Session #443: Katie Crooks on Voice, Hypnosis & Flow

Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies and errors.

---

This is the Work Smart Hypnosis podcast, session number 443. Katie Crooks on voice, hypnosis and Flow welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Linette, your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business success. Here’s your host, Jason Linette. If you enjoy hypnotic podcast episodes with learning how to roll your tongue and stretch and babble like a baby, roar like you’re a beast, you are in for the best episode possible. Hey, it’s Jason. And the story behind this week’s conversation that you’re about to listen in on is that I first met Katie Crooks when she signed up for an event that I was running online.

And then as soon as she began to explain the work that she does as well as how she got into it, we had a ton in common in terms of a former theatrical background and understanding of voice. And yes, if you head over to the show notes for this week’s episode, worksmarthypnosis.com 443 yes, we’ll link to the book that we both raved about, Kristen Linklater’s Freeing the Actor’s Voice. You can also then find the links over to check out Katie and the work that she does, though specifically a background in vocal performance and coaching and the ways that her students basically were the ones going, hey, Katie, you should become a hypnotherapist because you’re basically doing that work. And then she did.

And this integrative approach of exploring voice and what allows our voice to free in a very natural way in a very flow state, as well as what creates that tension, what emotional blocks may often stand in the way. And what’s really great about this conversation, again, that you’re about to listen in on is some extremely practical advice in terms of finding that voice and really using that as the primary tool that we use to help our clients to create change.

I’m going to mention once again that the show notes for this week’s episode are [email protected] 443 and I’m pointing towards that because what we did not record of this conversation was the chat that Katie and I had for like 15 or so minutes after we hit stop on the recording to then talk about what this industry needs in terms of freeing their own hypnotic voice, preventing that vocal strain, and really getting more impact out of the work that we do as practitioners. So dates have not been set, but likely summer ish, we’re going to do a workshop together. So if you head over to worksmarthypnosis.com 443. We just have a simple form over there for you to drop in your name and email address.

And that way you’ll be the first to know as we get something scheduled and iron out the details as to what that upcoming workshop will be. And of course, if you’re listening to this after the fact, then we’ll very likely have that available as some sort of on demand recording. So fill out the form over at worksmarthypnosis.com 443 and then also while you’re over there, head over to hypnoticbusiness systems.com Now, I could take this moment and tell you about all the features and all the different modules that are in this digital program. I could talk about how as I closed down my office in Virginia, I took some of the best performing step by step, you know, sort of workflows of my company and publish them for you to start to use right away.

So there’s no excuse for you to not have a digital product. I’m going to give you the license rights to just recreate one of mine and slap your name on it. There’s no excuse to not have quality videos on your hypnosis content, because I’m just going to give you the transcripts and teach you the format of exactly how I formulated what I said. I could talk about all those things, which clearly I just did, though more. So go over to hypnoticbusinesssystems.com and just take note that as you scroll through that page, 95% of that page is not me telling you how awesome that program is. It’s instead other practitioners telling their results that they’ve had by putting that content into use.

So I’m calling this out because there is this sort of momentum right now of people teaching business in the coaching space, not just to hypnotists, but across the board who clearly, what’s the terminology? Invented things and pulled them out of their butts to then try to sell it to you, respectfully speaking. And instead, everything that I share with you has been based upon proof, has actually been put into use. And some of them are things that I continue to use to this day, while also then telling you to go off and recreate it for yourself. Because here’s the thing, you can’t do it the exact same way that I did. You can’t, because you shouldn’t. You need to make it your own.

And again, when you head over to hypnoticbusinesssystems.com, you’re gonna see the Stories of people who have dove into that program, put the various modules and tactics into use, and saw a really incredible roi. Return on investment by putting these principles into work. It’s a program that doesn’t cost you anything. It’s instead going to help you to earn as you implement the strategies. Check that out [email protected] and with that, here we go. Let’s dive into incredible conversation with some rather interesting sound effects. And it’s about time we had tongue stretches on a hypnosis podcast. I’m serious about that. So here we go. This is session number 443, Katie Crooks on voice, hypnosis and flow. So, Katie, we’ve got a hypnotist who is working with clients in their office, and let’s assume it’s a bit of a marathon day and.

And they’re beginning to lose their voice. What advice would you have for them?

Best piece of advice I can give is let go of trying.

So to let go of trying and to start doing what?

