Barbara McAfee, voice coach and author, explores how your voice carries early silence, family secrecy, cultural training, and unrealised gifts in the body, and how working directly with sound can restore range, authority, and emotional truth.
Barbara is a voice coach, author, speaker, and performer, with over 30 years of experience helping people unlock their full voice through practical vocal techniques and tools for authentic, flexible self expression.
In this episode, Lian and Barbara, explore voice as the muscle of the soul, something physical and behavioural that reveals where we have been silenced, where we adapted, and where we still hold unused range - not just vocal but all kinds of aspects of us. Barbara reflects on growing up as a secret keeper, how silence shaped her early sound, and how her voice expanded beyond what she believed possible through the Roy Hart lineage.
Together they consider archetypes as living forces, energies looking for a job, and how older cultures worked with them through ritual, invocation, and sound. They look at the Five Elements as a living map of vocal expression, how earth, fire, water, metal, and air each carry distinct qualities in the body, and how landscape, gender, and class shape which of these we are permitted to use.
Lian offers herself as a live example, including how partial deafness affects volume and self perception, before they experiment with laughter, yawns, and the awkward freedom of taking up more sonic space than feels polite.
Listen if you notice your voice shifting depending on who you are with, like you become softer with authority, sharper with family, or uncertain about how loud you really are, and wonder what your truest, fullest expression might be.
We'd love to know what YOU think about this week's show. Let's carry on the conversation… please leave a comment wherever you are listening or in any of our other spaces to engage.
Why suppressed parts of you often show up as missing range, pitch, or volume in the voice
How landscape, culture, and gender subtly train which vocal qualities feel safe to use
What happens when you treat voice as a set of movable elements rather than a fixed identity
Visit Barbara's Website
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Watch Barbara's TEDx talks:
Listen to Barbara's audiobooks:
Full Voice for Leaders: Cultivating Vitality, Presence, and Impact in a Changing World (soon to be renamed Vocal Intelligence) 2025
Barbara's paperbacks:
Vocal Intelligence: Leading with Vitality, Presence, and Impact (coming in Spring of 2026)
Bandcamp: A catalogue of Barbara's original music
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