Find Your Voice and Change How the World Perceives You

We're really excited about this episode of the Big Leap podcast. We've got one of the world's greatest vocal coaches, Roger Love, and he has coached a lot of people you'd be very familiar with, and he has things to say about the voice that no matter where you're speaking or what you're speaking about, your speaking is going to be enhanced. So I really encourage you to tune in and hear what he has to say.

Right. And one of the things that I loved about this episode, and I'm talking about it because Gay, or, I mean, Roger is here with. With us. Gay is we talked about personality, character, and also breath and movement. But how to create a character with your voice that creates either love and connection or influence or creates variety. And we talk about melody and voice that was really, really powerful. So how about you, Roger? What is everyone and what should they be listening to for in this episode?

They're going to realize that they're not the voice they were born with, that some of the sounds that are coming out of their mouths are working for them, working for their communications and their relationships, and some of the sounds are not working. So we're going to go through a list of sounds, and I'm going to show you how to change the ones that are not working so that when you open up your mouth, people will.

Feel and understand and appreciate the best of who you are. They'll find the authentic parts of you and will get rid of all the sounds that you don't like in your voice right now.

All that and more in this episode of the Big Leap.

Hey, this is Mike Koenigs, and I'm here today with a very, very special guest. It's Roger Love, and I am so excited for this. I've been looking forward to this. Roger Gay. What do you say, my friend?

I'm really excited to be working with Roger, too, and talking to Roger, too, because I know a little bit about his work and some of the people he's worked with. So I'm really eager to kind of get behind the scenes and find out his operating system.

I love it.

Sure.

Yeah.

So just to frame this up, if you don't know, Roger, haven't heard of him. He's worked some with some big, big Grammy award winners, SAG Oscar winners, including Selena Gomez, Reese Witherspoon, Jeff Bridges, many, many, many more. I mean, it's like it is a who's who's list. Who's who list for sure. But let's just dive in. Roger, what's been going on what are you most excited about right now?

Today, I'm excited about talking to you and answering whatever questions you have for me. And I'm just continuing my normal process. Years ago, I decided I had to do something, so I decided that I was going to save the world. And I figured the only way that I was going to be able to do it with my skillset was one voice at a time. So for those of you that don't know me, I work with singers and speakers, and my. My job, and I'm happy to have it, is that I help people figure out what sounds should come out of their mouths to achieve the success that they want. So for 17 years, starting when I was 16 and a half, I only taught singers. And when I was 16 years old, I was the voice coach for the Beach Boys and Earth, Wind and Fire and Luther Vandross and all kinds of interesting, amazing singers. Seventeen years later, speakers started coming to me like Tony Robbins and John Gray, who had written Men are from Mars, Women from Venus, and they wanted me to work on their speaking voices. And that opened up a door which has led me to where I am today. About 50% of my clients want to sing amazingly, and 50% of my clients want to be incredible speakers, influencers, and presenters.

All right, well, Gay, I can always leave it to you to come up with some great questions. So I'm going to just say Gay Hendrix. Take it away and be Gay Hendrix.

All right, first of all, all glory to Ms. Emma Williams, my high school Latin teacher, who taught me that the word personality in our language is made up of two Latin words per sona, which through sound, through sound, our personality is known. So the Romans had it figured out in their psychology that the best way to learn about a person's personality was to listen to the tone and timbre and the pitch of the person's voice and how their voice came out of their mouth. So I imagine you've come across that before. But in that spirit, what can the voice tell us about my personality, your personality, everybody's personality.

First, I love it when you teach me things. So that was fantastic. Well said. We live in a world right now that believes that communication is word to word based, that if I had the right words to say to you, Gay, and to you, Mike, that we'd have a great conversation and that I could get one of you to run away with me to. To a lost island. I could complete a business deal. I could start a relationship if I only had the right words. But science has proven that the Words you say are not effective in the way you should actually communicate with people, because the way that the brain processes spoken information, it processes it first for emotion and then for logic. So words by themselves have no emotion. If I say, I love my wife, I hate my wife, I love my dog, I hate my dog, you don't know how I feel about my wife or my doggie. So I have to attach sounds to it to add emotion. So I literally have been spending years trying to help people stop speaking from word to word and start to realize that you have to be in control over those very sounds that you mentioned. The pitch, the pace, the tone, the melodies of the voice, so that people would really understand how we felt when we spoke and showcase the best of ourselves in every communication.