Good point. To let go of trying and start allowing from a place of flow instead. Because in my experience, just like hypnotists, the artists, singers, and actors that I work with sometimes get into their heads and they start overthinking. But it’s actually when they drop into their deeply more relaxed state and they’re more present, that’s when their voice can flow more easily. That’s when their throat opens, their larynx, their voice box can relax back down, and their clients can pick up on that.

Yeah, which we’re intentionally going out of order here. In terms of how I usually have these conversations, though, let’s dive into it. What was before getting involved with hypnosis? What was that career path for you?

A varied one, but it started out with singing and voice and music, but it was very intellectualized. And I found that I wanted to go into the storytelling side of things, but I was getting very much pulled into the classical world, which I loved. But it was very. It just got too intellectual for me. And I wanted to. Yeah. To tell story and fast forward to here we are, and this is what I do for a living. But back then, I started to move into teaching singing quite early on, and I found that in the practice room, in the practice studio, all these students were so busy limiting their voices and holding themselves back. And I thought, what’s going on here?

I can fix the vocal technique, but if they keep coming back with the same problems every week, then what’s going on underneath to cause all that emotional blockage. And that’s when I started to go deeper.

Yeah, yeah. So then. Which you’re not allowed to say go deeper on a hypnosis podcast, but we’ll let that one pass. I’m kidding. Now, I asked the question from a slightly leading perspective here, which is that, you know, I. I am completely opposed to the absolutes. And there’s a time that I went to a workshop at a hypnosis conference, and someone said that, well, for weight loss, the reason they’re overweight is always whether they’ punishing themselves for something or protecting themselves from something. And just the moment that. That always fired off. And just to put it simply, I believe you should never use absolutes. Without exception, you should never. Three of you are getting the joke here, though.

What is it you tend to find is part of that reasoning of, you know, when the voice is straining, when the voice is struggling, and there is something that’s kind of blocking that voice from naturally flowing?

Mm. I noticed that people. There was something going on physiologically that I started. I started to notice patterns appearing in people’s tongue tension and their larynx, their voice box tension. I started to think, what’s going on that might be causing that. And every single time a student sang and they really went for it, there seemed to be a big emotional release going on. And I started to correlate and again, can’t use absolutes. Absolutely not. But I started to correlate these. I noticed these patterns with these students who were clenching their jaw, and when they released their anger in their performance, their jaw started to slacken and let go. And when they released sob or a cry in their voice, whether they were speaking or singing and these big performances, it was catharsis. They started to feel more themselves when they did that.

Yeah. So could we break it down to tension? And it’s that the emotion helps to release that tension.

Yeah, the emotional release helps to release that tension. In my experience. And I noticed that so many people couldn’t actually allow themselves to release their voice until they actually acknowledged that there might be something that they needed to release underneath. And not every single time, but quite often, a student would walk into the room, and I had a. You know, you develop an intuition when you’re sat in front of people, looking at them, working with them for 20 years. And I started to notice that if I could pick up on what was going on in them through their posture and their. Where they were holding, tension in their body and their difficulty finding presence in that moment that we could get to the vocal release much faster. If so, I’ll give you an example.

So I had a student who couldn’t find her middle voice. Her mix set up when she was singing in her lesson, and she kept saying, katie, I don’t know, I can’t find it. It feels like it’s really locked up. And I said, oh, that’s interesting. I wonder what kind of week you’ve had. And deliberately didn’t, you know, place any suggestions. Just gave her the opportunity to search her own unconscious mind and she suddenly went, oh, my goodness, Katie. I watched a really heartbreaking episode of Game of Thrones with my housemates last night and I didn’t want to cry in front of them. So I’ve been suppressing this sob in my voice and that. And as soon as she did that, she started to get a bit wobbly and emotionally and she was sort of half laughing, half crying at the same time.

And then for the last five minutes of the lesson, she sang. And this voice that came out was so fluid and free. It just. Yeah, that moment really stuck in my mind.

Yeah. And to really set the stage for this conversation, let’s tell the story of how you and I met, which was that I was running an event online and then I learned what you do and I just dropped the statement. Oh, well, the book Freeing the Natural Voice, Imagery and Art in the Practice of Voice and Language by Kristen Linklater, that’s probably one of the very best hypnosis books ever written. That’s not about hypnosis, which to read it. There’s like these whole exercises that are in there of lying on the floor and feeling yourself relaxing bit by bit throughout the body, feeling yourself melting into the experience. I’m like, this is hypnosis. And that was something that I ran into as, you know, liberal arts education.

