Best of 2023 - Our top five podcast episodes

We're rounding off the year with our annual Best Of selection.
We broadcast 20 episodes in 2023, so we divided them into four groups of five and got our listeners (and watchers on YouTube) to vote for their favourite episode in each group.
Then we chose the "WildCard" fifth episode ourselves.

We're introducing excerpts from each of the top five episodes as voted for by you.
If you don't want to know which episodes we chose, look away now...

Top episode from January-March - Season 7 Episode 5 with Kate Bassett, Vocal Surgery and Beyond part 1, Injury, signs and rehab

Top episode from April-June - Season 7 Episode 10, Career Mentoring and Vocal Habilitation - secrets of our 1-1 private coaching revealed

Top episode from June-October - Season 7 Episode 11 with Louise Gibbs, Authenticity in Singing, what is it and can it be taught?

Top episode from October to December - Season 8 Episode 7 with Lisa Perks, Overcoming Vocal Shame - how teachers can support their singers

The Wild Card - Season 8 Episode 5 with Anne Leatherland, Exploring Values & Beliefs in Teaching Voice

Thank you for being with us in 2023. We'll be back in 2024 with a new series. See you there!
Cheers, Jeremy & Dr Gillyanne


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Transcript

This Is A Voice S8 Ep9 Best of 2023

This is a voice, a podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher. This is a voice. Hello, ho ho, and welcome to a terrible joke from This is a Voice, Season 8, Episode 9. The podcast where we get vocal about voice, and as you've guessed, I'm the more serious one, and Jeremy is the more zany one. 

Okay, we are doing a best of. This is the best of 2023. And thank you to all of our listeners for engaging with the poll because we asked you what your favourites were. Uh, yes, thank you. We actually, I'm going to start again. We, I'm going to leave that in, what the hell. Uh, we are going to jump straight in with the first poll.

It's going really well so far. Have you had a drink this morning? Not at all. I'm afraid this is my natural state. We are going to start straight on the answer to the first poll that we did. We separated 20 episodes from 2023 into groups of five, and this was by far the one that was most voted for. This was the episode with Kate Bassett.

And the episode was called, Vocal Surgery and Beyond a Singer's Experience Part 1, we split it into two, The Vocal Injury, The Signs and Rehab. This was a really powerful episode and it was very important for Kate to share her story. She wanted other singers to know that there is life after surgery and there is also no shame after surgery.

And interestingly Shame has come up a couple of times in other episodes, hasn't it? Voice shaming. Um, and I think that, you know, the key thing really here is you can survive and it's okay. And wasn't there a lovely comment that came from one of the listeners about why they chose it? They chose it because they said, Kate's honesty.

in what was such a tricky time for her and the practical information. So thank you for that comment. Here we go with the excerpt.

Just give us a little bit of background about the event. 

Mm-hmm. I was on tour at the time. I was doing an ABBA show that was touring most of Europe, so Germany primarily. So I was out somewhere in, in far eastern Germany, in a dusty theatre.

Um, and we were coming to the end of the show, so we were probably two thirds of the way through. And I went offstage to do a quick change. And during the quick change, something made me cough heavily. I wasn't sick, it came out of the blue. It was a sort of a really heavy, hard cough, something that really made impact.

Um, and I was probably hairspray and all, all of the things that you're doing when you get changed bending, I'm sort of zipping up your boots. I didn't think anything of it. I went back on stage to announce something, you know, uh, the next song you sort of high energy announcement going into that last part of the show.

And it was as though Mute had someone had muted my voice. It wasn't, it was, there was nothing there. There wasn't even any sort of contact or gravel sound. It was just an instant sudden complete voice loss on stage that that's what happened. Terrify terrifying. That's so interesting because what subsequently happened when you got in touch with me was that.

Neither of us really realized that that was the core event. Yeah. Because when you were on tour, you did what most people do, which is you kind of adjusted and you tried to keep going and it was only after a little bit of that, that you got in touch and said, my voice doesn't feel quite right. And I think you emailed me because we, we weren't able to even speak at that point.

The, you know, the connections. Tell me more about what you did, if you don't mind, in terms of, you know, what did you do over the next few days? because I think this is so important for the listeners hear. Yeah. Right. So I think there was maybe two or three shows left on that particular leg of the tour.

Um, and you know, i, I try to conserve my energy you know, just be. I guess use my voice less than the day-to-day. You very helpfully sent me some videos of some SOVT, uh, for, you know, a tired voice. So I was using a bubble, you know, straw bubbling and sort of, I guess just trying to sort of gently get to the end of that particular leg of the tour.

