Weekly Voice Insights #116 -The Red Cup

A red coffee cup, an unexpected kindness, and a memory from Paris.

I've recently returned to a morning routine that includes spending time with my Panda Planner and my Stoic reflections. There's a section in the planner that asks me to write three things I'm excited about that day, and one of the things I frequently write is:

“Expecting unexpected, marvelous things.”

I've written those words many times. I don't necessarily expect something extraordinary to happen every day. For me, it's a reminder that something unexpected is always possible, and I think it's important to remain open to that possibility.

This past Sunday, I had a rather lovely reminder of what those words can mean.

A Red Coffee Cup

I was sitting in a little café in Biarritz called La Panetière, enjoying my morning coffee and working in my planner.

The coffee came in a red Cafés Richard cup. I've always liked red coffee cups, and this one particularly appealed to me, so I asked the people working at the café where I might buy one.

They were very friendly, and one of the women spoke with the owner. He came over and explained that these cups weren't generally available for individual purchase because they were supplied directly to cafés.

I asked whether I might buy one from him, and he went to see what he had. He found one and brought it over, but when I offered to pay, he declined. The woman cleaned the cup, wrapped it, and put it in a bag for me as a gift.

It was a small gesture, but one that meant a great deal to me. And as she handed me the cup, something came back to me from my years living in Paris.

Un Petit Rien

Around 2001 or 2002, I remember seeing a message on the buses operated by the RATP, the Paris public transport authority. It was part of a request encouraging passengers to show their transit passes, or abonnements, to the bus drivers.

The wording, as I remember it, was:

« Si chacun fait un petit rien, ça fait un grand quelque chose. »

If everyone does one little thing, it adds up to something much greater.

I hadn't thought about that phrase for quite some time, but as the woman handed me the cup, it came back spontaneously.

I told her about the message I'd remembered from the Paris buses and explained that what she and the owner had just done was un petit rien for them, perhaps, but un grand quelque chose for me.

She smiled and said, « C'est vrai. »

After leaving the café, I walked down toward the Atlantic and found a bench overlooking the water. I sat there for a while with my new red cup, thinking about the kindness I'd just experienced and how unexpectedly that old memory had returned.

Being Open to What Happens

When I write “expecting unexpected, marvelous things” in my planner, I'm reminding myself that I don't know everything the day may bring.

There may be difficulties or disappointments, and occasionally something happens that gives me an unexpected reason to smile.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus often reminds us to distinguish between what is within our control and what is not. We cannot determine how another person will behave toward us, although we do have some choice in how we respond.

Finding the Words That Matter

I might ordinarily have hesitated to ask about buying the cup, thinking it was a little too forward or perhaps intrusive. But then I realized I was anticipating a response before I'd even asked the question. Why assume how someone might react when I hadn't given them the opportunity to respond?

I spend a lot of time thinking about how we communicate with others and whether the words we choose express what we really mean.

Speaking French allowed me to share a memory from my years in Paris and tell them why their kindness meant so much to me.

Of course, a simple merci would have been perfectly appropriate. We don't always need to find just the right words to express our appreciation, especially when we're speaking in a language other than our own.

Our expectations can sometimes limit what we're willing to do, particularly when we assume how someone else might respond. Being open to the unexpected means allowing ourselves to find out.

---

Find the DYAV newsletter, website, blog, reflection journal, and Voice Insights archive below:

https://linktr.ee/DYAVwithElias

or scan

#DevelopingYourAuthenticVoice #WeeklyVoiceInsights #PetitRien #AuthenticCommunication #TheRedCup

Weekly Voice Insights #115 — Orchestration: Where Preparation Meets the Moment

Back in Biarritz for Madama Butterfly, enjoying the opportunity to make music with my colleagues at Opéra de Biarritz Pays Basque.

I'm writing this from Biarritz, France, where I've just begun rehearsals for Puccini's Madama Butterfly.

After a seven-and-a-half-hour overnight flight, a connection in Paris, and another flight to Biarritz, I arrived with perhaps two hours of sleep. Shortly after arriving, I was in rehearsal with my fellow singers, the conductor, and the stage director. Everyone was excited to begin working.

I thoroughly enjoyed that first rehearsal. Much of that enjoyment came from the preparation I'd done before arriving. I knew my music and my words, so I could listen to my colleagues, appreciate what they were doing, and respond to the conductor.