I was on track to be the backstage technician, but we had to still take all the same classes. And I remember getting into hypnosis and thinking back to that book and going, oh, I’ve seen this before. I know how to do this.

Exactly the same feeling for most people. So when I was teaching, after a few years teaching singing, I started to move into teaching spoken voice as well. And that’s when I was exploring things like link later. And I was talking these students through this. Yeah, this guided imagery and this lying on the floor and the ground and unlocking. And these students were having these life changing aha moments. And they’d open their eyes after the session and say, I never realized that my voice could do that, but I didn’t realize that my mind could go to these incredible places as well. And it got to the point where some of them would say to me, katie, can we just record your relaxation session, the voice and relaxation, so I can go to bed listening to it?

And then one of them piped up and said, katie, you should become a hypnotherapist. So here we are.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s that beautiful thing that you can find hypnotic components in most everything else. And then here comes that correlation. And again, my favorite part of any bit of training is that revelation of someone going, oh, I was already doing this. Yeah, and I know how to do it. But were doing an event. We’re running a certification class right now, and someone in the class is a real estate agent. And were getting into the language patterns that make the hypnotic induction actually work. And it was this. Oh, that’s what I do whenever we’re in that final step of negotiation. And I’m having to let my client know that, you know, what they’re asking for is unreasonable, but I have to let it be their idea to then concede it.

Yeah.

That there’s always these elements of that there. So then, as you brought in the hypnotic component, let’s say, intentionally, to what you were doing, what are some of the changes that you began to notice?

I began to notice that because. Because I could help, because I could recognize in people’s voices that there was, you know, if there was something going on, I could hear it and see it in their posture. That really influenced the way I would interact with my clients. So they would. I mean, we can all. We all unconsciously clock what someone’s voice is. Is sharing with us through their emotion. But I think that ability to connect with what they got going on emotionally on that level really helped us. It sort of acted as a doorway into the deeper work.

Is there an example that comes to mind of that?

This is where I love having an ADHD brain. It goes off on a tangent. I’ve just got to throw that in there, because these tangents, they just come up so beautifully. And then I go, what was the question?

No, a time where, you know, sort of helping to free that voice really became part of the way towards. Because I imagine it’s, you know, it’s six, you know, chicken or the egg type moment, which would be that sometimes it is that voice releases. I’m thinking of a specific thing that happened. Oh, this would have been about 10 years ago, actually. And it was a hypnotist who I was working with just in terms of creating videos for her business. And it was that the regular register of the voice was, you know, kind of middle and, you know, kind of balanced. But as soon as the camera went on, she immediately went up into this voice and it was all very tense and a bit higher.

And by, you know, kind of coaching it not from the direction that you would do, but just kind of going, hey, just the camera’s a friend. Just talk to them. You’re stepping into a character when you’re turning on the camera and just speak. And like suddenly it was this emotional breakthrough that was coming through and it was like, that’s not what we’re planning today.

Yeah. So this client came in for a session and were working on this piece, this speech, and she was really struggling to get out of her head, get into her body. And her voice was really squeezed and really high. And I realized that her voice box, her larynx, was somewhere up on the ceiling. And we played around with dropping it down and she had this huge aha moment when she realized that somewhere in her past early childhood, she’d been repeatedly told to ask nicely for the things she wanted. And every. She had this huge emotional release as she realized that in her work currently, she wasn’t standing in her authority. She was trying to be pleasing and trying to be nice. Everything was going up, her larynx was going really high.

She was trying to sound pleasing and nice and using the word trying deliberately. There, of course she was trying too hard. But actually, when she dropped her larynx, not only did she have that realization that she could be in her authority, but she also had a huge emotional release because when your larynx relaxes down, it tells your system to relax, that you’re safe. We tend to associate high larynx, a high voice box, with emergency situations where we have to shout to tell our fellow tribe members that there’s a saber toothed tiger about to chase them.

Whereas when the larynx is down, when the voice box is down and the voice sounds lower, that’s usually associated with nicely relaxing sounds and relaxing states, like sitting in my cave knowing that I’ve got my animal skins, I’ve killed the woolly mammoth, I’m safe, I’m fine, I’ve got everything I need, my needs are met.

So then in those moments, let’s say a client’s coming in and I know that a lot of your focus goes in. Well, actually, that’s a question Then are people then mostly coming to you for voice related issues or has this begun to spin off into other sort of side categories?

