Ingredients for Success in Voice Therapy
The first question many people ask during a consultation call is how long will it take until I reach my goals? The answer is that it depends! The ingredients to an efficient and successful course of voice therapy are collaboration with your voice therapist, good vocal health, lots of practice outside of sessions, and consistency. The presence or absence of these elements can mean the difference between doing voice therapy for a few months or a year or more.
Collaboration:
Many people come to us after they’ve had frustration or difficulty trying to change their voice on their own with online resources. Working with a voice professional can open up your experience to be more efficient and successful. Work with your voice therapist to ensure they have a clear vision of your voice goals. As voice therapists, we are the experts on how to use the vocal instrument and how to keep it healthy, but you as the client are the expert on how you want your voice to be a reflection of you.
Vocal Health:
A healthy and sustainable voice is built on a foundation of good vocal health. If you aren’t taking care of your voice, you could experience strain, tension, poor vocal quality, or lack of control or accuracy. Work with your voice therapist to create good vocal hygiene habits to support all the hard work you’re doing. Check out this blog post that touches on some ways to keep your voice healthy.
Practice:
This is the number one indicator of how quickly you might make progress in voice therapy. Completing home practice exercises as often as possible (without over-working or straining your voice) will lead to quicker development of muscle memory and advancement to more difficult skills. Think of it like learning to play a musical instrument or learning to speak a new language. The more you practice, the easier it gets.
Consistency:
Our most successful clients are able to integrate their practice into their daily routines so that they are building muscle memory that is generalizable to many different scenarios. This looks different for everyone, and doesn’t necessarily require practicing with others out in public. Your voice therapist can help you to identify situations that feel safe so that you can work on your skills in new and challenging ways and get you ready to use it how you ultimately envision using your target voice. Check out this blog post for more information on generalizing your voice.
Here’s a link to another post in which we go into more detail about how to know when you’re finished with voice therapy.