This idea keeps bubbling up for me: "Successful communication begins before you enter the room." In an opera, I know my particular role, but I cannot necessarily see or hear everything happening around me. The conductor has a different vantage point, following the score while listening to the orchestra, watching the stage, and responding to the singers.

And a good conductor needs to know more than the notes on the page. Understanding the text and the individual contributions makes it possible to recognize when a singer needs space for a breath or when something happens differently from what was rehearsed.

I've been thinking about this idea of orchestration in relation to the work of business analysts, project managers, and people working within Agile teams. Like a conductor, someone coordinating a project needs to understand the whole, even when individual participants are concentrating on their particular responsibilities.

Each person brings their own knowledge and judgment to the work. There are project goals, requirements, and agreed ways of working, but individuals also make choices along the way. Those choices may affect other people, sometimes in ways that aren't immediately apparent.

The conductor works from a score, just as a project team may work from requirements, process maps, or a shared plan. But neither the score nor the plan can account for every decision or adjustment made in the moment.

As performers, we have some freedom in how we interpret our roles, but there are limits. Our choices have to remain connected to what others are doing.

“In this therefore is the skill, in this the art, the quickness, the judgment...”              

— Epictetus, Discourses 2.5, translated by George Long

Weekly Voice Insights#114 -Tell Me How to Do It!

I came to Boston to share my work. One comment helped me see it from another angle.

At the end of my last blog, I said I would try some of the ideas I’d been exploring and let you know how they worked. This is part of that follow-up. In my last blog, I wrote about moving Beautiful Dreamer to the beginning of the presentation and closing with my “It’s Now or Never”/“O Sole Mio” mashup. Beautiful Dreamer gave the listeners a softer, more conversational sound as they entered the work that followed. I sensed that the song had their attention. At the end, the mashup let them hear a more athletic version of the voice. Moving between English and Italian brought the vowel changes into focus. The music sits in a medium to medium-high range, where I could show more of the voice’s power without making the delivery more emotionally charged.

At breakfast during the Business Analysts World Summit in Boston this week, I heard someone say, “Tell me how to do it, not that I can do it.” I understood the point. “You can do it” is encouraging, and encouragement has its place. But when someone is trying to improve a skill, encouragement alone doesn’t show them what to try next.

If I’m mentoring someone to become a better listener, pay attention to their tone, or speak clearly enough for an idea to land, I can offer more than the outcome. I can suggest steps to practice and ways to notice what happens along the way. How does the thought feel before it’s spoken? What changes when the speaker slows down or lets a sentence finish? What can they hear in their own tone?

This was part of my presentation at the summit. I shared ways to pay attention to the voice and body, so people could begin to recognize the choices involved in listening and speaking. Confidence and authenticity can describe what we’re working toward, but those words can feel abstract on their own. A moment of practice gives us something to do. Self-awareness helps us notice what happened and consider what to try next.

In one exercise, I split the group in two. One half delivered a word with an extended vowel and a clear intention toward the other half. The participants were surprised by what they heard: the sound changed with the intention. They were also surprised by what they saw in their colleagues’ faces. The exercise gave them a way to experience how intention travels through the voice and how listeners respond.

In business analysis, these choices show up in everyday exchanges: asking a question, giving an update, or responding when a stakeholder introduces something unexpected.

Telling someone, “You can do this,” can offer encouragement. Then we can work on their delivery, choose the intention behind a phrase, feel what the breath and tone are doing, and make an adjustment they can feel. Encouragement can support the process; practice gives  something specific to try.

There’s also room for curiosity in that practice: 

• What can your voice do?
• Of the four pillars, which tool or aspect feels most available to you right now?
• What could you explore to become more effective in the way you listen, speak, and connect with others?

You don’t have to work on everything at once. You can begin with one choice, try it, and notice what changes.

“Every habit and faculty grows through the actions that strengthen it: listening by listening, speaking by speaking. To become a more effective communicator, make a practice of communicating; when one approach isn’t helping, train yourself to use another.” 

—Adapted from Epictetus, Discourses 2.18

Find the DYAV newsletter, website, blog, reflection journal, and Voice Insights archive below:

https://linktr.ee/DYAVwithElias

or scan

#DevelopingYourAuthenticVoice #BusinessAnalysis #CommunicationSkills #Voice #SelfAwareness

Weekly Voice Insights #113 — It's Now or Never!

The Freedom to Try Something New!