I'm really glad to hear you say that. And I'm glad you're working with speakers too, because my wife and I have taught seminars sometimes with some of the other speakers you've coached. And there's one famous one that his voice used to just drive me crazy because he had kind of a gravel way of speaking on the bottom of it, and it used to sort of make the cells of my body screech. But somewhere along the line, you must have fixed that because I think in recent years, he hasn't irritated me quite so much.

So we know who you're talking about. You're either talking about God or you're talking about Tony Robbins. One of those.

One of the two. Take your pick.

So just for an interesting story, Tony Robbins came to me 30ish years ago because his daughter I had opened up a studio in New York and I was teaching all of these Broadway singers and I was teaching Tony Robbins daughter Jolie, who was working on becoming a Broadway star. And when Tony heard what I was doing with Jolie, he set up a session to meet with me because he was planning this huge birthday celebration and he wanted to sing a duet with Elton John. So Tony Robbins actually came to me first to teach him how to sing so he would sound good next to Elton. Now, soon as I heard him, of course, I. I realized that he not only needed my help learning to sing, he needed my help learning to speak so that he could get on stage for days and days and days in a row and not lose his voice. So a lot of the work we did in the beginning was just me making sure that he could speak for days in a row without losing his voice. And then we started working on how to make other sounds. And you know, he's one of the greatest speakers in the world. That doesn't mean the sound of his voice is perfect by any means. Think of being Tony Robbins. And I think it happened in high school or junior high, and all of a sudden you're a certain height, and then, boom, you're four feet taller overnight or something crazy. Well, when that happens, your voice, your vocal cords and the larynx and the voice box, those all go through major changes, too. So imagine that there's sort of interesting things going in, going on inside the voice box of Tony Robbins. His chords are huge. So it's, in a way, part of his sound is that his vocal cords are large and they barely fit inside of his voice box. Right. Interesting physical. The physiology makes a big difference to the sound.

Yeah. I also, one time I was reading the autobiography or the biography of Enrico Caruso, the great singer. And apparently when they did an autopsy on him after he died, they found that he had the largest bronchial capacity they'd ever seen in a human being. So I'm always interested in the interplay between genetics and then what you do with the hardware you're born with. And give me an example. Harking back to my personality thing, give me an example of a personality aspect that you can identify with the voice.

I believe that the sounds we make showcase every emotional, every emotion that we're capable of expressing. And science basically thought there were maybe only about four major emotions. And then later on, years later, they said, well, maybe there's 12 emotions. And now they've identified as many as 24 emotions. And I believe the voice is capable of showcasing every single one of those emotions. Here's a really simple example. I break down the sounds that we can make into what I call building blocks. Pitch, pace, tone, melody, and volume. And we use those elements. Pitch, how high or low we go. Pace. How fast or slow we go. Melody. Does it go up or go. Does it go down?

Pitch, pace, tone. Tone. Is it airy or is it. Or is it edgy? And volume, how loud or soft it is. So if you want to understand what the sound of anger is, for example, it has specific sounds. To sound angry and be perceived as angry, you have to have three components. You have to have more volume. You have to be louder, or you'll never sound angry. You have to have monotone, which means there's no notes in it at all. Just one note. And it's just one note over and over and over. And you have to get faster, so you have to speak really fast because you're really Mad and you don't have time for melody and you're louder. And those three things come together and they sound the sound and the emotion of angry. But if you didn't have all three, you would never sound angry. For example, I could be as loud as I want, but if I had melody, I don't sound angry, and I could be as loud as I want. And if I stayed on the same note, but I didn't rush, I wouldn't sound angry either. So basically, I've spent a lifetime trying to figure out what are the exact sound components for every emotion. And then I make great influencers and great speakers and great storytellers and great people because they know how to use their voice to create emotions. And that creates emotions in other people.

