Yap Sesh S2 E6: Under (More) Pressure
Anna: Welcome to Yap Sesh. We're your hosts. I'm Anna Diemer.
Maurice: And I'm Maurice Goodwin.
Anna: And we are coming to you fresh off of a fantastic new live course that we just gave this week—Under Pressure: Customizing SOVTs for Professional Voice Users. I was waiting for the...
Maurice: For anyone who—you know, we've only had two guests on this podcast at this point—but anytime before or after recording, Anna and I are just making noises into the microphone. It is real noise chaos. So for me, it's fitting.
Anna: It just lives in our brains. So what singers are actually like—this is what we're actually like. We're just constantly making sounds. We're phonating. We're getting warmed up.
Maurice: We're getting warmed up. That's right. How was the course for you?
Anna: I had so much fun giving this course. Everyone, I think, was ready to participate, ready to jump in. The chat was popping off. Can I say that? Sounds so exciting.
Maurice: The chat was popping off.
Anna: Am I too old to say that?
Maurice: No, I think it works for the course.
Anna: Okay, yeah. Because leading all of those demonstrations was a blast. We mostly spent the whole course singing, and my favorite part was someone getting in the chat and being like, “I hope they play Hot to Go at my CE course,” because we used Hot to Go as a demonstration song melody. And so I just felt so validated by our creative choices there.
Maurice: I do appreciate that. I appreciate that. Yeah, I had a great time. I thought the course went really well. I'm always reminded that it's nice to be in a space with other people who care about this stuff and who find it applicable to their practice and what they do and how it applies. So it was just great. I had a good time.
Anna: I had a fantastic time. I got to learn about nasal resistance training.
Maurice: Yeah! That was my fave. That was a new one. That was a new one. What did I learn that I still cannot do? Like, over-the-tongue and under-the-tongue raspberries.
Anna: Yeah, I can do those okay, but I tried in the moment—a rolled R for one of the demos—and it crashed and burned. But you know what? That gives an authentic experience to our learners, because we create this space for people to explore in, right? And so we ourselves can do that, right?
Maurice: Yeah, for sure. I think one thing that I also notice after almost every course that we do—y’all, after every course that we do—we log off, we look at each other, and we’re like, “Oh, this could have been another hour or two longer.”
Anna: Yeah! And all the survey responses said that as well.
Maurice: They were like, “This could be longer.”
Anna: “I wanted more.”
Maurice: I wanted more too. So keep your eyes peeled for either an expanded Under Pressure... Under More Pressure is what we should call it. I mean, that is so iconic.
Anna: We should just call it that.
Maurice: Under More Pressure.
Anna: Under More Pressure. If you are listening to us right now and are having FOMO, you can catch the replay of this course through the end of the year. So get Under Pressure, because next year maybe we'll be Under More Pressure.
This is how courses are born, dear listeners.
Maurice: When you all see this, you're going to know—Under More Pressure. And the discount code’s going to be like the episode title. It's going to be great. The secret discount code.
Anna: Yeah, secret discount code hidden in this podcast episode, which was five months before the course. We're just taking a page out of Taylor Swift's book and dropping Easter eggs.
Maurice: Oh my God.
Anna: VoiceProEd Yap Sesh Easter eggs.
Maurice: The melody’s going to be like Ophelia or something.
Anna: Full disclosure, we are tired.
Maurice: Speaking about being under pressure...
Anna: Under pressure, we are tired. And so we are gathering all of our remaining brain cells. And also, I think that was something I appreciated about Under Pressure—learning and laughing, right? Like, singing is fun.
Maurice: Yeah. We both commented on how rare it is sometimes to leave a voice course where you actually use your voice. Because so often—especially at conferences and other events—you just sit and watch someone do it.
And so I think we’ve tried to be really intentional about getting folks to use their voice, because that’s a primary experiential training component. And yeah.
So, speaking of, we are headed into SVSLP season—Singing Voice for the Speech-Language Pathologist—which is another...
Anna: Experiential course. Yes.
