What is musicality?
It’s not vocal variety. It’s not the pace of your speech nor the tone of your voice. These are consequences of musicality, but they are not the root.
The root of musicality lies deeper. It’s easy to miss and hard to imitate. You can only discover it for yourself. But when you do find it, something magical happens: you experience the very essence of being alive.
Musicality is a contrast of feelings.
Think about music for a second. There are slow parts and fast parts; quiet parts and loud parts. There’s contrast. Ups and downs. Shifts and swings.
Contrast is what makes great stories. There’s variety. There’s complexity. There’s conflict. Characters laugh, cry, scream — and we can’t help but feel the realness in their emotion.
That’s because emotions are naturally relatable. We all cried as babies. We all had embarrassing days at school. Friendships came and went. Love visited and heartbreak followed. At times we hated our life. Other times we felt lucky to be alive.
We may not always feel the same things. But all of us feel something. Feeling is at the heart of human connection. But when it comes to speaking, sometimes, that connection is broken. Why? Because the feeling is nowhere to be found.
Why do so many people speak without feeling?
Human beings are creatures of feeling, but they don’t always show it while speaking. Why? Maybe they don’t care cre about what they’re saying. Or maybe they do care, but they’re scared of showing it.
That’s valid. When you allow emotion to take over, you may lose control. And sometimes that can be costly. Maybe one time you went too far and said something you didn’t mean. Maybe it blew up in your face and left you feeling exposed, embarrassed, or ashamed of yourself.
As a result, you may have subconsciously started to control things more — to the point where you decided to play it safer in speaking. And in doing so, you may have accidentally narrowed your range, constrained your expression and reduced your speaking to a fraction of its potential.
So how do you reverse the process?
How do you regain your speaking potential without exposing yourself to unnecessary risk? You practice expressing your emotions in a safe space. That way, when you’re under pressure, you’re not experiencing a flood of emotion for the first time. You’ve learned to ride it, re-direct it, and harness it to your advantage.
This is what Ultraspeaking is about. You train letting go. You notice when you’ve gone too far. You practice reigning back in. You feel silly, awkward, and (maybe even) uncomfortable — until one time it finally clicks and you discover that perfect harmony between being in your head and being in the moment.
That’s mastery. The ability to surf between thinking and feeling. The ability to stay in complete control while entirely letting go. When you experience it, you feel alive, at ease, and inflow. You perform at your best, and you don’t even know how you did it.
| “Artistic creation, sports, dance, teaching, counseling — mastery in any field of endeavor implies the thinking mind is either no longer involved at all or at least is taking second place. A power and intelligence greater than you and yet one with you in essence takes over. There is no decision-making process anymore.” – Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks |
Ultraspeaking exists to give you the space to explore greater self-expression. Your coaches support you. Your classmates want you to succeed. Everyone here is rooting for you.
So, don’t hold back. Experiment. Try. Go beyond comfort. Feel around the edges of awkwardness. Learn something new about yourself. I don’t know what you’ll discover, but in all my experience so far, the one thing I can say with certainty is this: the more you let go, the easier speaking becomes.