When experienced teachers ask me for a bit of advice, I always recommend singing lessons. This isn’t to get your singing any better ( hey, I can’t talk there myself!), but to help you use your voice and breathing more correctly. Very often teachers don’t have the time to sit down and learn the techniques, and can often end up damaging or losing their voices. I’m exactly the same myself, I know what I should do, but don’t always have the discipline to do all my warm ups. Things are also compounded for me because quite often mics or amps break down, or people think that I won’t need a microphone to talk to 200 people! In those situations I can’t just turn round and say “sorry, it’s a no go”, but doing them often leaves me without a voice for a couple of days. So as next week is the start of this year’s presentation season and as last year I lost my voice a few too many times, I went to the doctors to check things up and he recommended I go to a speech therapist, to get some discipline kicked into me! So that’s where I was today. Everything was pretty much straight forward – drink plenty of water ( easy! ), avoid coffee ( hmmm tough!), outdoor exercise ( a little counterproductive in big cities with all the smog!), and of course breathing. The trick with breathing is to make your stomach look as fat as possible ( quite easy for me) when you breathe in, and make it look as thin as possible ( quite tricky for me!) when you breathe out. “Fat in, Thin out” – right that’s my breathing exercises for the day!