Um, and admittedly amidst all of that, probably behaving a little bit chaotically to try and just get through those last shows. Which in hindsight obviously was a very bad idea. Yeah. 

How long was it from when your voice cut out completely before you could use your voice at all again? Um, so after the um, the initial cutout. I remember I, I mean, for some context I was playing Frida in the show, which is actually a lower, a sort of a lower range than my voice naturally sits at. But so, uh, I remember sort of it did come back, but it was very, very low. And it wasn't, you know, I was struggling.

Um, so I had this sort of low voice, so I think I was sort of just singing down the octave initially in that, that, in at the, sort of the initial moment where it happened. And then after that point I was, I guess just, just maintaining and I was able to sing the show, but obviously my voice sounded husky tired, very craggy you know, all the things that you would expect in both speaking and singing voice.

Um, but yeah, so I, I didn't sort of, That, that that complete voice loss was sort of moment momentary. And then yeah. And then obviously I had a, a bad voice quality going forward. Okay. So that's interesting. And again, very super interesting for singers and teachers to know. 

The winner of poll number two was, and we were very pleased to see this, it was actually one that we did solo. called Career Mentoring and Vocal Habilitation, The Secrets of Our One to One Private Coaching Revealed, and that was Series 7, Episode 10.

Mm, something that I feel very passionate about, having had a voice problem myself as a young singer, is making sure that other singers don't get into that place, and also helping people, um, if they have had voice rehabilitation, taking them back to work. So I'm really delighted that this one was chosen.

We almost split this episode in half. I was talking about career mentoring which is a fairly new thing that I've been doing. I've been doing it a few years but it's really grown in the last year or so. And it's the idea that people need a sounding board to go, what am I doing with my life?

What am I doing with my career? Am I going in the right direction? And because there is no specific ladder, you know, there's no career ladder for a performer or for a teacher. It's actually quite hard to know where you are and how to measure what you're doing. So, I am acting as a sounding board in quite a lot of the career mentoring stuff and also giving advice.

And as Mr. Portfolio Career personified, I think you are a perfect person to do this. Thank you. Here's the excerpt.

So Jeremy, I want you to talk a bit about something that you've actually been doing for many years, but have started to do a lot more of recently, which is career mentoring.

Love it. Love doing career mentoring. Go! Okay. Career mentoring session. What happens? Well, the first thing is somebody comes to me and says, I need help with my career. It's not going where I want it to go. I'm not getting the income I want. I'm not getting the students that I want. I'm not doing what it is that I want.

I'm not even sure what it is that I want, but I know that I need to do something. 

Do you just want to upgrade slightly what you do, or do you want to take the next step up in your career ladder? And that's quite a different thing. It's actually quite a different conversation. Some people are absolutely ready to step up. onto the next rung of the career ladder and will be, will do whatever they need to do.

Now that might be immediately, it might be over a month, it might be over six months, it doesn't really matter. It's why I asked the year question because a year is a very good period of time to really upgrade what you do and step up a lot. So some people don't want that, they just want to go, how can I just tweak what I do to make it more comfortable for me?

That's fine, too. And you love these sessions, don't you? I get, I get so much out of them. It's in a, it's a real happy place for you. It is, it is, yeah. I love doing those. And is it somewhere that you expected to go? in your career? Because You know, something's popped into my head. You started your career as a collaborative pianist.

Yes. How has that enabled you to do career mentoring? Because I think there's a link. I think there's quite a big link. Um, When you are a collaborative pianist, one of the things that you do, and it's built into the job description, is that you work with a lot of different people at the same time. And sometimes you work with a lot of different people at the same time on the same piece of music.

And the really interesting thing about being a collaborative pianist is if you're going to be any good at all, you cannot play the piece the same. Because if you play your version, of the piano part of that piece, then you are not going to fit with three or four different people who come into the room.

And that's not collaboration. That's not collaboration at all, no. And I think it's really fascinating doing audition piano. jobs, which I did for years in the West End. I was, I was the go to audition pianist for all sorts of things, um, mainly because I could sight read pretty much anything. And I also knew a whole lot of opera repertoire, so I was audition pianist for Phantom for years.

Um, that you have to gel or vibe with somebody the moment they open their mouth. So you, you know, somebody starts to sing and you go, Oh, fine. I know this piece well enough. I know what, what's happening here. Um, you're going in this direction. Oh, okay. I can do that. That's fine. And I will play it differently depending on what, what anybody wants.