I love that you ask that because I started. The first ever online program I created was a mix. It was integrated voice and hypnosis. And it was great fun because we do. I’d call them hypno hybrids and we’d do voice and hypnosis together and we’d unlock voice and relate the vocal training with what needed to be cleared on a deeper level. And then over time, I started to move into working with entrepreneurs. As I was learning more and more about building my own business, I just came across so many entrepreneurs who had things like fear of public speaking, fear of being seen, fear of visibility, those kind of things. So I started to work with them and then sort of fell into things like weight loss and other topics like sleep and so on.

Because every time I work with a client, they’d say, oh my gosh, that was so much fun. Can we now work on this? Can we now get over fear of relationships or fear of flying or whatever? So it was sort of moved into other ways. But just recently I’ve been really called back to this idea of integrating this deep voice work with hypnosis. Because it’s just so, it’s. It’s so much fun. It’s so powerful.

Yeah. So then let’s go into the practical part then. Let’s say for the audience that’s out here for the hypnotist. Because sometimes I think I was sharing the anecdote with you on that event that you attended, that here were the places where, and I’m not gonna drop specific names on this recording. There were people who were known for teaching actors dialects and different accents. And at the time, there were two of them that were kind of the predominant voices in that field. And one was highly technical. And it was trade this sound for this one, Trade this, like bringing in the phonetic Alphabet and almost like mathematically helping them to rewrite their script. And the other one would come in and teach the history as to.

Here’s what Northern Ireland was going through at the time of this play, and here’s why the voices became this direction. And then almost like a magic trick, the actors were speaking in that dialect. And it was beautiful because these two separate people were very clearly competitors. And we would often bring in both because they were both correct. Or the times where I’m sharing this before we hit record, I’d be the one going, we need to get an understudy for this character. And I’d get the response of, we can’t afford that. And the response would be, we can’t afford to cancel four shows. And we ended up canceling six before bringing in someone new for the role. So there are those moments, though, where for whatever reason, whether it’s sickness, whether it’s strain and the voice becomes challenged.

Do you have practical advice on that sort of thing, to recover it and, you know, retain it? If it is that moment where I’ll phrase it this way, it would seem as if we need to keep going.

Ooh, there’s about five questions in there that I want to ask. All of them.

I know.

I’ll take it.

You do the rest of the episode. I’ll sit back.

Well, the first thing. And again, this is a fun tangent, but something. What I noticed when I moved from teaching singing into teaching voice, and in the uk, voice is referred to as spoken voice, and the two practices are kind of regarded quite differently. I loved integrating them because the singing approach was very much like the first person you described. It was very much, in my experience at least, the work was very much intellectualized. It was a case of let’s find, let’s decide the sound we want to make and then do what we need to do in order to make that sound. And then when I started to switch over into teaching spoken voice, practical voice, and in some cases, it used to be termed as primitive voice, but they changed that after a while because it’s more than primitive.

But when I worked with practitioners like Linklater and Patsy Rodenberg is another one, and their practices, it was completely the opposite. It was very much like the second person you described who would give them an experience. And it’s very much. I’m very much of the belief now that it’s about feel first, understand later. So feel have the embodied experience of the character, the accent, the vocal release, and then understand what’s going on technically later. Because I think that compounds the change, personally. So I think, like you say, both approaches are brilliant, both are correct, but they’re very different doorways into the work. So that was one way of answering the question.

Yeah. So then bringing it into the practical nature for the practitioner who is then, you know, using their voice throughout the entire day, what kind of advice would you have for that person to maintain that voice or even to recover the voice when it does have that strain?

There are some brilliant, really simple techniques, such as lip trills, you know, the. And exercises like that, making silly sounds to allow the voice to work really freely. Things like sovt, which is semi occluded vocal tract exercises. So you practice things like a V on a V or a Z or an F, not an F, that’s unvoiced. A V, A and a literal like a. But actually I would say that when hypnotists are in, I mean I, I think most hypnotists drop into a state of theta or similar. You know, they drop into a form of trance when they’re with their clients. I think when they naturally do that and they’re fully relaxing and they’re breathing and they’re allowing themselves to breathe, that they get into their flow state and quite often their voice tends to relax down naturally as a result of that.

