What is it?

Explore Your Voice provides unique, total immersion, music based, group and leadership programs for all companies wishing to improve the productivity and skills of their leaders and teams.

Nothing builds team cohesion and tactical awareness like having to make decisions when you are completely out of your comfort zone.

Participants in Explore Your Voice programs will see improvements in:

• Confidence and trust during teamwork
• Personal expressiveness
• Vocal authority in presenting and leading
• Team cohesion in planning and execution
• Collective problem solving and decision making
• Initiative and adaptability in challenging situations

Why is it music based?

Top musicians have unique communication abilities. One of the key things that musicians understand innately is that every presentation to an audience is in fact a performance.

No matter if you are briefing 3 people on your latest project or trying to sell contracts to 5oo prospects in an auditorium - musicians understand that every communication with a group of people is a public performance of one kind or another. Understanding this simple concept and applying it to your everyday business practices can seriously sharpen your ability to sell your message.

Selling your message well is pivotal to successful  business. The art of winning someone over to your way of thinking involves more than a firm handshake and an engaging smile.  Also, getting the confidence of your team is not merely a function of being the boss. 

The Explore Your Voice Challenge allows participants literally to  explore all the facets of their voice in conditions where they need to 'sell their message'. 

Your voice is your principal weapon but also the hardest thing to judge entirely by yourself. 

It's all in the voice

It's true. Think about it. When someone personally presents some information to you, what are you listening to?

Their voice.

It's in the front line of interpersonal communications. Effective and even charismatic vocal presence is not an easy thing to establish without guidance.

Vocal Authority is essential

What really loses points in a meeting is when the presentation is delivered by someone who has no command, no presence, no VOICE.

 It colours your perception of them and their message can be lost.

We have all had to sit through someone who drones on in a flat, emotionless monotone, failing to speak up, or with a weird raspy or nasal delivery. They seem to have no GRAVITAS to draw upon in their voice.

How to get that 'Vocal Authority'

This is why we developed The Explore Your Challenge. It's an opportunity for individuals within a group to experience using their own unique voice in unfamiliar ways and how to use it most effectively.

This is not a public speaking course. It's also not going to teach you how to write a hit record. It will however, help you understand how much power you have in your voice to change hearts and minds. 

The Tasks

For The Explore Your Voice Challenge your group will be tasked with producing and recording  a co-operative musical piece where they will have to pool their skills and rely on each other in order to succeed.  Guided by a world class vocal coach and a studio producer  they will also need to engender an emotionally safe work environment for themselves to overcome the essentially challenging moment of singing with others.

They will need to negotiate their roles and manage their expectations of themselves and their team mates.

When completed, participants will have a high overall sense of achievement and satisfaction with the confidence that they can overcome a natural fear.

This can help open their horizons, enhance their public persona and sharpen their interpersonal skills.

For leadership development

The Studio Challenge can be used standalone or as content for leadership development in the Cynefin Framework - an industry standard problem solving tool that helps you put situations into five 'domains' defined by cause and effect relationships. This is an incredibly useful tool for all management leaders.

This is what leadership expert Dr Desley Lodwick from Wisdom By Design writes about Explore Your Voice:

Using ‘Explore your Voice’ to learn

about complexity.

This is a systems-oriented team activity to let leaders experience the different actions required of them

depending on whether they are dealing with a technical, complicated problem or a complex, adaptive challenge.

Counterintuitively, best practice and expertise can get in the way of being an effective leader.

Explore Your Voice helps leaders understand why and offers an immersive team experience from which to analyse behaviour and decide how to act. Its value lies in placing people into situations where their expertise is a disadvantage, the operational parameters are emergent, and they have to set a direction rather than a destination.

They explore skills that will increase their capacity to take broader and deeper perspectives on how they and others make sense of things; shades of grey where they once saw only black and white.

These understandings are fundamental to organisational development and leadership.

Isn't it time to do something different?

Above all,  Explore Your Voice is designed to be an engaging and exciting undertaking for the participants. It's an opportunity to stretch themselves and learn how to deal with the unexpected and for some, the downright scary. 

The Explore Your Voice sessions can be held in your workplace conference rooms,  auditorium or a specified external venue.

Participants are coached through the entire experience by renowned singing teacher Katie Slaney and world class producer, engineer and musician  Michael Oliphant.

​

Contact us to arrange  a call to discuss how Explore Your Voice can change the way you work with others.