So it's this idea that you have a global view of. music and how it works and how it works in lots of different ways. And you take that into career coaching, which is your career is you. It's what you want to do. And therefore there are hundreds of different versions that you can do that are based around a music career.

Quite often in a career coaching session, I will suggest something that they've never even thought of. And I'm going, it's so obvious given your list of skills, and your list of interests and where your energy is and where you want to go. So obvious to me that you should just look into going in this direction, even as a sideline, because you are going to love it there.

I want to tell a story to make you laugh with you talking about how you listen to a singer and you pick up the vibe. Um, I don't know, 10 days ago we were driving back from visiting some friends in Wiltshire and it was our dear colleague Anne Leatherland's birthday. And we were in a car park having a cup of tea and a brownie and I thought, well, you know, let, let's ring Anne and surprise her, let's WhatsApp her and sing happy birthday.

Yes. And I was very pleased with myself, you know, because, um, I thought I did some nice phrasing, uh, etc, etc. And what I noticed, I said to Jeremy, Oh, well, isn't that amazing? We're so in sync. We started on the same note. Yeah. And then, um, you know, we each seemed to know exactly what we were going to do with the phrasing.

Tell everybody what you said. I'm a collaborative pianist. I just waited to see what you did and did it with you. I thought that I was quite amazing. That, by the way, is also the skill of a collaborative pianist, as the singer thinks they're better. 

It's And now there's something that you do, Gillyanne, which is you, and some of your one to one sessions are on vocal habilitation. Yes, absolutely, or perhaps more precisely, vocal post rehabilitation. Yeah. This is a place that, um, I came to quite early on in my career, because you can't be working with multiple singers for years and years without coming across voice problems.

And a voice problem is different from, um, a skills issue, as we all know. Yeah. So we have different categories of voice problems or voice issues. I mean, and some of them obviously may require surgery and some of them are more about changing the function where we've got into, um, it's almost like having a repetitive strain injury, um, in sports, uh, whereas something is in imbalance and therefore needs adjusting.

So muscle tension dysphonia is the sort of generic term for that. Can I be a little more specific? on, um, where you are, which is the difference between a technical issue and the voice problem. Yeah, you can, you can correct me on this. It seems to me that a technical issue would be, well, I can't sing that high note.

I can sing it in that song, but I can't sing it in that song, or I'd really love to be able to get louder sometimes. A voice problem has a longer term than that. So a voice problem will go across a whole song. It's like there are certain things that I know I can't do that aren't to do with a phrase or they aren't to do with a word.

They're to do with a whole song or a whole utterance. And critically It's something that you used to be able to do. Okay, good. So something has changed. Nice point. Yes. And I think that's very important. So, yeah, over the years, I've worked with people sort of post surgery on cysts with polyps, um, helped people recover with, you know, soft nodules, helped people deal with having had a long term nodule, uh, nodules, A situation where they've become more firm.

Um, and how do they get around that and go on and continue their career. I've done that too. That was a very interesting one. And then also helping people with muscle tension dysphonias, unpicking, you know, once there's a diagnosis, or even if the diagnosis from the clinicians isn't always totally clear, um, just looking at what it is that you can help the singer to change that behavior post their clinical therapy.

So, I'm not putting myself in the position of saying I am a clinician, because for me that's a boundary. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't be in dialogue with the speech and language therapist, or sometimes being in dialogue with the laryngologist. If it's appropriate for me to have that information and if the client says yes, I think we talked about that in, in episode eight, I think of season seven.

Uh, when we were talking about the boundary of a singing teacher or a vocal coach, which is you do not diagnose, you may. assist, you may give information to the clinician so that they can diagnose or re diagnose, but you don't do the diagnosis yourself. You're not qualified. Yeah, and I've had people that, you know, at all sorts of different levels of expertise, so for instance, I've had choir singers.

I've had a barbershop singer who was referred to me by the voice clinic, um, amateur singers really wanting their voice back, getting their life back. I remember one very precious moment with one singer who had been a choral singer and suddenly wasn't able to use their voice, um, when she felt she'd, Finished her session.

She said, Thank you for giving me my life back. It's very powerful. Yeah, but then also working with professional singers who've run into trouble, which, you know, can happen to any of us at any stage. I've been quite open about the fact that in my late 20s, I had a voice problem. I got into the situation where.