I read one time about a play, I don't remember the name of it, where a character says the word no 17 times in a row with different tones on it.

Makes sense to me. Infinite number. There's at least 24 different emotions. And you should be able to say no and elicit at least 12 out of the 24.

Tell me another thing. In your work with people, you work a lot with stars and Grammy winners and things like that. But for regular folks who may not have a Grammy quality voice, who just want to speak better down at their neighborhood, you know, like a friend of ours just got elected mayor of Ojai, and down at the city council meetings, you'll hear a wide range of people speaking out loud. And many of them are very scared to do it. But anyway, what's something that regular old folks could learn about their voice that would make them better able to communicate, whether it's with their beloved or with the city council or wherever they're called upon to speak?

First of all, I don't only work with celebrities and superstars. When I train a superstar singer to sing, what am I doing? I'm helping them sell more tickets, some more T shirts. When I help someone find their speaking voice, it changes their life because it actually influences the way that everyone in their life perceives them. So here's, Here's a great answer to your question, and I'm going to do it in two parts. The first thing that people need to know, everybody needs to know, is that they need a. A voice makeover because they're not the voice they were born with. We all think if I have a nasal voice right now, and I speak nasal, I think, oh, that's my lot in my vocal lot in life, I'm supposed to speak nasal. We think if we speak airy, that's the voice we were born with and we got to make do. We think if we speak with no emotion, that's the voice we were born with and we got to make do. But you weren't born with a voice, you were born with an instrument. And the way we learned how to make sounds is through imitation. If your mother spoke to you and she had a really airy, airy voice and she said, roger, are you hungry, little baby? Hungry? Then when as soon as I could speak, I'd be like, hungry, mommy milk. If my dad was like, ah, spoke with a really nasal voice or he spoke like Tony Robbins with a really edgy voice and it was like, ah, fishing, let's go fishing. And I wanted to go fishing with my dad soon as I can, I bet, daddy fishing. Because we, we mirror sounds and we learn the words attached with the sounds and suddenly we're young adults in school sounding like our parents and we didn't, we didn't know that was why. And then we're adults sounding like our parents and we think that we're trapped within that voice. And I say, you're not trapped. Record yourself. Do you love it? Most people don't when they listen back to their voice on their voicemail machine, they hate it. There's some of the most popular hashtags for the last 10 years are I hate my voice hashtag. So it's popular. So it's time to record yourself, listen to yourself and figure out what sounds are working for you and what sounds are not working for you. That's what I spend all my day helping people.

I started out my career, such as it is. I got a job, a part time job in radio when I was just out of high school. I was a weekend disc jockey at a little tiny radio station in Leesburg, Florida called wbil. But one of the great things they had was some great recording equipment like a Wallensack tape recorder and that kind of thing. And I used to love to go play back and figure out ways I could use my voice a little bit differently. Interestingly enough, I went to a top 40 radio station, I got a promotion up to a big radio station in a big city. And it was a completely different radio station where everybody was encouraged to speak very fast. It was back in the 60s, it was always screaming, here you go, the Beatles, everybody. And that kind of thing. And we were encouraged to pitch our voices up about half an octave. And I did that for four years while I was working my way in college through College. And I've sort of had to worked my way back down into my regular voice ever since then.

Yeah, now you listen to radio and, and the, the, the radio Host of Top 40 Stations is a voice that you would hear if you were standing in line at the dry cleaners. And a very casual, very informal, very, very, very run of the mill, average voice that you would, that you might pick as your friend on the street.

I wanted to ask you about something else, Roger. I was thinking of a client, he's an attorney, and when he first came in for his first session, one of the things I noticed is he spoke in a very deep, artificially deep voice. And it looked very stressful to me. And actually you could kind of see muscles down in there. And I called it to his attention and I started working with him and.

Asked him to just kind of let go of that and find a voice that resonated more in his body. And interestingly enough, as soon as he made that shift, he burst into tears. And it brought back a memory of deepening his voice artificially when he was a teenager to keep his father from thinking that he was gay. And so he put on this much deeper voice and it made me.

I guess the question I want to ask is how often is our voice style based on some trauma or avoidance of pain that we were trying to get to?

