61: How to Use Music Lessons to Grow in Poise and Other Skills for Public Speaking

In this engaging episode of the Music in Our Homeschool podcast, Gena Mayo, a seasoned music teacher and homeschooling mom, reveals how music lessons can significantly enhance your child's public speaking skills. Discover the intersection of music education and effective communication as Gena shares her personal journey and valuable insights into developing poise, confidence, and presentation skills.

Dive into the fascinating world of music lessons beyond the traditional learning of instruments or singing. Gena explains how skills like deep breathing and posture, crucial for poise on stage, can transform public speaking capabilities. Learn about the powerful Alexander Technique and its role in connecting mind and body for improved performance, whether in a music recital or a speech.

Perfect for homeschoolers seeking affordable and quality music education, this episode highlights practical strategies to incorporate music lessons into your children's curriculum. Gena offers tips on creating opportunities for regular performances, from recitals to homeschool co-ops, to help students practice and gain confidence in front of audiences.

Join Gena as she outlines how mastering a musical instrument or vocal performance parallels delivering a captivating speech. Explore the crucial elements of memorization, pacing, and engaging with audiences to enhance your child’s public speaking prowess. Whether your child dreams of becoming an engineer, salesperson, or homemaker, the skills gained from music education lay a strong foundation for future success.

Tune in to uncover how music lessons can be a transformative tool in developing poise and public speaking skills for lifetime benefits. Connect with Gena Mayo on her website, musicinourhomeschool.com, for more insights and courses. Don’t miss this opportunity to empower your children with the art of music and the confidence of effective communication.

Find links to all resources mentioned in this episode here: https://musicinourhomeschool.com/use-music-lessons-to-grow-in-poise/

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Transcript

61: How to Use Music Lessons to Grow in Poise and Other Skills for Public Speaking

[00:00:00] Hi. I am Gena Mayo and today I'll be talking about how to use music lessons to teach poise and other skills important for public speaking. Private and group music lessons aren't just for learning how to play an instrument or to sing. There are so many skills that students learn, including those that make them better public speakers.

So let me tell you a little bit about myself. I'm a homeschool mom of eight, a music teacher, and a professional vocalist. I've loved music since I was a little girl. I've been involved in all manner of vocal performances and competitions starting when I was a teenager.

And then I took my love of music to the next level, studying and obtaining a music education degree in voice at Baylor University and even a master's degree in vocal pedagogy a couple of years later, while I was teaching. Vocal pedagogy is teaching voice [00:01:00] lessons. I taught junior high choir and elementary music in the public schools, early childhood music and movement classes out of my home and at homeschool co ops.

I've taught private voice lessons and musical theater classes and directed shows. And even have an online music site where I help homeschoolers to include music in their homeschools. And yet there was a day a couple of years ago where I stood on stage with my hands shaking and my heart racing as I was about to perform Adelaide's Lament, a fun song from the musical Guys and Dolls.

I was performing in front of a very friendly audience of my students and their parents, yet it was all I could do to force myself to show the poise that I knew was necessary in order to entertain my audience, as well as make them feel comfortable.

In short, I didn't have the [00:02:00] poise that I desired. What exactly is poise? Well, you can use some words and phrases to describe it, such as calmness, confidence, balance, elegance, and grace. I've had butterflies in my stomach and other kinds of usual nervousness when performing in the past, but what made this particular performance different and why I believe my poise was lacking was that it had been so long since I had performed in front of an audience.

There were years in the past where I was singing a solo in front of an audience many times every year. But recently that hasn't happened at all. And you know the old saying, practice makes perfect. The experience reminded me of the difference between singing and practicing at home, or with my voice teacher doing a lesson, versus performing in front of an audience.

Unfortunately, we [00:03:00] simply can't imitate the experience of being in front of an audience, unless we actually are performing in front of an audience. Our demand for an entertaining and great performance is heightened when we're trying to influence others positively with a satisfactory performance and we are forced in that moment to find a way to lead our minds and our bodies toward poise.

For me, this was accomplished by focusing on deep, slow breathing, prayer, and focused quiet and not allowing my mind to wander and take me down a road of picturing failure. In short, I visualize a successful performance and that helps greatly. Of course, this can only happen if I'm fully prepared and have practiced sufficiently as well.

So let's take a step back and talk about public speaking. [00:04:00] If you're here watching this presentation, I would guess that you feel that public speaking is an important goal for your children to attain. It certainly was and is a goal of mine for my kids as well. Many years ago, we joined a local public speaking group that taught my kids and me many public speaking skills.