I would get up in the morning and wonder what I was going to experience that day and I unfortunately was put in the position of being told by singing teachers, it's all in your head, dear. Uh, that obviously was a very long time ago and, do you know, I said this to someone the other day and I'm about to swear, everybody so swear alert, of course I'm having a psychological problem, my voice doesn't fucking work for me.

So we do need to separate between those things. Well, this is the really interesting thing. If your voice doesn't work for you, that's the instigator. The psychological problem is not necessarily the instigator. I mean, of course there are psychogenic problems which impact on our voice, and that, again, can happen to anyone.

And you, you know, you need someone who has trained in that area to do that kind of diagnosis. It's not your job to do that. As a singing teacher, if you suspect there's something. of that nature, then it's about referring on and, and perhaps flagging it in, um, a kind empathetic way for the singer concerned, because, um, even saying that, you know, I know what I felt, which is Blimey, it's not just my voice, it's me.

Mm hmm. It's the core of you that's gone wrong. Yeah, and that was very hard. So my happy place is they've had the operation, they've had their, you know, their rehabilitation, And they come to me and I go, okay, now what are we going to do to help you get back on track? Where are we? How are we going to start changing pathways if we need to, or, um, rebuilding a pathway that's got a little bit lost because of surgery and, um, putting it into practice?

in your work environment. So be that whether you're a teacher or whether you're a choral singer, whether you're a professional singer, um, whatever your genre. I mean I've worked with people from pretty much any genre in, in these situations and I just love. doing it. So if that's you, and this is a little bit of a shout out for what I do, if that's you, I do have more spaces for this kind of work.

It is targeted. You don't have to have lessons for ever and ever. None of us believes in that anyway. Nope. I am very, very happy to help and I have the knowledge and the ability to talk with your speech and language therapist or your laryngologist if needed, if you're comfortable with that information being shared.

The winner of poll number three was in fact the next episode which was series 7 episode 11 and this was with actually one of our favorite guests, lovely woman to talk to, Louise Gibbs. Yes and Louise had done a talk for the AOTOS, NATS, BVA, Global Connections event that you and I took part in and Louise did a keynote and she was talking about authenticity in that keynote.

And we said, right, you've got to come and do a podcast for us. Because it's something we, we all talk about, isn't it, as listeners and teachers, this idea of authenticity. And it's a, a much broader topic than you might think. And the title of the episode is Authenticity in Singing. What is it and can you teach it?

Here's the excerpt. Inspiration for the coming year, people.

Louise: You can get 10 people sing the same song and they'll always deliver it even if they're attempting, even if they're attempting to mimic it as closely as possible, but they'll always come up with 10 different versions. And that's, I think, what we have to, that's what I was honoring in my talk, and I felt like this is a way of resolving personal authenticity with tra, with the authenticity to style or tradition is that in fact, it's upon you,

it's really incumbent upon you to add to that tradition. And and that's what you do.

I love that Louise.

You bring something. It doesn't matter how small it is. It doesn't have to be have to be original. You don't have to strive for that. You just actually have to be yourself. 

How are you helping these young performers navigate the contemporary world and finding themselves and yet giving them enough, enough language, if you like, to be able to create something that is authentic for them? 

The first thing always begins with them. I think the thing is with when we know dealing with words. For me it always begins with words If you want to reach people directly, because, if you are just dealing with, let's say, teaching the piano, that's a more abstract connection with emotion. 

But, but if you're dealing with words, One of the things is that, you know, people have to get to know each, get to know themselves. 

And, I had a very funny experience recently with a student and I was saying was singing this song about, oh God, I've forgotten what the song is. It's from, I think it's from a musical.

But anyway, it's about destroying somebody's car that you are that you are broken up with. And I said, you just, 

you have to feel rage. I said, so no. At one point you really love this person. And then they ran off with somebody else and, and now you know the way you're so full of rage that you're getting back at them.

And she said, after a kind of like a silence, she says, I've never been in love with anybody. And I went, Oh God you know what the whole premise of the whole understanding is like, you've gone out the window. And 

I said, so I said, okay, do you have a dog?

Yep.

So do you see what I'm saying is you are having to get, and you're having to do that. What is it, a bit of archeology, go 

back. But it always starts there. And I'm also trying to get people to say well, you know, they're sad. And I said okay, there's different kinds of sadnesses and there's different things that you can be sad about.

It's, it's not just happy or sad and I'm trying to get that, I'm trying to get people to explore the nuances of a particular emotion. Like even feel rage. If you feel rage. There's different kinds of ways to feel rage. And this is very interesting cause a lot of young people are they're horrified that I might be encouraging them to think about rage.