Another aspect of course is going back to what we said before about rather than wanting to be liked is actually drop down into their authority seat because then their voice box, their larynx is going to drop down. And when it’s, when the larynx is relaxed and it’s not low, not compressed, not too far down like this, but just neutral bouncing around. When it’s not too high and it’s neutral and it’s bouncing around, their voice mechanism can work more freely. Another thing I would definitely suggest, particularly if they’re sitting down to give sessions, which is probably most of the time, is a lot of people, when they sit at their desk or with a client, they tend to jut their chin forward.

And I know we’re working on audio, but if I jut my chin forward, if I stick my chin forward now, you can immediately hear a, a different sound. I’m overdoing it obviously, but when I lengthen the back of my neck and I straighten my spine gently, then my voice can sit in a more natural way. It’s my version of neutral. So posture is a huge part. And I think going back to what you said about the accent coach, the one who got them to embody the identity of the accent, I think it’s often the same with embodying the identity of a hypnotist who knows and trusts themselves and knows what they’re doing. When they lengthen their spine, their voice can relax. They’re more likely to access a sound that’s more intuitive, more authentic to them and less of that please like me voice.

Yeah, well, just to kind of pull something out of that the sort of freedom to explore the voice and explore where the sound comes from is one of those things that also, I mean, I think to the example of I learned this just with weightlifting years ago, that, yes, if there’s an injury, stop it. But at the same time, you know, explore that range of motion. And sometimes, you know, kind of doing just a light stretch in the opposite direction kind of just frees up whatever kind of clenched up and became tight.

And, you know, sometimes it is that task of the reset, which is, let me go back into the gym and let me kind of do a lighter weight, but focus the intention on some other part of it, whether it’s the form, whether it’s the posture of it, whether it’s the grip. And to find those places where, I mean, it’s a fair statement that tension usually is what interrupts the voice.

Yeah, absolutely. Tension usually interrupts it. And tension blocks off resonance. But resonance is the sound waves resonating around and someone’s nervous system actually picks up. I think they call it a parasympathetic response where a person’s nervous system picks up on the types of sound waves that a person’s producing. So when you can allow attention release, then you’re going to be able to access more natural resonance. So things like jaw massage, where people would. I would recommend my clients massage their jaw, their temporal mandibular joint, which is the. Usually the big chunky one either side of the jaw. The one you can feel when you clench your teeth. Right. That massage, if. If you. If you give that a really good massage.

The one where people sometimes say, I need to release my tmj. I need to get rid of my tmj. And you have to point out that’s actually the name of the joint. You don’t actually release that.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s the muscles that are contracting the tmj. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So the TMJ is an interesting one because, I mean, there are so many phrases that we relate to jaw tension. You know, bite down on something hard or they’ve got grit. There are so many phrases we associate with this gripping. In fact, I’ve just had a client text me, say, oh, just been to the dentist, and I’ve been told that I grind my teeth. So when they. I mean, again, this is nice, fun to handle, but when they actually release whatever or clear or shift, reprogram themselves to release whatever it was that was causing the teeth grinding, then they’re likely to find that jaw tension is going to naturally release, and then they can find more resonance and then their voice is going to flow more freely.

Well, that’s where I appreciate. Yeah, go for it. Yeah, I was Going to say, the appreciation of this integrative approach, that sometimes it is the actual technique, I think, to a lot of NLP trainings where we get into the whole concepts, and these are things that were modeled from other modalities, of course, but that of opening up that sensory acuity and opening up that awareness and places where we start to realize, oh, I’ve been driving and my shoulders have crept up higher than my ears. I’ve been speaking and I’m clenching in this very specific way. And just by opening it up and finding that, as well as then, of course, the hypnotic techniques to then go in and deal with that emotion and release the thing that’s actually causing it in the first place.

Yeah, absolutely. I believe that there’s an, you know, an aspect of the work we do which is clearing those. Those unconscious patterns at the root, or however different hypnotists do it. But then there’s the really. I was going to say simple and basic, but it’s actually not. It’s really intuitive, which is this being present in the present. Mom. Finding a space between thoughts and allowing the person’s breath to move easily. Because they do say how you breathe is how you do life. And actually, and I love the fact that the word inspiration means to breathe in, but it also means to have an idea. And if you notice that when people have an idea, they tend to breathe in, they go, oh. But breath takes the path of least resistance.

So if someone’s breathing is labored, if there’s a tension or overwork going on, then it means something in there is working harder than it needs to work. So actually, this is where doing vocal technique would help me get a sense of what the person needs on a deeper level. So if their breathing is labored, or maybe labor’s too dramatic a word, but if their breathing is a little bit tight, then that would tell me, okay, we need to release something in their body’s breathing. Let’s go deeper and find out what they’re holding onto mentally and emotionally, and then we can get back to actually fixing the technique.