Every two weeks, they would prepare some kind of speech or presentation at home, such as memorizing a poem or a funny story, developing a show and tell speech complete with visual aid, or even writing a persuasive or expository speech. The kids would practice and memorize it at home, and then when we met together with the other families, each student would present their speech in front of everyone and receive feedback.

What skills did this teach? Well, many. My kids learned to formulate their thoughts, to memorize and present well. [00:05:00] They learned how to give positive and constructive feedback to others, and they learned many techniques of good presenting, such as enunciation. Mumbling sometimes takes time to overcome.

Volume. Students are almost always too quiet. Tempo. Most kids tend to speak too quickly. Eye contact. Making sure that they're looking back and forth to cover the entire audience and not just looking at one person or one section. Gestures. And how to keep them appropriate and matching the tone of the speech and as well as removing distracting gestures such as playing with your ring on your hand while you're speaking.

Posture. Standing with an air of confidence and not swaying back and forth. Pausing and transitions. Removing unnecessary speech patterns such as "um"[00:06:00] and you know and a lot more. So one of the best things my kids learned through this experience was poise. Continual practice and performing in front of an audience helped them gain enough confidence

and adequately display it so that the audience had confidence in the speaker as well. How did my kids attain this poise? Well, the bi-weekly practice in front of the live audience, when most of the time they did not want to be there or doing it. A couple of things we did to make it more enjoyable for the kids was to add in some fun games to help them with improvisation or tongue twisters.

And we even provided food. I love that this group was for all ages, preschool through high school. The high schoolers were the leaders and led many of the fun speech and improv games. And the younger students were [00:07:00] able to watch how the older students worked hard and improved, and that would inspire them to do the same.

Well, studying a musical instrument or studying to sing is a lot like learning how to perform a speech well with poise. And notice I said performing. We've probably all experienced hearing someone stand up and read a speech who was ill-prepared. We can tell when a speech giver is not at ease. There's a lack of poise and a lack of proper pacing.

Their dynamics tend to be flattened or altogether too quiet. They get stuck on challenging words or phrases. Perhaps they even mumble or make no eye contact at all. And when it's done, they probably aren't happy with their performance. And the audience, though perhaps compassionate for the speaker, is relieved when they're done.

There's only one way to gain better poise, [00:08:00] comportment, joy, and influence in one's public speaking. Practice. Practice and focus studying to improve. And there are even greater benefits to such success. A student learning to present to a group, whether it's two, twenty, or two hundred people, grows in self confidence.

They grow in poise. They realize that they have something to contribute. They tend to be less bullied by feelings of insecurity and self doubt in their own mind. And the net win of all of this is that they become more. And the audiences they influence become more. It's a true win win. The same is true for the study of performance and performance of music.

One, it's a performance, not an ad lib rambling. The music needs to be studied ahead of time, either written by the performer or learned from something already written. [00:09:00] And that takes a concerted effort and the development of skill and memorization over time. Two, as the student learns the music at home, he or she is likely challenged with new concepts, different time signatures, different keys, different note patterns and rhythms, most definitely different skill techniques.

There's a lot to learn. And so, too, the speech giver learns new ideas and concepts and words and their relationship to one another. Three. After the music is learned, there is the business of how it sounds, how it's performed. You can't simply play the music like a computer might. You need to learn the dynamics of it, the feel of the tempo.

In short, the expression. This is analogous to the art of rhetoric, the ability to effectively speak the words into their performance. This is where the speech transforms from information to [00:10:00] story. You may hear movie critics take apart a movie for its lack of direction.

They're not quibbling with the plot, or the actors, or the script, the soundtrack, or even the cinematography. It's the direction they didn't like. Perhaps it came out when the separate scenes were sequenced, or through the pacing of the scenes, or the dynamics of the scenes. These subtle yet powerful additions to a film can make or break the audience's ability to enjoy it or not, to truly enter the fictional dream or not.

I'd like to take a moment to mention one other thing that you can learn through music and through voice instruction specifically that can help you learn poise. Have you ever heard of the Alexander Technique? The Alexander Technique helps the student focus on posture and specifically the connection between your mind and your body.

The connection between how you [00:11:00] think and how you move. The Alexander Technique teaches a set of skills that help you find poise and be in the mental and physical zone of calm, confidence, and balance. So, if this is something you or your students are struggling with, I'd encourage you to seek out a study of the Alexander Technique.

