🎙️ Weekly Insight #42: When the Words Are Yours

Recently, I wrote a LinkedIn article called Does This Sound Like You? 

It explored how easy it is to let AI tools like ChatGPT take the reins when drafting a post or a comment. The ideas might be solid. The sentences might be smooth. But if you haven’t shaped it, spoken it, or infused it with your sense of pacing and vocal phrasing—it might not sound like you.

This week, let’s take that same idea and explore how it plays out in our voice—how we use it to shape meaning in the moment, whatever the setting.

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When I work with singers or speakers, one of the biggest turning points comes when they stop trying to sound "right" and start trying to sound real. That often starts with listening—carefully—to how they speak, how they shape a phrase, how they breathe.

Musicality often gets treated like a vague artistic instinct, but at its core, it’s really about using technique—vowel length, breath pressure, dynamic shape, articulation—as a way to express deliberate personal intent. If you’ve taken the time to investigate what you want to say or communicate, then those technical elements become tools to bring that message to life. Musicality isn’t decoration; it’s what happens when technical control meets personal intention—when you know what you want to say and have the tools to shape it clearly. They show up in how we write—whether it’s a blog post, an email, or even a quick text message.

In fact, this is something I learned from a story about Frank Sinatra. Steve Wynn once described how Sinatra would sit down with a lyric sheet before rehearsing. He’d go through it word by word, marking the ones he wanted to lean into, where he’d breathe, and which lines needed more space—so their emotional or lyrical meaning could really register with the listener. Sinatra didn’t just rehearse for perfection—he looked at each lyric, made decisions about breath, emphasis, and pacing, and shaped the performance so it meant something real. His goal wasn’t polish—it was about forming a real-time intention in the moment, shaping each phrase so it carried something personal and alive.

Writing is like that. And so is singing. Even when the notes are on the page, it’s the phrasing—the way you shape each word and breath—that makes it yours. Whether you're singing a familiar melody or refining an AI-generated draft, the phrasing still has to reflect your intention and your voice. Without that, the result can be technically fine but emotionally distant.

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In Developing Your Authentic Voice, we often work through four key elements: Intention, Breath, Tone, and Connection.

• Intention: What are you trying to say?

• Breath: Where does the breath settle? Are you holding it—maybe without realizing-, or using its energy to support what your  intention?

• Tone: Does your tone carry steadiness, urgency, warmth, or something else entirely—and is that quality intentional?

• Connect: Can the reader—or listener—feel you behind the words?

These same principles can show up in many different settings—this is how I use it when I’m rehearsing a song, clarifying an idea, or expressing something I want to be understood in real time. Voice isn’t just about vocal cords. It’s about ownership. Vibration. Deliberate expression.

Whether you're writing with help or singing from memory, the challenge is the same: you still have to make it your own. Read it out loud. Phrase it. Shape it. Ask: Is this something I’d actually say—or sing?

Because once it sounds like you, it can reach someone else.

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📜 “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” — Epictetus