So I’m starting to play with a deeper practice where I start to not quite switch more like flow between vocal teaching and then going into hypnosis, clearing the deeper stuff, then going back into the voice coaching and then uncovering something and then going into hypnosis. So it’s starting to become a really intuitive flow of moving between the practices. They’re just. They’re so closely linked.

Well, I’m about to say something that I am not qualified to say, and I’m guessing here, no, but it’s that there’s different, let’s say, even meditative practices that involve chanting, that involve creating sound. And there’s something very hypnotic about even some of those vocal warmups and the vocal exercises and, you know, the massaging of the jaw and the moving of the voice. And that was something that, you know, I learned, you know, in that part of my education of. Let me start with the voice down here, as low as I can put it, and slowly bring it back up into the back of the throat now up into the nasal cavities and, you know, just that awareness that we can move that focus of sound around. And I’m flashing though, to a very odd moment of.

Because I had basic computer skills, I became the go to guy in that area for world premieres. And it was for one reason. I knew how when the playwright couldn’t make page 24 work, they would send us the pages and the script would then become of a play. Hearing hypnotists go, jason says, script, this is bad. I’m talking about actors. Shut up. But the script would become. They’re allowed to use them. That’s the whole thing. 22, 23, 24A, 24B, 24C, 24D, 25, 26. And it’s the rehearsal where the actor sees the. He just skimmed the scene and the stage direction says angrily, and, I mean, he goes all out. He goes 100% and then turns the page and then starts bursting out laughing because the stage direction then said, even angrier than before, he goes, let’s reset that. Because I went 100% earlier.

I need to start at 60 and let me read the rest of the scene to make sure it doesn’t make me go, oh, it does. Okay. I need to have some range to this. Yet it’s where even in the work that we do with a client, everybody who’s listening to this right now, just feel that exhilarating feeling of confidence. That’s right. You’re on top of the world. Just feel that energy just exploding. Yeah, right. We have to go there with them. I mean, Jerry Kyne used to say that someone would ask, what’s the training I should do after hypnosis training? And he’d say, take an acting class. That your ability to convey emotion, your ability to bring someone on a journey with your voice is a big part of the process.

Yeah, it really is a big part of the process. I want to say I shouldn’t use absolutes, but I want to Say it’s everything. Because when you can bring someone into this journey with you through your embodiment and your own voice, your own sense of your own identity, of knowing what you’re doing, it’s so effective. And there was an absolutely brilliant. I was gonna say, in my opinion, but actually, in everybody’s opinion, incredible performance that I went to see of Cynthia Erivo. She’s just played Elphaba in the film Wicked. And I went to see her quite a few years ago at the Meniere Chocolate Factory in London, where she played Ms. Seeley in the Color Purple. And there was a. Oh, my goodness. There was a moment.

I actually took a group of voice students because it was before I was hypnotherapist, and I took these students to see her. And there was this moment in the musical where her husband says, you’ll never see your sister again. She’s dead to you. And this woman, Ms. Seeley, has been through such life, such experiences, and so much pain and just. It’s hard to comprehend. And she just. There was this moment where Cynthia Erivo threw her head back and roared. And the emotion. I’m getting tingles talking about it right now. The emotion that came out of her voice and the chord, the music underneath was. It was banging tune. And her technique was there, but it was this emotional. It was a sound so powerful and so ugly and yet so beautiful at the same time, because she was accessing something that made every single.

I think probably made every single person in the room so uncomfortable. And yet just had. I had what I was talking about before this parasympathetic response. I had an immediate reaction of sobbing. I was sat in the seat just sobbing because I felt her sound waves move through my body. And, you know, the ability to take someone on a journey through this emotional release of voice is. That’s. That’s what our actors and singers and artists are doing. And I think, yes, you’re not necessarily likely as a hypnotist to roar to your client.

Let me just put this in the show notes. Katie says that if you need to be a hypnotist, you need to be able to sing like Cynthia Erivo. Okay, got it. Putting that. Well, I mean, I, I. This is about to turn into an episode of just the Two of Us, and then maybe Catherine Tuohy over in Ireland, which would be that. Well, the. The Musical Caroline, or Change, if you’re familiar with that one, which just to give the context of it’s the maid in a Jewish family about the time of JFK being assassinated. So you’ve got all these different cultural things that are going on. And it’s one of the few examples of someone singing Ugly, because that’s how it was written. And just the raw emotion.