Maurice: Experiential course.
Anna: This leads us perfectly. What a great segue. Thank you, Maurice.
Maurice: What a great segue. How would you describe SVSLP?
Anna: SVSLP is our original brainchild.
Maurice: Yeah.
Anna: And I think—this is, again, the problem, right? With Under More Pressure. There’s just so much. There are always so many things. And y’all—our learners—are out there wanting more. You are thirsty for knowledge, and we would like to give it to you.
And so SVSLP is our attempt, even though in five hours it still could be so much more, because we have an in-depth exploration of power-source-filter, which is where the experiential parts come in.
I’m again leading more explorations—like 20–30 minute explorations at a time in this course—so we can really dive deep and experience those parts of your voice for yourself. This is really great, I think, for folks who are kind of adjacent to music but haven’t done a lot of singing before, to really experience and learn those things as we go.
And then the entire second half of the course, which we added last year—two years ago—gets into more of the application: What do I actually do with this information? How do I work with a voice care team?
That’s when our demonstrations come in. And I know I talk about this all the time, but it is my favorite. I get to teach a voice lesson in the course to one of the attendees. And that, I think, is always valuable for me as a clinician and a teacher—and our learners have said that’s really valuable as well.
Maurice: Yeah, there's so many different parts of the five-hour course that even if there’s a part that feels completely new or maybe even non-relevant to your practice, there are about twenty other parts of the course that feel extremely applicable. It is a meaty bite in terms of continuing education around voice and singing voice.
And Anna and I really—we came up with this, it’s been almost four years. It was 2021, the first time that the course was offered. We offered it in June and it was spread across three Saturdays. We did one Saturday for power, one Saturday for source, and one Saturday for filter. And they were like 90 minutes each, I think. Seventy-five or ninety minutes.
Anna: I think seventy-five, maybe?
Maurice: And we had a ton of turnout and a lot of interest. Folks were still adjusting to this sort of virtual continuing education experience. And we didn’t offer it for CEUs—we were just kind of doing it as a voice-teacher-speech-pathologist combo and pair. What do you remember about that experience, if anything?
Anna: Yeah, that was kind of one of my first times really lecturing, really doing this work in this capacity. Because I had, over COVID, taught some group voice before—which, figuring that out on the fly of like, “Oh yeah, this choir in California is hiring you to teach group voice three months into the pandemic, figure out how you’re going to do that.”
So I had a little bit of experience on, okay, I know what I need to do on my end to help create and facilitate an experience for the people who will be singing along. But really getting into the details and the experience for me of, okay, you are presenting, you are lecturing, was slightly terrifying.
But clearly it was the beginning of something lovely, because now here we are with the whole business where we do this, right? Like this was pre-VoiceProEd. This was just Anna and Maurice being like—I think you were at my house for a voice lesson, and that’s where the idea for this was born, right?
Maurice: Yeah. And now here it is, with all of its complexity and added value. It’s shifted every year that we’ve offered it. And I think we’ve really struck a balance between that didactic portion and its direct application.
Like you mentioned, you’re doing these 20- to 30-minute explorations at a time, and then we’re showing folks what this work looks like with live demonstrations and recorded demos with patients of mine. And so it’s all really—it's meant to be immediately applied.
Attending SVSLP—there’s no sell at the end to now come to “SVSLP Part 2.” Our expectation is that you come to SVSLP and immediately feel like you can do it—that you can jump into this work, that you can come to the course on Sunday, and by Monday you have more tools to approach the work you care about. That’s really kind of a guiding principle in all of our courses: when you come, you leave with something new, and you leave with something you can use.
Anna: I was just wondering—I know that’s been core to our courses—where did that come from? Was there any moment for you where you thought, you know what, this is meaningful to me; this is the kind of content that I want to be producing?
Maurice: Yeah. I think for both of us, SVSLP and VoiceProEd were answering some of the questions we had about clinical practice and about the clients we were seeing and the challenges they were running into.