You know, it's like, they, They edit themselves to such a high degree sometimes, I'm sure you find this, once we get to know each other, I've, it's wonderful what many people have inside them and the stories that they can tell and the things that come out, the things that they can draw upon.

And that helps them really to get, to give that detail of personal expression. And it's, basically to get them to think about what they really feel and to find words to be able to articulate it and to realize that it's a perfectly egitimate, if not desirable thing to do in relation to being an artist. 

The winner of poll number four was really no surprise. This was such a powerful episode and this is with Lisa Perks. Again, such a great person to talk to. Very, very interesting topic. Overcoming shame. How singing teachers and vocal coaches can support their singers. And specifically, it's overcoming vocal shame.

Yes. Because vocal shaming is a thing. Teachers have it, singers have it, vocal coaches have it, and it's really important that we recognize what it is. Um, in our profession and that we learn how to support singers going through it and the way that we work with singers in lessons is actually part of it.

So that was season eight, episode seven. Here's the excerpt. 

Singers, the business, And teachers treat each other in the voice profession if something goes wrong, that there's a sense of shame that we can carry.

I mean, you know that I had a voice problem in my early 20s, which I was told it was a psychological thing for me. I don't think it was. And I carried that shame. for decades. And we still see it, don't we Jeremy? We see this shaming. Teachers we were working with yesterday actually in a pedagogy practicum were saying, I can't tell you how many people come to choir who've been told they can't sing.

They should never sing. Yeah. Um, and you know, this is an ongoing thing. And I would love you to talk about where you think this comes from and, and what, how is it showing up this shame? Why, and what can we do about it? Hmm. Yeah, so I run a, a, a, a small course where I've invite a, a co, like a small group of people to, on a bit of a journey really to talk around.

This subject sometimes directly to the subject, but often it's around the subject because actually shame is that phenomenon that is there for us always at some, you know, to some degree or another, but it's, it's, it's very hidden. It's a, it's, it's almost like you have shame of having shame. So people don't like to talk about it directly.

So what I notice is that If you can share spaces where you can talk around some of the painful things that happen, that you see people come alive in that, they, yeah, the willing, it's, okay, I'll use the vulnerable word. People are, if they're put in the right position, they're very happy to be vulnerable.

And so what I can say is that I have ideas around where these things might start. I think that We have a massive responsibility as far as teachers and leaders to, dare I say, acknowledge that when we look or listen to other people or look upon them, gaze upon them, listen upon them, that they will, to some extent, be feeling some form of judgment or critique that's taking place.

And it's holding that space very responsibly. as a teacher and as a listener or an audience member. So holding it responsibly and compassionately, simultaneously. It's not like, here's a thought, I don't know if I'm right, but here's a thought. We're never going to lose this. This is something that, that is always going to be there.

And as teachers, it's our job to, to listen in and to help people and assist people with the things that they, they want to improve upon, let's say. Because we're guides. That's right. We're guides and that's what people come for. However, I do have a very strong opinion that we must be aware of the potential that we hold with everything that we say.

The potential to make someone feel ashamed or criticized or whatever. I mean, I, I've mentioned this before. I mean, some of the work that I'm doing at the moment, I'm thinking around the ideas of objectification. For example, when we have a singer come in, they are a person. They are a living, breathing human being with a heart and a soul.

And the voice is often thought of or considered by us singers as part of ourselves. And so if we as leaders or trainers or whatever are not really aware of this in a very deep and compassionate way, we really do run the risk of objectifying the people in front of us. And dare I say it, treating them as such?

I want people to feel like you can make all the sounds that you need to say or need to express and that you are witness. For your vulnerability, your honesty, your personhood, your selfhood that you have put on the line and you have don't, you've given so generously.

I want to be in a space where people can witness each other and their voices without holding such close judgment on. Function, or sound, or genre, or all those things. Going back to that story about how I got criticized for sounding a certain way, there is a vast spectrum of sound out there that we can make.

And as you say, like, some of it might be healthy, some of it might not be healthy. What's healthy for you, Gillyanne, may not be healthy for me, and so on. Contextually, it may or may not be healthy. I don't know the answers to all those things. Never will I. In fact, I'll give them to you, Gillyanne. So if people want those answers, they can go to Gillyanne or Jeremy.

That's fine. But what I want to see is people who are leading this industry, leading it in such a way that is deeply compassionate, and holding those vulnerable spaces in the most beautiful and delicate, holy, it's sacred. This is a sacred sharing. When I open my voice or my heart, I am giving you something from me.