I think a lot of times that's a really interesting story and I have heard stories like that before. Very, very moving. The truth is that all the different parts of our voice make certain sounds, certain vibrations, and people perceive very specific things based on the sounds you make. So there's really three voices inside the human voice. There's a voice down low called chest voice, which is what he believed he needed to be in down here. Chest voice. The reason it's called chest voice is because if you put your hand right around here and you say, I can, you sort of feel it vibrate at the top part of your chest. So that's called chest voice. That when you make the sounds of chest voice, people instinctively think, wow, you're powerful, you're strong, you're influential, you're learned, you're weighty. That, that, that's an influence voice. So that's a perception that's attached to it also that it's a very manly thing because before puberty, little boys and little girls all sound the same because their vocal cords are short. So they all sound like this. So then the only thing that differentiates other than physicality, what differentiates, sound wise, when puberty happens is the male voice drops an octave. So a man, a young man trying to hold on to his masculinity, the only thing he really has to hold on to is sounding more like chest voice. But there's two other voices as well. There's a voice way above chest voice called head voice.

And when you make sounds there, that's beautiful. That's so sweet. It's incredible. I love smelling the flowers. It's beautiful. Then the higher sounds resonate and make people feel, oh, that's pretty and engaging and empathetic and kind and patient and, and sweet. So anytime you go higher, people subconsciously just think, oh, that person cares more. And then there's a whole area in the, in the middle, in between the two called middle voice, which people have no idea even exists. So basically, chest voice sounds like this. Ah, Head voice sounds like this. Middle sounds like this.

Ah.

When you only have chest and head, this is what you sound like.

When you have chest, middle and head, you sound like this.

When I showed singers how to do that, they were like, Roger, you saved my life. When I showed speakers how to do that, they were like, who cares? Roger, why would I need all of that range? Why would I have to hit all those notes? And it's because all of those different registers have emotions. And the greatest speakers know how to move up and down like they were a piano keyboard and use all those emotions and all those sounds.

That is very interesting. It fits in so much with what I've learned about listening to people when, when they're speaking. I think you can tell so much from these natural body things like the sound of the voice or I do a lot of my diagnostics by watching the person breathe and figuring out where they're holding and can't breathe and where they're not allow allowing their whole body, which is a whole other subject I want to get into in a minute. But Mike, I see you pop up on the screen.

Yeah, I've got one. And that is. Roger. Something I've been very curious for a long time is first of all, the concept of characters number one. The next one is in matching your personality, your character, your face and voice in order to generate and garner trust and influence. So I'm curious about the matchup of all of those and again, this whole notion of what is a natural voice. Because when we all pick up colloquialisms as children, and I know like for example, a lot of politicians like George Bush, he adopted, clearly adopted a southern style accent. So politicians oftentimes they Seem to garner a certain level of trust and comfort and softness by taking on that little, you know, that kind of a Texas, more of a Texas style accent versus like, you know, in Alabama or something like that. You know, something like this Duff and down deep, steep south, when it just doesn't sound so smart. Right?

Yeah.

But I'm just curious what makes for natural when building a Persona that's again, embodies all these things?

Awesome. So, you know, I work with a lot of actors, and when I say actors, I mean male and female actors. Keira Knightley, Reese Witherspoon, Bradley Cooper, tons and tons of actors. When you speak to an actor, the way that they decide how to play a particular role is they get the script and the first thing they figure out is what does that character sound like? Because once they figure out what that character sounds like, the rest is easy. So Meryl Streep, once she figured out what voice she was going to have for the Devil Wears Prada, then, then everything else fell into place. Then her body language fell into place. Then, then the words that she would say fell into place. But let's use that word character that you mentioned because I believe that we shouldn't just have one vocal character. Let me explain. During the day, I'm doing my absolute best and I'm good at it. After so many years of playing the character of a voice coach. A voice coach has a lot of melody and volume and strength and physicality and is very animated. A voice coach like me believes he can be omnipotent, omnipresent, fix all problems. No matter what you present to me, I'm going to be able to fix it. I've created the voice for that, the character for that. Now if I bring that character home to my wife and I walk in the door as the omnipotent voice coach, the first thing she does, she hears me and she goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, superstar. Take the trash out and come back as my husband. So then I come take the trash out, come back in, and I make subtle changes in my voice to have the best relationship I have with my wife of 30 wonderful loving years, which is not teacher. Voice coach. Some subtle changes. I lower my volume a little bit. I. I speak a little slower. I take longer commas, I take longer silence at commas and periods so that I say hi and then I stop and I give her all the time that she can tell me anything she wants to tell me. I make subtle changes. Well, if I used that 30 year husband voice to my kids, then they Would eat nothing but chocolate chip cookies before every meal and play naked on the freeway. So then I have a voice that. That influences my children. And people are thinking, roger, I don't like the one voice I have. How am I going to create all these other voices? Once you learn how to make the sounds that your instrument is capable of, it's so easy.