And it’s not that this information doesn’t exist anywhere else—you and I would admit that we ourselves are products of the continuing education we’ve participated in, right? And the people who have written books.
But the view of clinical practice that we bring is really: How can you experience it for yourself? What are you noticing? What do you hear? What do you feel? What does that mean about function? And how can you help your client also experience that?
So it’s just a unique way of approaching something that I had interacted with before, but I needed it to be more tangible. I needed it to be more applicable—in myself, in my own body, and then in the people that I was working with.
Anna: I feel like most of my continuing education was still very much like, “Take in the information and then figure out how to apply it.” Because I remember when I was out there teaching voice in larger volumes for the first time—where I would see eight clients a day, go teach in the high schools in the suburbs of Houston—and had to figure it out sort of as I went.
Which is great! I mean, doing is the best way that we can learn how to do this. And also, this helps our learners have the tools they need to start doing—so they don’t have to flail as much, right?
It’s like, okay, we have done this, we have seen this. You too can do these things. When you see these things, you can do these things.
So it’s about connecting that gap a little more. Like yes, of course, the best way to become a better voice clinician is to see voice clients in whatever capacity you do—but we’re trying to ease that journey a little bit for you there.
Maurice: For sure. And I think too, some of this is like bridging the gap. You and I have encountered clinicians of all types who feel either overwhelmed by the idea of working with someone who has a history or current pathology.
And I’ve certainly encountered voice clinicians or speech pathologists who do not feel comfortable working with singers—or even working with voice, even if they are speech pathologists—because they feel like the gap between where they are and where the work requires them to be is so great.
I think for us, we say: yeah, there’s a lot of information to know. Yeah, there’s a lot of knowledge. And here are the tools necessary to just dip your toes in. And once your toe is in, go ankle-deep. Once your ankle is in, go knee-deep.
Here’s the scaffolding you can provide yourself with and equip yourself with so that as you get deeper into the water, you feel more confident—confident to do the work.
Anna: Mic drop. That’s great. That’s what SVSLP is about.
Maurice: That’s what SVSLP is about.
Anna: I know we didn’t even say when it was, Maurice.
Maurice: Oh gosh.
Anna: That’s okay, that’s okay. It’ll be everywhere—early in the show notes, all over our socials and website and everything. But it is Sunday...
Maurice: November 9th.
Anna: November 9th. And it’s not—I looked it up—it’s not on clock-change weekend! We usually put it on clock-change weekend, so we’re having to email people and be like, “Make sure you come at the right time.”
At least it’s fall-back, so people would be early. But clocks will have already changed. Hopefully your sleep schedule is fine—for you West Coast people who’ll be joining us at 9 a.m. But it is at noon Eastern on November 9th. I can’t believe it’s almost November.
Maurice: Yeah. And while it is called Singing Voice for the Speech-Language Pathologist, we have tons of non-speech pathologists who have attended. We have voice teachers, voice clinicians, acting teachers, definitely students attending, and just curious learners.
The course is open. It goes into so much of voice science, voice pedagogy, and application that it could be applicable for anyone who even has a background in singing and voice to see how these things are translated into the clinic and the voice studio.
So it certainly would be applicable for anyone who wants to come. And there are discounts for students, members of the TDNC community, and anyone facing financial hardship—you do not have to prove that to us.
Anna: I think it’s especially great for beginning voice teachers who are very familiar with singing—who have been singing all their lives—but have less experience with voice pedagogy.
I think this is a really great initial dive into that voice science and pedagogy, and how they can then take that and, with their knowledge of singing, understand how it feels in their body. This helps them conceptualize: Okay, how do I help my clients do that?
Maurice: Yeah. And while this—if you’ve made it this far into the episode—this wasn’t necessarily going to be an infomercial, we certainly wanted to talk about SVSLP. But I think it does offer some context for why we sometimes do things the way that we do them, right? And what are some of the opportunities that we’re hoping to continue to offer.
So I actually had a question for you. If people listening to this—we’re going to use this as like a time capsule. This is going to be our buried time capsule that we open in a few years.