But then the contrast to when there is happiness, the minor notes go away, the strain of it goes away. And just this illustration of the transformation that occurs within the voice.

Oh, yeah. The voice can depict such power and such transformation.

You mentioned something a little while ago, which I’d love to kind of elaborate on, which it may be esoteric, it may just be intuition here. Yet one of the things that I miss as my work is now 100% online. The offices that I had when I was up in Virginia, now down here in Florida, yet I had from the lobby area to my office, I had a hallway. And I would always have the client walk ahead of me. Hey, follow me this way. It’s right down the hall. I’ll follow you. And it was that you would learn so much, and if it was a subsequent appointment, you would know so much from just what was their energy they were bringing in, what was their sort of way they carried themselves, or even in a conversation.

It goes beyond the classic, oh, you can hear when someone’s smiling. It goes beyond that you can begin to hear more of the story and how it’s not just what they’re saying, it’s how they’re saying it, too.

Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it. It’s not just what they’re saying when you say it’s how they’re saying it. Everything from the way someone’s feet are planted on the ground, I believe will tell us something about where they’re at. And so when I would work with voice, I would work from the feet up. I would find out what was going on. Where’s their weight? Is it forwards? Is it back? Are they reaching forwards and, you know, in trying mode? Or are they on the back foot and leaning back and shrinking back from their vocal potential? Or are they somewhere in the middle where they’re balanced? And actually, that brings me to another practitioner I mentioned earlier, Patsy Rodenberg, because she’s got a book, which is a voice book, but it’s very beautifully framed, and for corporate folk as well. And it’s all about.

It’s called presence, and it’s about these. She talks about the three circles of energy. There’s the outside circle. I’ll do my best because it’s been a few years since I’ve taught this stuff, but really, I’m Bringing it back into the hypno work more and more. So there are these three circles. The, the outer circle is what I would call the aggressor. It’s very outward, blasting energy into the room. We’ve all been all three of these, by the way, at some point in our lives. This is just the states we move into. So the outer circle is very outward, very blasting, taking up all the air in the room, grabbing all the attention. I’ll then skip to the inner circle, which she calls first circle, which is very much about eyes lowered inward, very shrinking, very much pulling back.

You could hardly hear a person talk in first circle, but in between those two is second circle. And she talks about second circle being present. And second circle is about give and take. It’s. It’s rapport. It’s when we have rapport with our clients, I’d say we have to be in second circle. Having said that, to add another layer to that. If someone comes to you and they’re in third circle, you might want to elevate yourself to that level of third just for a moment until you bring them back into second. And if a person is in first circle, for example, I would have a, let’s say a really young singer come into the room when I was teaching kids, and I don’t know, 12 year old, 13 year old, and they would be very much in first circle.

They wouldn’t say boo to a goose, and they would. And they, if I were too enthusiastic, it would just be overbearing for them. So I would move into first. Instinctively. I wasn’t thinking about this. I didn’t know this work existed when I was teaching those, you know, younger kids. But actually by staying in second circle, but acting as if I was in first or third, I would be able to gain rapport. And I think for actors and singers, this first, second, third circle is brilliant. I think it’s so valuable for us as hypnotherapists. So, yeah, it’s really worth reading her book Presence.

Well, it’s also where going back to the question that I asked earlier about here’s the hypnotist working with clients and, you know, here’s where there’s some bit of strain. The unfortunate answer is in most cases, it’s in the prevention.

Oh, yes. Yeah. Hydration, particularly actually hydration and posture and letting go of trying.

Yeah.

And yeah, tongue stretches. There’s another one.

Perfect for an audio podcast.

I know, right. When you asked me the question about vocal maintaining a voice, I thought, well, all of these things Are visual. How do I demonstrate a good tongue stretch?

Well, describe one so we kind of get the idea of it. Yeah.

Lick your chin. Literally lick your chin.

Yeah. We just found the podcast title. Katie Crooks on licking your chin. Episode number. Okay, no, there’s that one. There’s also the. What is it? The tongue behind the bottom teeth and, like trying to push the middle of the tongue out.