As I prepare for my symposium session at ProjectSummit*Business Analyst World in Boston next week, I've been reconsidering something I've been doing regularly. At the end of my presentation, The Power of Your Voice, I sing the first verse of Stephen Foster's Beautiful Dreamer. I've deliberately placed it at the end because of what participants have experienced during the session.

Throughout the presentation, participants explore how they use their voices. We experiment with intention, breath, and tone, beginning with something as simple as the word “YO.” By changing the pitch, intention, and breath pressure behind that single syllable, participants begin to recognize how breath pressure influences volume and how the voice can communicate intention independently of the emotional meaning of the words themselves.

After they've had an opportunity to experiment with breath pressure and their own voices, I sing. I can take them through the Developing Your Authentic Voice pathway using the song as a demonstration. Singing slows the process down. The words are sustained longer than they would be in ordinary speech, the rhythm is slower, and the use of breath pressure becomes more apparent. Singing is also a more athletic use of the voice, making it easier to recognize how intention, breath, tone, and connection work together. Because participants have already experienced these elements themselves, they can now hear and observe them in a different way. 

While I'm singing, I also encourage participants to consider questions about how they might apply these ideas to their own communication. I usually reserve 10 to 15 minutes at the end for questions, and in Chicago there were quite a few. When participants describe specific situations in which they might use these skills, I can connect the information we've just explored to situations they may actually be encountering.

One of the other speakers who attended that session told me how strongly he responded to the singing and suggested that I consider moving it to the beginning of the presentation.

I've considered opening with singing before, but I've deliberately avoided it because I was concerned it might make the session feel too performative. Yet I've also been paying attention to how other speakers begin their presentations. Some use humor, others create an evocative moment, and several keynotes I've attended have been quite theatrical. Those openings can engage participants immediately, and I've begun questioning why I haven't been making greater use of something I already know how to do.

What if I begin with part of Beautiful Dreamer? It's a relatively quiet song, with a beautiful text and a melody that many people will recognize. After singing part of the first verse, I could ask participants a few questions about what they've just heard. What did they notice about how I prepared to sing each phrase? What did they notice about the pauses and the pace of the singing? How did the sound of my voice contribute to what I was expressing? Was there a particular word or phrase that caught their attention, and what made it stand out?

That would give us something specific to work from before we begin the exercises. It would also introduce the four pillars of my Developing Your Authentic Voice pathway: intention, breath, tone, and connection. Participants would hear those elements in the song before we begin examining them individually through their own voices.

Then, near the end of the presentation, before the Q&A, I'm thinking about bringing back something I used during a keynote at BA & Beyond in Copenhagen. I performed a mashup of 'O Sole Mio and It's Now or Never, using an Elvis karaoke accompaniment track. Since It's Now or Never uses the melody of the Italian song, I can move between the two languages within the same performance. It sits higher in my vocal range than Beautiful Dreamer, giving me more natural volume and energy. The Italian vowels allow for a more open, sustained sound, while the English requires different articulation and phrasing. These physical differences become much more pronounced in this kind of singing. After participants have explored breath pressure, pitch, and intention through their own voices, they would have an opportunity to observe those same elements in a more athletic and expansive use of my voice.

I've found feedback from participants particularly useful when considering changes to my presentations. I use a feedback form, and I'm often interested in what people choose to comment on, which exercises they remember, and the questions they raise after experiencing the presentation. Their responses help me recognize what they've taken away and give me ideas about what I might do differently the next time.

I have an opportunity in Boston to make a choice. I can deliver the presentation in a way that I know works, or I can take a chance on something different. There's a line in It's Now or Never about spending a lifetime waiting for the right time. Well, the opportunity is here, and I'm taking it!

I'll have a chance to see how this works next week, and I'll let you know how it goes.(ooolala!)

Weekly Voice Insights #112 "Communication Begins Before You Enter the Room"

“Let your words be few and well-chosen.”

— Epictetus, Enchiridion 33.2

I was honored to present at ProjectSummit*BAWorld in Chicago and be in the lineup with such inspiring and thought provoking speakers!

At ProjectSummit*BAWorld in Chicago, I gave my Power of Voice presentation and attended other people’s sessions. I learned from the information they shared, but also from noticing my own experience as a listener. A few observations helped me think about how I prepare and how much I’m asking someone else to take in when I speak.

When I’m preparing, I know my material and how one idea connects to another. The listener has to discover those connections while I’m speaking. In some sessions, there was good energy and pacing, but so much information on the PowerPoint slides that I didn’t know where to put my attention first. I started thinking about content per minute: how much information someone is being asked to absorb in the time we have. I might be reading the slide while the speaker explains something else. If I stop to write something down, the presentation continues.