In your own work—because I don’t want to say that either of us are, you know, taking VoiceProEd to the grave—but in this sort of work of working with clinicians and educating clinicians, what do you see for yourself? What role do you see education playing in the future? What sort of offerings do you want to be a part of?
Anna: Yeah, that's a good question. Like what is the future of Voice ProEd? Like what are we, you know, not necessarily in a year from now, but maybe five years from now—what do clinicians need? What do I think clinicians will need? What work do I want to do? I don't know if I have an answer for that yet. I may have to think about that and get back to y'all in a future episode.
I think I feel pretty good about where we are now, about the experiences that we're creating for learners now. And I feel good about the work that we're doing and also like my personal comfort as a presenter and a clinician and in my own confidence to get out there and be like, hey, this is what I'm doing. This is what actually happens in my voice studio. And that's not a secret and that's not proprietary.
You know, we say that all the time: I’m happy to share this with you because it will help you become a better clinician—just so that you have more information, so that what is going on in voice studios out there, what is going on. When we work with professional voice users, when we work with folks who have voice disorders, I feel good about our level of sharing around that, right? Like, you come observe my studio anytime. Maybe that's something that we offer as far as like, I'll teach a voice lesson and y'all hop on Zoom and hang out and watch, you know? I.
Maurice: I feel that was a motivation too for why we set things the way that we set things—is we had so many mentors and people in our life who talked about the work but never showed the work. And so, as a speech pathologist, it's easy to read about voice disorders, but doing voice therapy is very different from reading about voice therapy. And that's true for singing. That's true for voicing.
I just like hopped on the internet yesterday and was like, thinking and understanding voicing is not a replacement for doing and improving voicing. Those are two very different things. And I feel clinicians have often felt stuck at the, well, I have all this knowledge—how do I apply the knowledge? And so this is really the response and the answer to that in our own lives and the people who are coming to us for help.
I think one thing that's exciting that's around the corner is that we are going to be doing two lectures at ASHA this year, which gives us the opportunity to do this in person. We have given an in-person lecture before at PAVA last year in Houston, but this is a—ASHA is going to be a wildly different experience.
Anna: Yeah, and we just had a little baby presentation. It was only 25 minutes.
Maurice: And it was hard. We didn't even really do all that much with the...
Anna: Well, yeah—25 minutes. This is why we have a five-hour course, right? Twenty-five minutes is so short.
Maurice: You're listening to Yap Sesh because we need room for Yap.
Anna: Right, exactly. Yeah, I am intimidated because this will be the biggest conference I have ever been to. But I'm also excited to see what it's like to do that in the room with people. And hopefully we'll still be able to give some of that experiential—like, I will be able to hear the people, demonstrating, that they won't be on mute on Zoom. So I think that's gonna be a new kind of energizing for me.
Maurice: It's gonna be really fun. And I think if any of you are attending ASHA, you can expect a similar vibe to our courses, but again, just like, different because we're in person, which is going to be fun.
Our first of two lectures is on Thursday, November 20th at 2:30, and it's called Beyond the Binary, How Gender-Affirming Voice Work Enhances Therapy for All Voice Users. So we are super excited about that. And our second lecture is on *Friday at 3 p.m., Singing Principles and Voice Therapy, A Practical Approach for SLPs. So this kind of fits within both of our wheelhouses and things that we care about and things that we want to continue to see advancing in the field and advancing clinician confidence. And so we're excited that both of these things had us up. But obviously this is a really neat experience for both of us.
Anna: Come get a sticker. Come get a sticker. Come get a shiny voice poet sticker. And come meet me, because I feel like, Maurice, you know, you know a lot more of our learners than I do. And I'm excited to meet folks and see familiar faces in the Zoom room when they come back. But I'm also excited to meet more SLPs and venture outside of my immediate voice teacher field land for a little bit.
Maurice: By the way, reading those dates out loud made me like, oh, November 20th.
Anna: We are less than a month away.
Maurice: We are less than a month away.
Anna: That's okay. November is going to be a big month for Voice Pro Ed with SVSLP.