Another specific practice that can help you with poise is learning to breathe deeply. You can learn these kinds of techniques through something like yoga or Pilates. which will teach you how the breath is connected to your entire body. And learning to control it will help you with relaxing certain muscles in your throat, or elsewhere, which will actually cause problems during your performance if you're tense.

Let me give you just a couple of tips for breathing. A tendency for students, even adults, It's when we say take a [00:12:00] deep breath or take a big breath is doing it up here in your chest like that. But what you want to do is make the breath go all the way down to the bottom of your lungs. You can feel usually where the bottom of your ribcage is.

That's where the breath needs to go. All the way down there. Now one way you can feel this is if you lay on your back and you just breathe naturally in and out. Usually when you breathe in, you'll feel your stomach rise. When you breathe out, your stomach will go down. If you watch a little, a little, little kid or baby, that's what they do naturally.

For some reason, as we grow older, we tend to lose that deep breath, especially women, and I think it's because we don't want to make ourselves look bigger when we're taking breath down there. We don't want to make our stomachs stick out. But that's, that's what breathing deeply is. It's letting the air go all the way down to the bottom part of your lungs so that you're [00:13:00] filling it up all the way and that way you can control the breath more as you develop those muscles.

the diaphragm muscle which is right at the bottom of your lungs. So I don't want to get too technical here but I do encourage you to make sure that you learn how to breathe deeply, look into the Alexander Technique which will really help as well. So remember that experience I mentioned at the beginning of this presentation where I had shaky hands and an overabundance of butterflies in my stomach when I was performing in front of that audience?

My husband was in the audience that day and he said he couldn't tell that I was experiencing those things. A huge way I kept my audience from recognizing my deep sense of nervousness was by focusing on my breath. A year later, I had another opportunity to perform and I had vastly [00:14:00] more poise and less nervousness.

Just getting in front of that audience and performing, forcing myself to do it and get through it and work hard on breathing and focusing on having the poise helped me gain more poise in the future. This thing can happen for you and your students as well. So in conclusion, even if your kid's future job isn't going to be a musician or a public speaker or an actor,

there are so many occupations where you'll use the skills that we've been discussing today. Perhaps they'll become a salesperson, and they'll need the ability to present a product logically and passionately, with the right emphasis at the right time, with the right pacing. They'll even need to know how to observe their audience and switch up their approach throughout the presentation.[00:15:00] 

Did you know these skills are developed when learning to give a speech or play an instrument in front of an audience? Maybe your child will become an engineer. Learning to problem solve and understand how a musical piece is played on a violin, piano, trumpet, provides the same type of stick-to-itiveness and the aha moment discovery skills that will help in future engineering endeavors.

What about homemaking and the challenges of negotiating challenging personalities, encouraging work ethic and responsibility, helping a shy child overcome feelings of inadequacy? Such a mother would be better equipped if she had given herself the skills that came from learning music and performing it in front of an audience.

So I'd love to leave you today with a solution to a thought you might be having. How do you find an [00:16:00] opportunity for your kids to perform in front of an audience? So here's a few suggestions. If your kids take music lessons, ask their teacher to set up a monthly class where all the students play a piece for each other.

Be sure to always take advantage of every recital opportunity the teacher, sets up and make sure your kids practice enough, that they have their piece thoroughly memorized so that they're better able to connect with the audience and not hide behind their sheet music.

Look for other performing opportunities. Maybe there's a band or an orchestra or a choir in your area that your student can join. Is there a musical theater class that they could take? Is there a play or a musical they can audition for? Doing auditions brings yet another level of nervousness to learn to overcome and poise to learn to attain.

And again, the only way you [00:17:00] can actually get that, is by doing those auditions. So that's another level. Here's an easy option. What about setting up a homeschool co-op or a monthly library class where the students can get up in front of each other and perform a piece or a speech. If there isn't one already set up in your area, you can organize it yourself.

I hope that I have encouraged you today to see the importance of performing and building the skills of poise that will help your children become a success in everything they do. If you have any questions for me or you'd like to connect and learn about the courses that I provide, please find me over at MusicinOurHomeschool.Com and it has been a pleasure connecting with you today. 

Find links to all resources mentioned in this episode here: https://musicinourhomeschool.com/use-music-lessons-to-grow-in-poise/