Baby babble. That’s that. I learned that from Kristin Link later. She taught it to me herself, actually, because I did a workshop with her in London. She’s passed now, but, yeah, it was great fun experiencing her work firsthand. But she taught. Yeah. Tip of the tongue behind the bottom teeth and then you roll your tongue forwards. And there’s a couple of stages. So the first one is just to roll it forwards, have your tongue out so it’s curled forwards. But stage two is to move your tongue back and forth. Stage three is to add sound. And so she called it baby babble because you’d sound like a baby, you’d sou. And she did. She. I can’t remember whether she played us this video or. I found it online afterwards. She was referencing it.

She was talking about she did a lot of work, a lot of getting people into their toddler versions of themselves and. Oh, gosh. I mean, there’s inner child work right there, actually, when I think about it.

Well, I mean, so much of voice is unlearning the patterns. I’m on your website right now. It says unhypnotizing. And so much of voices about unlearning the stuff that we’ve been told to do and stuff not to do.

Yeah. Oh, gosh, yes. Yeah. And actually, this is something that she. That Linkface has said in those sessions I did with her. She talked about how, you know, when we’re very young, we’re programmed, since for as long as most of us can remember, to ask nicely for the things we want. You know, ask for that chocolate biscuit nicely. If you want to get what you want, you have to be pleasing. And so many children, I noticed later on, would then attempt to be pleasing by either raising their voice or there are different things that happen depending on gender, which is a whole other kettle of fish. But, yeah, fitting in to what is expected of us or what we desire to be, I think has caused a lot of vocal tension for many people. And then there’s.

Not to mention the topic of people not being allowed. Children not being allowed to express vocally because, you know, when a child has a tantrum they’re regulating themselves. That vocal release, that howling and screaming and yelling, which is what Cynthia Erivo tapped into in that incredibly powerful performance. That howling and screaming and yelling is their way of releasing all of that pent up emotion that they just can’t handle because it’s so much stuff coming through for such a small being. So when we can tap into the ability to just shout and scream and yell and make ugly sounds, then when we’ve accessed that, then actually embodying our authentic voice, whether it’s on stage or in hypnosis with our clients, embodying our natural voice, becomes so much more accessible. I think we have to go there.

We have to go to ugly to be able to access a really powerful, authentic voice that’s our own, in my opinion.

Well, you mentioned the, you know, sort of warmups. You mentioned the stretching, the tongue rolls, the baby babble, the sounds, the exploration of that. And this is where if you have a physical office, it’s okay, because then as you’re driving there, you do all the weird stuff in your car and just have people look at you in an odd way.

Yeah.

Or even what happens right before. And this is where there are some little technical things along the way, which was that friends that are performers and the awareness as to. Okay, so here’s what’s going on right now. Here’s where my range is a bit lim. Let me tell the sound guy to turn up the microphone. Or even right now, like, I get into a different posture when I’m doing this podcast. And part of it is also that I want this to be more of just intimate conversation that people happen to be listening to as opposed to. Katie, I heard you had a funny story about a boat, which is how no one talks.

Well, I’ll let you in on a secret. I’ve noticed that when I’m speaking, if I’m moving around, walking around, moving, rolling around on the floor like a small child, I speak with much more flow than if I sit in complete stillness. And yes, I do a lot of meditation and I love being in stillness. For me, often when I’m moving, my voice flows much more easily. And that’s why I would have actors get into their bodies and move around when they sing or speak. You know, there’s everything. For me, voice and movement is. I don’t believe you can separate the two. Really.

Yeah. This has been fascinating conversation, and I’m sure there’s many takeaways of just exploring and being open to really finding that voice as opposed to forcing that voice. Where can people check out more from you?

You can find me on www.katiecrooks.com.

Excellent. And then, any final thoughts for listeners out there?

Your own voice is yours and yours alone. It’s like. It’s like nobody else’s. And if you really want to get results with people, trust your own voice fully.

I’m Jason Linette. And one more time. Thank you. Thank you so much for engaging with this episode, sharing it in your ongoing hypnotic conversations, and of course, leaving your reviews online, that helps to expose this program to an even larger audience. If you head over to worksmarthypnosis.com 443, that’s where the show notes are for this week’s specific episode. You can see exactly how to connect with Katie and then fill out the form that’s gonna be on that page. That way, you’ll be the first to know as we announce an upcoming event. And as well, head over to hypnoticbusiness systems.com guessing sucks. Use what has actually been proven to work not just by me, but also by hypnotists all around the world. Check that out and join today. Hypnoticbusiness systems.com thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis [email protected].