It's.

It's totally authentic and. And truthful and honest to allow your sounds to change as you move. It's become second nature to you. The person who is really great in business and brings that business home usually doesn't have a successful relationship. You need to find. You need to use your voice to work with the audience who's listening to you.

All right, well, what about.

What about. That was really good, by the way. I wanted to bring on Gay. I saw his body language shift.

I got interested in something you were saying, Roger.

Yeah.

I've been in a couple of people's homes of people you work with, and.

Somebody like Jeff Bridges doesn't sound like Jeff Bridges at home. Or Neil Young doesn't sound remotely like Neil Young when he's just talking. And I'm interested in that interplay between.

The person at home and the person on stage and how people manage the difference between those kinds of things. And you've probably seen that a lot more up close and personal than I have.

Yeah. Especially for singers over the years, it's very normal for a singer to like Stevie Wonder, who I was able to work with. And Stevie Wonder would. Would be very soft all the time because he was thinking he was holding his voice back and keeping back his energy. Michael Jackson would talk like this all the time because he was holding back his energy. Thought if he gave it away off stage, he wouldn't have it for on stage. But the bottom, bottom line is, is that great actors who play many roles, they learned what I just said that. That they're not on camera all the time, that they. That. That we're all just normal people communicating with whoever we're trying to talk to and whoever we're trying to influence. Will Ferrell used to take lessons with me, okay. And at the end of the lesson, I'd say to Will Ferrell all the time, you know, I'm a lot funnier than you are. And he'd say, I know.

Because Will Ferrell did not feel the need during voice lessons when I'm teaching him what to do with his voice to be funny. Now, of course, Will Ferrell's a billion times funnier than I am. But Will Ferrell turns it on when he's getting paid to be funny or when he decides to be funny. Some of the characters that you know and you love are completely different in their private lives. Michael J. Fox didn't really like to speak at all when he wasn't on camera. He liked to read so you could be in a car. Michael J. Fox. When I was younger, Michael J. Fox used to. His girlfriend was my girlfriend's best friend. And we would double date every weekend. For years. Michael never felt the need to speak during double dates.

I remember talking to a guy once that had known Steve Martin before he was famous and he knew him for a year or so and he said he had absolutely no idea that the guy was a comedian.

Of course that's right, Rob. The people that are actually trapped in one character, the Robin Williams of the world, I mean there's a reason that comedians are, are score very highly on the, on the serious depression side. You know that they're, they're dealing with that. Because if you get locked into a particular character where you're trying to be funny all the time, it doesn't work. The people around you don't, don't respond to you being authentic and genuine. It's not, you're not a real person. We have to use voice. I thought my, my job early on was just to teach people how to have great voices. But then I realized that was a small goal. I realized I could use voice to help make great people. That's different.

I've got another question and it has to do with emotion and voice and specifically.

Being able to use. So here's the goal I have is self diagnosis. Okay, so imagine being able to use your voice as a self diagnosis tool to observe and monitor your emotion. And then again being able to be more emotive, more expressive and true to one's character. So can you talk a little bit about that before? It's, it's just kind of a weird thing, but I think about it often.

Great. Let me show you how to self diagnose your own voice. Very simple. It's called a phone.

