Voice as a Bridge

Where to start this month?

Miles Davis is a good place to start.

Having been obsessed by voice all my life from when I first used to learn poems and recite them, to university studying drama at Exeter University as one of only thirteen students, and then a thiry five year career in arts and culture, this is a quote I always come back to.

Somehow the voice and the trumpet are so connected - and especially to me as my father is an orchestral trumpeter player.

Both instruments -the voice and the trumpet - have a kind of emotion attached - they can scream, cry and talk. Miles Davis knew this more than anyone.

He also opened his biography with the most classic line ever,

"Listen. The greatest feeling I ever had in my life—with my clothes on—was when I first heard Diz and Bird together in St. Louis, Missouri, back in 1944."

Unforgettable trumpeter player and a reminder of the impactful sound of a voice.

I like to keep my ears open as much as possible for each voice I hear.

Last week in a mediation group that I attend online, one guy gave feedback after the session that he hadn’t experienced much only that he felt “filled with peas.”

Once we’d figured out that he had actually said, with his American accent, was that he felt “filled with peace” it led to a good round of jokes and laughter with the Brits totally teasing him.

The joke was a bit serious because actually “being filled with peas” or peace, is a big deal in these crazed times.

This guy was expecting flashing lights and hallucinations so the “peas” felt like the cheap option.

Not at all.

Any peas you can get are to be received with gratitude.

It goes for your speaking and presenting as well, don’t ignore the small moments and tiny steps in the hunt for the big ones.

You might feel ready to be on Oprah and you may well deserve to be there, however does her audience think so?

It’s easy to ignore the early boring steps and want to cut to the chase.

I get it.

Your story is a strong one, a lived one, a professional position that you’ve taken years to develop so why wouldn’t you want to get it onto the best stage?

Sometimes it happens because the circumstances are so extraordinary such as the story of Malala Yousafzai.

Her life changed forever when aged just 15 she was hit by a Taliban bullet on the 9th October 2012. It swept the news around the world so even if you don’t remember her name, you’ll remember her face and know the story.

A gunman flagged down her school bus in the once peaceful valley of Swat, proudly known as "the Switzerland of Pakistan”,?by a man asking ”Who is Malala?"

I refreshed my memory of the story from a BBC article written on 7th?October 2013 by Mishal Husain, know as a British newsreader, journalist and first Muslim presenter of BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

According to Husain’s article the region of Yousafzai;

“Until 1969, it was a semi-autonomous principality - its ruler known as the Wali. The first of these was Miangul Gulshahzada Sir Abdul Wadud, appointed by a local council in 1915 and known to Swatis as "Badshah Sahib" - the King. Although himself uneducated, he laid the foundation for a network of schools in the valley - the first boys' primary school came in 1922, followed within a few years by the first girls' school.”

The area was knowing for producing doctors and teachers, and quoted in Husain's article Adnan Aurangzeb says, "Swat was proud of its record on education… one way to identify a Swati outside of Swat was that he always had a pen in his chest pocket, and that meant he was literate."

Indeed Malala’s father realised a dream of founding his own school, which began with just a few pupils and grew to more than 1,000 girls and boys.

What I hadn’t realised about this story was that at the age of 11 Malala wrote a blog for BBC Urdu when they were looking for voices to share their experience of life in the region. Her father had been asked to think of someone who could talk about the themes of seduction and the future and it was his daughter who came to mind.

The anonymous blog was called “Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl” and Malala chronicled her hope to keep going to school and her fears for the future of Swat because the Taliban had ordered schools to close as part of an edict banning girls' education. Though the ban was then lifted it was not before some militants with an austere interpretation of Sharia law had destroyed 150 schools.

In the diary Malal shared her fears that like many of her friends they would just be constricted to the traditional role of staying in the house and bearing children.

Because of the controversial nature of this blog to Taliban traditionalists, the bus in which Malala was travelling had been targeted specifically in order to find her.

The bullet that entered her head entirely severed her facial nerve requiring an initial 10-hour operation and after many more treatments a cochlear implant. Firstly going to military hospitals in Peshawar?and Islamabad she was finally transported to Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham.

Post operative care is said to be key in these kinds of injuries and Malala was lucky that pediatric intensive care specialist Fiona Reynolds was in the region. Reynolds was reported to have said that despite the security worries she might have had about the Peshawar region and knowing the risk, she accepted because “Malala had been shot because she wanted an education, and I was in Pakistan because I'm a woman with an education, so I couldn't say 'no'."

Reynolds was key in the post operative stages and whilst Malala could not initially speak could ask questions using an alphabet board. Emergency care consultant Javid Kayani, a British Pakistani, noted that the first word she tapped out was 'country’ and then ‘father.” So with the relief of seeing she could ask questions the answers were given ‘England’ and her father was in Pakistan and would be coming soon.

Incredibly it was only nine months later Malala stood up at the UN headquarters in New York on her 16th birthday addressing a specially convened youth assembly and broadcasting to the world.

Those words - “One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world" made history.

Because it isn’t that it hasn’t been said before, it is about the stories behind the stories and the journey to get to the stage.

Malala’s journey began with a father passionate about education. When she walked on stage she was carrying a legacy. It was as if she had a pen in her top pocket like the Swat region?of Pakistan that she came from so she was speaking to the world but also for her nation and local region.

It’s that moment when the world is bigger than yourself.

It’s been called “communitas” by anthropologist Victor Turner - that rare and special moment of coming together.

When you have that feeling in your bones then your speaking is not about you but about becoming part of a legacy.

“I have a dream” said Martin Luther King and his voice reached back into time and way forward into the future. Time stopped and a legacy began.

So when we obsess about small details we fill our heads with worries that stop a speech being about the present moment.

Voice coach Gary Genard who is an actor, author, and expert in public speaking and overcoming speaking fear makes a good point about transmitting a sense of credibility. He says in a blog post, 5 Ways to Be a Credible Speaker Who Wins Over Audiences.

“The interesting thing about credibility, is that it has to exist in the audience's mind, not your own. It's a speaking quality, then, that can only be created by the right kind of focus. By that, I mean the kind that emanates from a speaker who is more interested in the audience's needs than his or her own.

Part of doing that says Genard is to “live in your audience’s world”, asking yourself “what do they need?”

“There is no good singing, there is only present and absent.” - Jeff Buckley

How can you more fully turn up as you?- warts and all? How can you mark the moment when you walk on stage? How can you feel the nerves as excitement and knowledge that you are contributing.

It takes preparation but it is completely possible.

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants - Issac Newton

Part of it comes from recognising your legacy and celebrating all the steps you have taken and the people who helped you take them.

Deborah Claire Procter

LIVE EVENT: I’ll be sharing much more in a live workshop co led with Richard Freeman (always possible) who helps businesses dig into what will make an impact in the world. It's in Central London at the RSA building on the 23rd June. There’s a one to one session with me before and afterwards to make sure we dig deep.

EMAIL UPDATES: Because it's hard to break habits alone I have an email with a daily dose of reminders to help you find and feel your voice. You get a PDF with some more tips and thoughts, also being on this?Stage Presence Central list?means you get heads-up on trainings before they are announced publicly.

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