The Voice of Success

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This book is a must read for any perioperative staff nurse, educator, leader, or administrator with a desire to strengthen his or her voice. Joni Wilson is a coach with 18 years of experience teaching voice communication skills to corporate professionals. This book covers everything about voice, including projecting and tailoring voice style, defeating nerves when speaking publically, vocal personality, health and hereditary factors that affect the voice, and how to put it all together for a voice of success.

As perioperative nurses, we must use our voices every day to speak up and advocate for our patients. Having a strong and confident voice is critical to patient safety; it is especially important to be heard when there is a potential for patient harm. For a nurse with a soft or weak voice, garnering the attention of an entire room of surgeons, anesthesia care providers, and other OR personnel for a time out can be intimidating. This book has an entire chapter dedicated to becoming a vocal powerhouse and how to be heard “above the babble.” Anatomical diagrams show how the human resonating system works, and the author provides many fun exercises for voice training that could be used to gain the attention of a loud and busy OR. For example, the author lists a string of words to read out loud to help practice and embellish vowel and consonant sounds for good vocal dynamics.

Sometimes in high-stress situations, a person's voice characteristics may give the wrong message or annoy the people around him or her. A coworker may sound blunt and angry when he or she is talking but not be aware of the angry tone. As a result, other people may try to avoid communication or grow intolerant or impatient with the person. This book explains how to hone in to vocal awareness and watch how people relate to you when you speak. The author provides wisdom about the types of vocal personalities and the realities of voice profiling, which is when a person makes decisions or assumptions about another person based on the tone, clarity, and sound of his or her voice. Different business situations call for different voice characteristics, and the author helps clarify the types that are appropriate for certain situations. The author gives examples of how to practice different vocal personalities (eg, authoritative, friendly, polite, sophisticated, bubbly) to create a positive vocal image.

This book also explains how using voice incorrectly can cause physical exhaustion and sometimes will make a person's voice sound thin and weak by the end of a long day of talking, such as when orienting a new nurse to the OR or giving a long lecture. This book contains advice and exercises to teach readers to use their entire bodies to speak to help prevent fatigue and loss of voice. Voice of Success also clears up many myths about voice, such as the belief that the voice begins and ends in the throat or that the voice weakens with age.

This book is geared toward women but also has some voice techniques that would be helpful for men. Voice of Success is a fun and easy read, divided into page-length subtopics and exercises. Readers can use this book to help them practice tongue strengthening drills in the mirror and read aloud to power up consonants and vowels. This book is comprehensive and full of valuable information that can help anyone instantly become a better communicator and public speaker.