Phone spelled the way that it sounds, except with a F. Except with a ph. And in your phone you have a little recorder, voice memos, whatever you want, programs in your phone, you have to record yourself. Now let me give you some things that you should listen for when you record yourself. Because the key is self diagnosis. You record yourself on your phone with a ph and you listen back and you're like. But you don't even Know what's ich? You haven't separated the ich from the little less than. And then maybe that could be better if I just tweaked it. Because you don't know what you're listening for. Here are some very simple things to listen for. Melody. Melody is the number one way to showcase emotion. So what do I mean by melody? Well, most people speak as if they were just one note on a piano, and they kind of stay on that same note all the time. That's called monotone. Every so often, they get excited and they're like, oh. And then they go back to this note that's called monotone. So you record yourself talking about breakfast or lunch or a movie that you like or somebody that you care about, something that you're really passionate about. And then you listen back and see if you can realize that you're kind of staying on the same note. That's bad. Do it again. But I want you to try to learn two other kinds of melody. One that's really good. There's a melody which I call stair step melody. Ascending scales. When a song goes like this, from low notes to high. La la la la la. When it goes from low to high, that's called an ascending scale.

From a low note to a high note, you should be speaking in more ascending scales. I really love my wife. I love chocolate. I love talking to Mike and Gay. I'm here and excited. Ascending scales make me sound happy. And when people hear ascending scales, they feel happy as well. Most people are doing either monotone or descending scales.

My name is Roger love. It's my birthday. I didn't get any presents. Wa wa wa wa wa. And you're like, roger, I don't do that. I'm way too smart for that. And I'm like, yes, you do. You were all taught to do that in elementary school. You were taught when you got to a comma to go down, and when you got to a period, you were going to go down. And the only time you could go up was if it was a question. Your teacher was teaching you bad melody. You don't get to go down descending scales at commas and periods. You don't sing like this. The hills are alive with the sounds of music.

With songs they have. Because every time you go down, you're basically telling the other person, I'm done. I don't have anything else to say. Your turn. That's why you get interrupted so much. We are in a world of people who are using descending scales even when they say their name. Hi, I'm Roger Love. They even go down, and that's like you're apologizing for your own name. So record yourself. Realize whether you're going up melodies that go up, whether you're going down the commas and periods and other places, or whether you're doing monotone. And then practice speaking again, recording yourself and trying to do more melodies that go up. If you get better at it, and it only takes a few minutes to just go up, people will love listening to you more, and you'll love listening to yourself more, and you'll make yourself happier because the sounds that come out of your mouth actually influence your own emotions.

You know, I want to jump back into my breathing thing that. I had a question for you a while back. I once had the pleasure of writing a little movie script for John Cleese and being with him all day as he recorded it. And I want to contrast this with another person I. I saw one time. But John was able to speak in this really loud voice in a way that was absolutely effortless. The emotion of it came through. But here's what I noticed from the sidelines. He was breathing from way down in here. He was. This area was working as he was speaking up top here. And I wondered if you would kind of translate that for me to what I was seeing and then contrast that. One time, a long time ago, I remember emceeing a show with the surf singers Jan and Dean. I don't know if you're even old enough to remember that.

I know Jan and Dean.

Two girls for every boy. Anyway, I watched the. The guy that did the. The high parts, I can't remember if it was Jan or Dean, but he was popped out to here, and his face was redder than any tomato you've ever seen. It looked like a really, a lot of work to hit those high notes. Whereas, you know, Luciano Pavarotti can hit those high notes with absolute ease. So, anyway, I just wanted to bring that subject up and see if you could shed some light on that.

Absolutely. First of all, the human voice is set up to sing or speak 24 hours a day and never get hoarse, because even when you're dreaming, when you say words like hello, your vocal cords are still vibrating. So there's. There's very little periods during the day or night where you have complete inactivity of the vocal cords. It's set up to work 24 hours a day and never get hoarse, never lose your voice, and never create any pressure. So the people that are creating pressure, getting Hoarse, losing their voices, straining. They're doing something wrong. Great speaking and singing happens when the right amount of air comes out of the lungs and meets the right amount of vocal cords that just happens to be sitting in the right position. So air comes to the vocal cords and then pushes through the vocal cords, and that creates a vibration and a sound that then comes out of the mouth. To have a great speaking or singing voice, you have to have control over those two elements, the position of the vocal cords and how air comes in and out of your body. Because as air comes out, that's what your voice is riding out to the world on. Most people breathe like this. They take big breaths with their mouths open, and they raise their chest and shoulders.