And you, indeed, as listener, as instructor, as expert or whatever, you are in turn receiving and giving at the same time. And this constant need for rightness or wrongness or cancelling, which is where you were going with that, I think. That's never going to get us anywhere. That's actually just going to make us go around in circles. 

This is the fifth of our Top Five podcast episodes, and this is the one that we've chosen. Yeah, a podcaster's choice. We have decided to go with season eight, episode five, where we invited our Associate Trainer, Anne Leatherland, to come in and talk about values and beliefs in teaching voice.

And I think all we need to say here is have a listen and find out what are the difference between values and beliefs and how they can really impact on your teaching. When people have gone through this process, it has been a game changer. Enjoy the episode.

So Anne, I want you to talk a bit about values. Okay, as I see it, values are the things we hold dear, the things we live our lives by. Now, the difficulty is, of course, that we may think we know what those are, but without a full investigation and a real level of thought, we can miss it. We might come up with one or two words, or we might think things are values when they're actually beliefs, which is a slightly different thing.

So a value is something that We just couldn't live our life without. It's something that encapsulates who we are at a deep level and it helps us in every aspect of our lives. So it might be something like love or integrity or creativity. But there are so many words like that. So what we did in the accreditation was to take the teachers through a process where they could examine possibilities and choose the things that resonated with them and then examine them at a very deep level by going, that means, or why is that?

So if they chose, say, family as a value, we just come back and say, well, which means? or honesty, which means, and very often there would be something deeper even than that, which we'd call a core value underneath it. So it's a bit of a complex process, but it's really worthwhile. Now the thing about belief is this, belief is something that's programmed into us, actually so are values, but in a slightly different way.

We tend to pick them up throughout our lives and we listen to them and we formulate plans in our head according to our beliefs. Now sometimes beliefs can run alongside values and they work together and that's ideally what we want. But other times, beliefs just don't support our values. So, for instance, if I have a value of self care, I believe in looking after myself, it's not selfish, it's what my being needs, it's what I need as a person.

But at the same time, I work myself ragged and never give myself time off, and I don't look after my health or my diet, or get enough sleep, because I believe that I have to work hard to live. then my belief is not running in line with my value. Yes, I can share a similar thing actually, which is, because one of my core values, in fact I think it's my top, is harmony.

Which is very nice if you're a musician, but I think simply because of childhood experiences and so on, I grew up with the belief, I must make things right with people, I must make that people mustn't argue, they mustn't be unhappy with me, they mustn't be unhappy with each other. And that meant that there's several times in my life that I was driven by that and I didn't even know I was driven by it.

And therefore, I compromised something that actually did not work for me. You know, I suffered as a result of that belief. And occasionally, he still has to remind me of it. He'd say, hang on, is that, is that belief going on? And I go, oh, okay. And then if those conflict with each other, of course, that is one of the causes of human misery, I think, don't you?

Absolutely. I mean, it's probably the main cause. That conflict is where we get stuck and we can't move forwards. Yeah. And we talk a lot about beliefs in the accreditation program and how difficult they are, if somebody has a belief, and it's a very powerful belief, how difficult it is for somebody else to move that person in any direction, really, in teaching, you mean, in teaching?

Yeah, absolutely. And, and therefore, some of the work that I do when I'm coaching people is to check whether there is a belief there and whether it's serving the person or whether it's serving the value. And if it is great, we leave it alone. We identify and leave it alone. And if it isn't, then I go, do you want to look into that belief and find out why that's there?

And if it's necessary for you, it may have been protective for you in the past, but is it necessary for you now to still carry on? I think that's, again, another really important point is that beliefs are very often protective. They're things that we formulate because things have happened in our lives.

What people have said things to us, we could go right back to childhood on it, or it could be more recent. For instance, we could have tried to sing at a concert and it didn't work out well because we were afraid. And so we then have a belief that we're no good and everybody thinks we're rubbish, basically.

And so the next time a concert comes along, it's worse. Because the belief is just ingrained. And then it's a self perpetuating belief. Absolutely. And then that gets mapped in the brain and then the brain goes there, because the brain is geared towards protecting itself, protecting us from negative experiences.

And it's a wrap. So what do you say? More sherry vicar? Oh, I don't mind if I do. Thank you so much. Been lovely talking to you. It's been lovely having you listen to the podcast. We have had some amazing guests, some great episodes. Time for a break. We'll be back in the new year with a brand new series.

We'll see you then. Bye. Bye.

This is A Voice, a podcast with Dr Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher.