny because I’ve heard this in business as well. I want them to see what happens. I’m not asking them to get it right, I’m asking them to see what happens. The more I can get them to that point where they can see what happens, and then I start pointing them to what they don’t want to go to. They’re like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen if I do that.” “That’s good. Let’s see what happens.” It’s important to be able to dive into what makes you uncomfortable, which is essentially what we were bringing up so much of because that’s where the new things come from. That’s where you get to the level of awareness around the issue, and that can actually transform or transmute that issue.
It takes a great amount of intensity. Intensity itself can be uncomfortable. We’re used to being in chill mode or being so much. I have to say this. We’re used to having, so the uncomfortable becomes comfortable. I think of this again when I think of work because with the jobs that I’ve had were super uncomfortable but you get used to it. You get used to a level of uncomfortable and then you get stagnant around it. There’s uncomfortable that’s within. That’s a completely different thing. Being comfortable in your environment, trying to fit into a group might not be comfortable, but as long as they’re fitting in, you feel like you can’t be attacked. Getting uncomfortable within is where the clarity of what needs to change. What is different than the way you want it to be? You start seeing how real or unreal that is.
This is honestly some of the work of standing out in and of itself because you realize how much of yourself you’re not being. You’re like, “I don’t know why I’m uncomfortable sharing this part of myself to this group of people.” It usually comes again with some conversation in your head around, “I’m going to get attacked if I show up this way. Somebody is going to knock me back. They’re going to think I’m on a high horse and knock me right back down. They’re going to think I’m crazy and lock me up.” It’s some kind of conversation in your own head around that. It takes getting in there and sitting in with yourself and saying, “Where did you get this idea?” Are there any examples around you where that’s not true? Why do you think it’s specifically true for you?” You’re starting to have some real one-on-one time about that. I think it’s important.
For me and my clients, it’s a little bit of a faster process because essentially, we’re practicing it in real-time by getting connected to our breath and body, and then jumping and seeing if it works. Then getting back to our breath and body, doing it again and seeing if it works. We’re practicing the experience of getting uncomfortable and showing up in each breath exercise that we do. It becomes getting comfortable with uncomfortable.
There are many facets of it and aspects of it. First of all, you have to be in the cultivating the practice of awareness, of recognizing how you feel, what you’re resisting, what you feel drawn to and what’s your motivation. There’s the discomfort from working outside your comfort zone because you’re expanding your area of ability. You’ve got to press the boundaries and get uncomfortable to grow. You then bring up that perfect point of a lot of times that discomfort comes from that voice, that inner gremlin, if you want to call it that, that’s like, “You probably don’t want to do that. You’re going to get stepped back down. That is not for you.” This is that gremlin that has that like, “I’m here to protect you. I’m going to tell you why you shouldn’t do that or what you’re already doing wrong.”
That discomfort, we can’t shy away from either. We have to get more comfortable stepping into it. Sometimes people think that inner voice, that negative perception that they’ve got, they’ve got to square off with it or turn the mute button and completely disregard it. That awareness helps you understand where it’s coming from. What is it that that part of you is trying to protect yourself from? If you can be aware and say, “Whatever happens, I’m authentic and doing what I feel I need to move forward. The reception could be this or it could be this but we’ll take that on as it unfolds, but I need to step into this and I need to step into that discomfort and not back away from it.” You can grow so much with awareness, keep moving into it and pressing your own edges, pressing the limits.
You can always take the blanket statement that whatever your fear is, it’s not real. There’s a lot of great things about this that I wish I had the memory for. The reality is, whatever you’re fearing isn’t real. Number one, if it’s a fear, it hasn’t happened yet, you’re not usually scared of, it’s not currently happening. You’re scared of something that it could result in maybe, but you’re not scared of what’s currently happening. Also, you can consider it a smokescreen. It’s a part of your body that’s keeping you from buying. That’s why I feel it’s that crucial. This is very true for voice by the way because it’s all the training that we get from youth around our parents, around our society, as children, we’re not supposed to feel like we’re not important and we’re not supposed to talk or up.
There’s also a historical fact that people have literally died overstating things that people weren’t ready to hear. There are those things that come up in us every time that we’re trying to stand out. One of the biggest things is that if you’re not supported by the society, then you become disenfranchised. That’s one of the scariest things there are for people because the truth is, if you have no group, then you have nothing to eat from. There’s no way to earn money. There’s no way to survive essentially. It’s hard to survive on your own. There’s something deep within us that knows that. That’s what it’s trying to save us from like, “I don’t know how random people in the world are going to take this. They’re going to think all that stuff.” The more we focus in on what we fear, the more we’re creating imaginary people. We bring them all to the place that we’re going to show up and we wonder why we’re nervous.
You have to realize those things aren’t real and that you can choose to be more present to self, and that’s where it becomes important to have some process that brings you back to the moment, back to your intention, talking to who you want to speak to. Even if that’s your manager and you’re thinking, “I don’t even know if my manager likes me,” you can assume that they do. You can talk to them like, “My manager thinks I’m the best.” Talk to them as if because you won’t know until. You won’t know until you actually have the conversation. Until then, it’s just an unfounded fear.
The energy that we put out there is so powerful. That’s terrific. Instead of the worst-case scenario, why not buy into the best-case scenario? Come from that energy and come from that higher vibration, and then see what comes into your field as opposed to expecting the worst. I get to tell this to my husband now and then, “If you keep looking for trouble for me to come and find you, it is easy to see it coming. If you keep looking through the better stuff, then you notice it.” Our brains are so wired, like you’re saying, that sphere. We are wired to be defensive, to protect ourselves, to be ready to cut and run, that’s our biological wiring because that’s what we came with. This programming, we have control over. We get to choose to say, “I don’t have to be afraid of what’s going to happen. I’m going to expect the best. I’m going to keep on seeking that out. We actually pattern our brain to look for those, to validate that. It starts that upward cycle instead of the downward trend.
That’s what’s beautiful about a lot pure vision of what you want as a result. When you’re working off of that material, it gets ten times easier. If you didn’t believe you could be giving her a raise, if you didn’t believe that you could build a business, that you wouldn’t be having this conversation with yourself at all. There’s a part of you that believes it can happen. That’s what you want to get in touch with.
It’s the power of where we put our attention, and that practice over time makes it easier. You don’t have to be reminding yourself to get into that frame of mind. It becomes the way that you operate. You can cut out all that noise and obstacles. I feel we’ve been talking quite a lot. It makes sense to me but it has since we met. I heard about your mission about why connecting to our voice and stepping into it helps people excel in other areas. At the same time, I understand that it can be hard for people who hear about this correlation and they say, “That’s cool. I don’t need to say it. I wish I felt more confident in the meetings. I wish I had more power in the boardroom. I don’t get the voice connection.” Beyond the basic lessons that we’ve talked about authenticity and stepping into your power and recognizing the difference of taking center stage versus blending into the chorus. Are there other ways in which you see your clients finding it easier to bring some of these lessons? What are these lessons that they can take back with them to shine in the business capacity?
It is that ability to tap into what you are trying to do at any given moment, and then express it because there’s something that comes up on the way out. Honestly, that’s one of the reasons why my marketing specifically points to non-singers. If you’re discerning enough to realize that something’s not quite going right with your voice, whether that’s by somebody telling you or something real-time experience, what happens with that is that you have the discernment to understand what it would take to move forward as well. A lot of people assign the voice as something that special people do. They think, “I don’t do that, but I do want to be confident. Can we talk about speaking?” My answer is always like, “We can talk about speaking if you’re willing to work with your singing voice.” What happens in singing that doesn’t happen quite with anything else is that it affects your nervous system. There are a few ways, and this is specifically because of the vagus nerve. If anybody has heard about this in combination with any long-term illnesses or a lot of things that sometimes are hard to point out in the beginning. It could be coming from a lot of different directions in the body. They’ll talk to you eventually about the vagus nerve because it’s the main chord of connection to the whole body.
It’s the one cranial nerve that actually integrates with most of our major organs. It’s incredible.
There are a few ways that you can stimulate the vagus nerve. People keep saying that you can hold your breath. In my belief, you can’t just hold your breath. You can’t stop breathing. It has to be some kind of thing where you’re relaxing enough that you can trigger the vagus nerve. You have to relax your vocal cords to the back of your throat. You can breathe to do that and then hold your breath, breathe out and then hold your breath to do that. Everything else is vocal. Chanting, singing, humming are the other ways to stimulate the vagus nerve. Automatically, you can get into a feeling of confidence when you stimulate your vagus nerve. I say this because people want to be confident but they assume that that’s a special people thing like, “How do I get confident? You do cool people things.” It doesn’t work that way. You have to be confident before you do the cool things.
One of the ways to be confident is to get your body and state so that it feels cool, calm and collected. That feeling of, “I’ve got this.” One of those ways is to stimulate the vagus nerve. It gives you this feeling of full-body relaxation. When you do breathwork, it also can help with somebody who knows what they’re doing. Vocal work is specific because you not only get the benefit of that automatic stimulation of the vagus nerve, but you also get the vibrational resonance of that stimulation as well. With attention and awareness, you can shift things in minutes, including your mindset and how you come to the table. I’ve had people with 2 or 3 sessions that end up having conversations with their spouse, partner, ex, that they would have never said before. It came with more clarity, more authority, more confidence than they’ve had in a long time been able to have these conversations. That comes from being present into your body and having a real intimate experience of how you feel at any given moment.