And then they exhale. That's called accessory breathing. That's the way to get the least amount of air into your body, and that's the way to have the least good sounds that you could possibly make. Terrible for your voice, singing and speaking. Other people, like your buddy Luciano Pavarotti, knew how to do diaphragmatic breathing, even though he didn't learn it till later in life. And he got better as he got older. He learned, and we all learned, that the way we were born to breathe was diaphragmatic breathing. Because all babies breathe this way. They breathe in through their noses, not their mouths into their noses. And they pretend that there's a balloon in their stomach. So they I breathe in and my stomach comes forward as if I was filling a balloon with air. Then my stomach deflates on its own. You don't need to fill up a balloon. Let go of the top and then squeeze the sides of the balloon. Soon as you let go of the top, the air comes out because it's under compression. The sides of the balloon don't want to be that big. The lungs operate the same way into your nose, fill up your tummy as if it had a balloon in there. And then you speak, letting your stomach come in slowly the whole time you're speaking. Now you're like an accordion. Accordion goes out, and then an accordion goes in, and it pushes air through the right places and it creates sound. Most people do not speak only while their stomach is coming in. The great singers and speakers have learned to only sing or speak while your stomach is coming in. So you have to practice taking a breath into your nose, letting your stomach come forward, and then speaking, like, counting to 10. 1, 2, 3, 4. Letting your stomach come in. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Not pulling your stomach in like somebody was gonna punch you. But letting your stomach, without any pressure, fall back in when. When the wrong Jan or Dean was singing two girls for every boy, they weren't singing the right amount of air for every chord. So they were tightening, tightening their stomachs. Most people talk when their stomachs are. And then they sound like this. This sound is really prevalent right now, but it's them holding their breath. As soon as I let the air through, you hear the difference in the sound. We all need to learn to only speak while our stomach is coming in. That's the way an accordion is supposed to work. That's the way your voice is supposed to work. Do one other thing. Right now, the reason most people are getting hoarse, losing their voices is because they're breathing into their mouths. Both of you take a breath in like this. After I show you what to do. Go do that with your mouth open. Mike, do you feel the dryness in the back part of the throat immediately? Now close your mouth and breathe into your nose.

No dryness. Every breath you take in through your nose dries out your throat, dries out your vocal cords. Every breath you take in through your nose goes through filters and becomes moist air so that when it goes to your throat and goes to your vocal cords, it doesn't dry you out. And now you could speak all day and night just with that simple tip.

I really appreciate that because I've written a couple of books on breathing, and I spend a lot of my time coaching people how to breathe. And I found that one thing that really is almost universal is so many people are locked up in their chest breathing, they don't really get their diaphragm to move through its full range of motion. I once read, I used to be a trumpet player when I was a kid, and the trumpeter Louis Armstrong, once, after a Carnegie hall concert of two hours, was challenged to blow as many high Cs as he could, which is a hard note to hit on a trumpet. But even after two hours in Carnegie hall, he was able to hit 400 high C's in a row.

I've worked with a lot of trumpet players. One of the first groups that I ever taught was Earth, Wind and Fire. And part of my job, aside from teaching some of the lead singers, was to take some of the instrumentalists and turn them into background singers.

And I've worked with a lot of trumpet players. There are two schools of thought for how a trumpet player plays. One is they actually lock their stomach to send more compressed air towards the trumpet.

And.

And the other one is diaphragmatically where they actually bring allow the stomach to come in. Two trains of thought. One is very difficult on the body, but amazing trumpet players throughout history have also learned to do what I just said, to play the trumpet even at extreme volumes or high notes like high Cs, and let your stomach still come in.

I've been learning that again this year because I relearned how to play brass instruments during the pandemic. I. You can't see them over my shoulder, but I bought a trombone and a pocket trumpet and a couple of other instruments to learn how to play brass again.