Maurice: And you will never see us until 2027.
Anna: We will go into hibernation after ASHA, because again—did I mention we are tired? Taking breaks is good. We need to have another burnout episode.
Maurice: The burnout bees, the burnout seas. The burnout seas.
Anna: Oh no, we have Under More Pressure, we have The Burnout Seas. The Burnout Seas is actually a pirate episode. So even though we will be hibernating for the rest of 2025, we will be thinking up some new plans.
Maurice: Oh my gosh, I think in December we should do a pod episode from our like comfiest position. Like I'm going to take this microphone and just like curl up in bed. We do a cozy, comfy episode.
Anna: Cozy, comfy holiday holiday special.
Maurice: Oh my God.
Anna: Oh yeah, because this is our first holiday special. The voice for a holiday special. You heard it here first, folks.
Maurice: You heard it here first.
Anna: I was going to say—I was going to turn this back into an infomercial. Okay, so I just—for those of you who aren't going to watch the replay of Under Pressure, this was hilarious because I always do the announcements: make sure your Zoom name matches your ASHA registered name, and if not, e-mail us, all of that stuff.
And Maurice introed me like, “Anna Deemer does the best announcements.” I don't know. I think just lots of practice from when I was like chorus manager of the Houston Symphony Chorus. I'm used to like getting information to the people in a succinct and clear fashion.
Because I was about to say—we might be hibernating, but most of our courses you can access all the way through December 31st, 2025. So if you want to get some last-minute CEs in before the end of the year, we have a bunch of courses up right now. We have like four courses. We do.
Maurice: Yeah, there's four asynchronous and then SVSOP will also be offered through December 31st. So it'll be five. And I think it equals like something like 5 + 1 + 2 + 2... plus one. So like 1.1, 11 hours of CEs are available, which is great. I mean, that's wild. For us, we started off as just, you know, one.
Anna: Right. Or even before we were a CE provider, you know.
Maurice: Yeah.
Anna: Look at how it's exciting.
Maurice: We are excited to let y'all know too—I know it's only October—but we have to put on our planning and thinking hats for Q1. So we're also excited for like what that looks like in the future of the things that you all want to see.
We have people reaching out all the time asking for specific content or courses related to things that are important to them. So if any of you are listening to this and you're like, actually, this would be a great continuing education topic, and it's something that you feel like maybe some of our learners would also want to learn, feel free to reach out to us, please, either at Maurice at VoicePro.com or Anne at VoicePro.com or info at VoicePro.com or our DMs or any way you can get in touch with us. We'd be happy to hear your thoughts. And we look through all the feedback that we get because that's helpful for us too.
Anna: We are chronically online millennials, please.
Maurice: We are chronically online. We want to see. Chronically online, yes. It's a great way of describing that. Do you—are we ready? Are you ready? Is it time?
Anna: Is it time for tool time? We're leaving space for the sound effect. Maurice...
Maurice: What's your tool?
Anna: Oh, you got to it before me.
Maurice: Hey, bro, what's your tool?
Anna: Bro, what's your tool? What is my tool? We've gotten talked all about SVSLP since I last thought about my tool. That's right. I remembered it now. So I might have talked about this before because I love doing it, but maybe for new listeners to the pod, this will be new to them.
I love using tongue twisters as diction warmups. And I also put them to a melody so that we're not only getting the, you know, the acting warmup of it all of like “red leather, yellow leather” kind of thing, but we are putting text with pitch, which—in the scaffolding of like, how do we get from rehabilitation to habilitation to like, we're singing songs now, right?
Sometimes people will do great on just one vowel—maybe one consonant is in there. But when we sing on words, especially as, you know, folks who are English speakers singing in English—and sometimes we sing like we speak, and a lot of the time that is not the sound that we want for singing.
So having something in my exercises that is reflective of, okay, this is like singing an actual song, and here's how we can both warm up our articulators and experience singing words—because it is very different than singing an SOVT or singing on vowels.