One speaker talked about talking at people because we’re nervous and have a lot to say. I’ve experienced that. You’ve prepared all this information and want to share it, but the person listening hasn’t had that preparation. They’re hearing it now in the moment.

Last week, I wrote about becoming comfortable with the pause and practicing outside the situation where we’ll need to use it. Another idea from this conference was that communication success begins before we enter the room.  Part of this is considering who will be listening as we decide what to say.

One of the business analysts talked about not knowing what the acronym PM meant when he first heard it. He felt insecure because everyone else seemed to know. We can forget that a term we use every day may be new to the person listening.

I think about that when I teach voice. I may use the familiar phrase “belly breathing” to introduce diaphragmatic breathing, even though the stomach itself has very little to do with the process. The familiar phrase gives us a place to start. Then I can explain what I mean and use an image to show it. Some people need to see an image along with the words they hear. That image can help make the explanation clearer.

That’s one reason I attend other people’s presentations. I get to be on the other side of the equation, hearing what’s already been said and how people are responding. When I present, I can connect my material to what the listeners have already been hearing. A question or a response can help me decide what may add the most value to the listeners experience.

Epictetus writes about listening as a skill and how a suitable listener can kindle a speaker’s desire to speak.

I chose “communication success begins before you get in the room” as the title for this week's insight because I heard it in one of the presentations, and I captured it.  At lunch with the other speakers and participants, the idea came up again; someone else wrote it down, too. It had resonated with all at the table. 

When I’ve done this work before I "enter the room", I’m not preoccupied with whether I’ve said every point. I can pay attention to the people listening. I feel honored and privileged to hear such speakers at ProjectSummit*BAWorld in Chicago, and grateful to everyone who joined the conversations and connected those ideas to their own experience.

Weekly Voice Insights #111  — How Do I Become Comfortable with the Pause?

After my presentation in Madison last week someone asked, “How do I become comfortable with the pause?”

I’ve been preparing the role of Sharpless in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Much of his music is woven into the orchestra. He doesn’t have many large solo moments where everything stops and the voice takes over. His words have to enter the music and move with it.

From the house Pinkerton has rented high above Nagasaki, Sharpless sees the city, the sea, and the port. The rests separate each observation; the following measure suggests his excitement at the view.

When I first look at the score, that can seem daunting. The notation has to show pitch and meter, with markings above each syllable. Dashes connect words; punctuation is there, though the shape of the language can be difficult to see among all the musical information. A score is a written version of the data. The performers use it to prepare, but the listener experiences the music by hearing it and seeing the action on stage.

I’ve heard a score compared to an Excel document. There’s a useful similarity in how information is arranged: rhythm moves across the page, while pitch is shown vertically. The layout helps a performer see a great deal at once. But a performance isn’t meant to be read like a spreadsheet. The information has to become sound, and the listener has to be able to follow it as it passes.

So I work on a section at a time. I may take the text away from the music and read the words on their own. Puccini often follows the natural rhythm of the language, and I want to hear that shape before fitting the words back into the score. Then I return to the music and work out how the text belongs within the orchestra.

The rests are already written in. My task is to make them feel like part of the natural movement of the speech, even though their timing has been composed. The orchestra may also carry a musical idea while Sharpless is silent. In opera, recurring themes can help a listener recognize what is present in a character’s thoughts between spoken or sung lines.

I see a connection to presentations. We often go into a meeting with a long list of things to cover and a short amount of time. Last week’s question was, “What can we eliminate?” The natural temptation is to fit every point into the time we have. But if the information comes too quickly, the listener can’t take it all in or tell what is most important first. It can pass by like music played too fast to follow.

Preparing a presentation doesn’t require writing out a score as complicated as Puccini’s. It does require decisions. What information needs to come first? What can be left out? Where might the listener need a moment before the next idea arrives? Then we have to practice delivering it so the information can be absorbed.

The pause is part of that preparation. We can practice saying one thought, letting it finish, and waiting before we begin the next one. We can listen to how the sentence sounds, whether we’ve left space for its meaning, and whether the next idea follows clearly. The practice can happen outside the consequential moment—in rehearsal, while preparing a presentation, or by reading a few lines aloud and noticing where the thought naturally settles.