You have a lot of interesting stories and expertise.

Yep. When I was 15, I decided I didn't want to do just one thing in life. I wanted to do as many possible things as I possibly could. And so far, I've made good on that.

I love it. I love it.

Well, very good.

So I have one other thing that I, I want to add here, and that is, Roger, you've got lots and lots of tools and resources available. We just put up a. A link right now, which is if you go to rogerlove.com leap there is a link to get $50 off some of your courses. But why don't you talk a little bit about the tools, the training, the courses, and what you have available for folks who want to take advantage of your incredible body of work and knowledge.

Awesome. I would never come and be in a room with you two and not come with gifts.

So the gift I came with today, and I also love being the delivery person for good news. If you can deliver good news, why not? So the fact is, I came today because I wanted to help your listeners be able to use their voices to achieve the next level of the success that they wanted, both personally and professionally. So if, if your listeners want to speak or if they want to sing or this interview has inspired them to want to do both like Gay wants to do everything. Here's what I did. And the website address is right there. There's a $50 gift certificate waiting for you right now on Roger Lot rogerlove.com Leap L E A P like it says right there. So you're going to go to rogerlove.com leap and claim your gift certificate, and you can use it to get your hands on any of the training programs that are perfect for you if you want to achieve to be a good singer or you want to be a much better speaker or both. So, I mean, that's the next step for people to realize that the right information, like to breathe in through your nose instead of your mouth can mean the difference between you being able to speak 10 hours that day or you dying out after 45 minutes and not knowing why. That being able to create the sounds that go all the way up and down the range gives you the ability to communicate emotionally with people. And only those people that communicate emotionally are the people that are remembered and believed and they'll act upon the things that you say. They. The saying is that people don't remember the way what you said, but they remember the way you make them feel. You're only going to make them feel things with the sound of your voice, not the words. Anybody's got words. The words are a bonus. Go to the website, pick what you want to do, Work on your singing, work on your speaking voice. Let me give you $50 towards it. And by the way, the programs are inexpensive, so $50 pretty much gets you through.

It's good. It's good. Always generous. And you and I first met, I believe, at a Brendan event, and I was, you know, you drove me to tears on a couple of occasions. And just because you're so talented and you know how to bring out emotion and you know, a big part of learning to use your voice in my experience, is learning to let go of old emotions, old traumas and old feelings. And we didn't touch on that in this interview, but my hope is that we'll take a chance, an opportunity to do this again. And Gay and I have something beautiful planned this. This coming year. We call it the. Your big leap year. And we'd love to bring you in as a. As a guest for that. I think you'd be remarkable. I know you'd be. It's not that I think so. Gay, do you have any other questions for. Well, first of all, just say something here. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.

Roger. Thank you. Thank you. I firmly believe that the sounds that come out of your mouth make you happy, healthy or unhealthy. And those same sounds are making the people that listen to you happy, unhappy, healthy or unhealthy. So I'm not kidding when I say I'm really trying to make a difference in the world. I'm trying to save the world with all the differences that we have. If we could just come together and agree that there are certain sounds that we should all make, that. That's my way of fixing the world. We're going to be all together, united in sound, as if we were all singing the same song, changing the world.

One sound at a time. I love it.

Yeah.

And do you have a course called how to Sing Like Lady Gaga in less than an hour?

No, but all of the techniques in there will show you exactly how to do what she does and why she's so special.

I was so blown away by her version of the national anthem. I spent half of that in tears just listening. I may be the last person on earth to have really discovered Lady Gaga, but I hadn't really discovered her until that moment. I was just.

I cried probably at the same moment that you did with the world in such divided ideas. At that moment, it just showed that one voice authentically showcasing how she felt and creating those sounds. Who disagreed?

That.

That was beautiful. Everyone in the world came together and thought, maybe we should either wipe the tear away or we should be crying because this is beautiful. So you're right. That was one of the most beautiful moments in the last few months.

Thank you so much, Roger, for adding beauty to the world.

Thank you so much, Gay. Thank you so much, Mike, for having me.

It's my pleasure. Thank you.