Singing does this in a way that can’t be done any other way, in my opinion. If you know anything about chakras, if you know about throat chakra, you know it’s the chakra where we come with expression and also creation. I always bring up the fact that the creation of the world was of two things. When God first spoke the world into existence, “Let there be light,” was what he said. The first thing is for light and that he spoke. Those are real things, so if you’re not into that version, there’s the ohm, it’s supposed to be the original sound, the sound in which creation was born. It’s a sound that creates that. This is why people were into affirmations for so long.
If you want to create anything new in your life, you have to be able to speak it, and not just to speak it but to speak it with authority. If you don’t know what authority feels like, you might want to get acquainted to it. What does that feel in your body? That’s the process. That’s why I’m so passionate about it because you have the experience, or something that you might only know by stories that other people have told you. You want to be able to experience that yourself. Sound is powerful. When you can know how to tap into your own authority with your own voice, then everything you say is power. Nobody is going to ignore you, even if you’re wrong. I hate to say it but it’s true.
People are involved in it because that’s what acting is. They get so involved in the story because you’re saying it like it’s real. If you believe in something you’re passionate about and you’ve heard a lot of people talk about the same thing and they are not any cooler than you are. They’re saying the same thing, giving the same material. People listen to them and they say it, that is a disconnection with their personal authority. That is something that can be easily fixed if you’re willing to work with your voice.
That’s the secret. First, you have to be willing to do a little bit of work. I love it. I love how Science and Biology are catching up with concepts and theories that we’ve had for millennia. The fact that you can use your energy, your attention and intention, your breath to change your biological process to slow your heart rate down through your breath. Through the choice that you make, you can change your biology. By changing your biology and turning down your stress response, you have room for your creativity, for your intention to be expressed. There’s only so much bandwidth we have. Instead of letting the noise take up the space, we can tune that down and then have all of this space to express and get authentic and bring out what we’re here for.
There’s so much space in there when we make the choice to create it. First, I have to get acquainted that it’s valuable. You say work with your breath. I was like, “I breathe already,” so they discount it. I used to say all the time, “Anybody can sing.” People believe in me because they’re like, “That’s not true.” I have to leave that at the door. When I say, “I know your voice can lead you there whether you can sing or not.” That thing that you want to say like, “I’m not going to buy into that,” that thing of not even wanting to try the tool that can then can work is our inner resistance overall. All the time, I’m always mentioning, “What makes it less valuable to you? Is it because you can’t put it in a package and sell it? You don’t plan on becoming a professional singer, so therefore it’s not valuable enough to work on.” Who’s determining what’s valuable to you? You breathe every second of the day. Importance level, in real life, you stopped breathing, there are problems. Let’s think less about like, “Can you sell it at the store and more about, ‘How often do I use this thing? Should I get to know it?’”
“Should I take advantage of this tool that I have?”
Our voice is how we communicate with the world, our families, our friends, our partners. You should know how to do it with passion, with presence, with love because it will invite all things good to you.
I knew this was going to be a great conversation. Thank you, Monifa, for bringing some reality and some insights to it. There’s so much to take away from this conversation, so it’s probably worth another read or two. I’m definitely going to enjoy this one and getting to read it all over again. Thank you so much for carving out a little bit of time and joining me. I appreciate you.
It’s absolute pleasure. I thank you so much. I’ll see you guys over there at The Reset to Destress.
That was the name of the challenge that I started the group. Now the group is Live With Less Stress, and my website is 3XLessStress.com.
I was going to say the name of your company but then I realized there was a different name for the group. I was like, “Maybe I should ask before I put that out there.”
I’m on all channels. Monifa, tell us your website where people can find you.
You can find me at MonifaHarris.com. It’s also better to find me on Facebook because I don’t keep my website super updated. You can see what I’m currently doing if you look for me on my business page. You can search it on Facebook pages, my name is Monifa Harris Voice. You could put that in the URL or you can look for me, Monifa Harris Voice, in the search engine.
Monifa is always sharing some brilliant content on Facebook too. I love to see what’s new and coming out over there. Tune in on all channels. The podcast that you and your friend are putting out, what’s it called?
It’s eFEMeral.
You can check out their conversations and explorations and matters of voice and expression.
Expression, showing up, communication, we cover all the things, and the energy of feminine and masculine and what that means and what it means to your self-expression.
Thank you so much, Monifa. I’ll talk to you soon.