This kind of preparation is important when the situation changes, too. A new software program, a different workspace, someone else leading a presentation, or a stakeholder introducing information that changes the direction of a project: each one asks us to work with something unfamiliar. We may need to stop, listen, reconsider what is relevant, and decide what to do next. Practice gives us a way to rehearse that process before we need it in the room.

Margaret Harshaw taught that singing is largely mental: we will the voice to do what we choose for it to do. I think about that as I prepare Sharpless. The intention has to be clear enough for the voice to follow. In a presentation, the same preparation can help us decide what to say and when to leave room for it to land.

This connection also applies to updates delivered to a group. A 25- or 30-minute update can’t simply be everything we decided to say read aloud. It needs to be clear as it unfolds. If it’s all put into an email with too many paragraphs, people may stop reading. And when the sound of the voice, its tone, and its intention help connect the message to the people receiving it, an email may not be the best way to deliver that update.

In both settings, preparation includes choosing what to say, where to leave space, and practicing how to deliver it so the listener can take it in.

Weekly Voice Insights #110-What Can We Eliminate?

I just came back from presenting at PMI Madison, and over the two days there was a lot of conversation about leadership, communication, collaboration, meetings, listening, giving people room to speak. Many useful ideas and a great deal of leadership maxims as well.

• Communicate openly.
• Listen to your team.
• Leave time for questions.
• Make sure everyone feels free to contribute.

Chris Sprague, whose work centers on enterprise transformation, culture, change, and strategy execution, talked in one of the workshops about going into a meeting with a laundry list of things you want to accomplish. He raised the question: What can we eliminate?

I know that question very well from preparing presentations.

Part of what takes me so long when I prepare is not figuring out what I could say. I usually have far too much to say. The harder part is deciding what I might omit.

For my breakout session, I had organized my speaker notes almost like a menu. The idea was that I could monitor the time and listen to what people were responding to and then decide whether to stay somewhere longer or move on.

There is a word I heard several times during the conference that is being used more and more outside of music: orchestration. For me, orchestration has a literal meaning.

An orchestra rehearsal has a fixed amount of time. In a professional, unionized orchestra, the conductor cannot simply decide to keep everyone another twenty minutes. Going over costs money, sometimes a great deal of money, very quickly. The maestro may hear twenty things that could be fixed. There may only be time for five.

Epictetus gets very close to this in Discourses II.17. In George Long’s translation:


“Adapt the preconception properly to the particular things.”

In another presentation, the suggestion was to have a brief weekly leadership meeting—ten or fifteen minutes—where people could raise concerns or talk about what was getting in the way. If there are ten people in the room and one person raises something that actually needs discussion, what happens to the rest of the fifteen minutes?

I remember seeing a meme in which a meeting is almost over, the person leading it asks if anyone has questions, and someone speaks up. Everyone else groans because they were almost done. Most of us have probably been in some version of that meeting.

They may be thinking: Was there really room for an answer? Was there time to do anything with it? Was it the right group for the discussion? Or was asking the question simply one more item on the list?

A performative question is asked to create participation—to get people responding, raising hands, speaking, or otherwise engaging with the session. A diagnostic question is asked to learn something about the room: what people understand, what they are experiencing, where the difficulty is, or what may be most useful to address next. Ideally, a question can do both.

People may also be deciding whether it is worth speaking up: Is this really safe to say? Will I be seen as negative, difficult, or not a team player? Will this be held against me later? Even when a leader asking for input sincerely wants an answer, those concerns can still be there. Saying people are free to communicate is one thing; creating enough time, space, trust, and flexibility for them actually to do it is another.

Marty Neumeier wrote in 46 Rules of Genius that you can learn anything, but you cannot learn everything. I used that book when I taught seminar classes for first-year students, and I have always liked that idea because it applies just as easily to communication. You may have twenty useful ideas, but you cannot give all twenty equal time.

I also heard a presentation where one leadership maxim followed another for close to an hour. There was barely time to absorb one before the next appeared. By the time the speaker asked for questions, there was so much material that I am not sure people knew where to begin.I had deliberately left about fifteen minutes for questions in my own presentation, demonstrated some of what I do by singing, and already eliminated material so I would not have to rush. In the feedback form I offered, participants indicated a desire for more opportunity to practice, which is useful information for me. Next time, I may explain less, or stop after a section and ask something that helps me decide whether to stay there or move on.

I am not sure what that next version will look like yet. I can create the plan, but I do not have to follow it one hundred percent. I have to be willing to adapt.