So the tongue twister of this week—I try to do like one a week so that I can mix it up for my folks—but this is, I got this from my students at HSPVA in Houston, the performing and visual arts high school: “A proper cup of coffee in a copper coffee cup.”
Maurice: A proper cup of coffee in a copper coffee cup.
Anna: Yes. Excellent. Yeah, I'm glad I didn't mess that up while I was demoing. I was like, oh no.
Maurice: My brain is still like, cup cup, coffee coffee.
Anna: So right, we have the brain of the warm-up too, right? Like warm singing is very mental, very psychological. So this gets you on so many levels.
Maurice: It definitely also takes us to the scaffolding part of complexity, right? That we offer structure and also—singing is complex. Yeah. So we need to take the body and brain there, to that level of complexity. So it's training at that level of complexity, which singing is.
Mine is going to be my tool—while not direct therapy (which, shocker, if any of you have ever talked to me about voice therapy, I'm like, 98% of your sessions need to be direct voice therapy). Use the voice if you want to make the voice better.
And I was reminded a few times over the last few weeks that also helping clients navigate how to make their voice feel better through things like voice hygiene and spending time talking about voice care habits can be really helpful for people.
I'm such like a “we have to use the voice to make the voice better and it has to be active” person, and a few clients have reminded me how important it is to slow down, address the concerns. And so yes, someone may be slightly dysphonic and breathy and strained—and if their primary concern is around dryness and feeling discomfort—while I do think direct therapy can be helpful for relieving some of that, also indirect therapy and figuring out the tools for relieving discomfort and treating symptoms is also impactful and important work.
And they exist in concert, not in isolation. And so I was just reminded that, yeah, it's helpful to address those things—address the needs and the concerns and the symptoms of the client in front of you. That's my tool.
Anna: These are such good tools.
Maurice: Take a beat.
Anna: Take a beat. Take a—get your token.
Maurice: What was the... what was the—a copper cup of coffee and—no, what is it?
Anna: A proper cup of coffee.
Maurice: A proper cup of coffee and a copy... copper coffee cup.
Anna: Copper coffee cup.
Maurice: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Now I want to say “puck”?
Anna: A coffee puck. I guess that’s like when you buy already pre-ground coffee. I don’t know, I don’t drink coffee. This human being does not need to be caffeinated.
Maurice: And to me, I need more. Yeah.
Anna: I feel like that’s in every partnership—there’s one human that cannot have caffeine, and then the other one that needs caffeine so deeply.
Maurice: Yes.
Anna: Anyway, come drink coffee with us as you attend our five-hour flagship course, Singing Voice for the Speech-Language Pathologist (SVSLP). Maurice is smiling at me right now because I’m going into announcement mode. That’s great. That’s great.
So SVSLP is coming up live on Sunday, November 9th at 12 p.m. Eastern Time. We will go for about six hours because we take some breaks in there—because that is a lot of content, a lot of learning.
If you cannot join us live, that is okay! You can still watch the replay through December 31st, 2025 and still earn ASHA CEUs. We have four other courses available asynchronously on our website, voiceproed.com/courses. So if you have missed something from this year, you can catch it before the end of the year.
I think we have put some fantastic stuff out there. I always have a blast when we do courses together, and I am looking forward to the big whammy coming up here in a couple of weeks.
Maurice: The big whammy.
Anna: Well, because, you know, Under Pressure was just an hour. That felt so short, right?
Maurice: It felt so short. And then keep an eye out—in June of 2026, we’re going to be doing the bigger whammy. It’s going to be ten hours.
Anna: Please no! Five hours is hard. That’s my limit. That’s my limit.
Thank you to all of our wonderful listeners. Get in the comments, let us know—let us know what whammy you want coming next. Let us know how you are coping with your stressful fall. Hope you’re getting sleep. If you’re drinking coffee, also hydrate.
Maurice: That’s so silly. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for the laughs. I appreciate it.
Anna: We need—we need more of that. All right, we’ll catch you in the next one. Bye.
Maurice: See you soon. Bye.
