Book review: The Voice of Success
 Book author: Joni Wilson
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Australia
In a world full of books on leadership and communications, the voice is an unseen subject; which is why Joni Wilson wrote The Voice of Success. A voice and performance coach for over 18 years, Joni knows how important your voice is and how, as a woman, you can enhance and maximise it.
The focus of this book is on strengthening and maximising the voice, developing different voice personalities, and what women can do to get their voice back after losing it when they need it the most - whether to make a important presentation or to speak at a large conference. Joni’s aim is to get you to understand your voice, how to control it, relax it, make it listenable and maximise it to its full potential.
Towards to beginning of the book, Joni presents her 3-Dimensional Voice profile – how to use your whole body to maximise your voice, instead of relying on your vocal chords - and provides the excercises on how to achieve it. At the start, the tips she dispensed were a bit confusing and unclear (especially as some seemed too simple) but as you continue through the book the vocal excercises seem to be something that could make a big difference.
There is a lot of content in the book, as it covers every facet of the female voice, which is also a problem as it’s not organised in a logical fashion. The flow of the book is interrupted and there are no quick summaries at the end of the sections or chapters to help you better understand her points.
This is definitely not the book for you if you are looking for some helpful tips to help you make the most of your voice, as opposed to a full discussion on all aspects of the voice.
And if you are after a few helpful tips, the best thing to do is to jump to the last chapter and go through the excercises listed there, reading back to the chapters when referenced.
As it’s such an untouched subject (and I am no expert on it), I was a bit sceptical of the book at first, especially when she mentioned that you could change your voice -until I realised that she was referring to changing the characteristics of your voice.
This was a big negative as it was confusing as it wasn’t clear as to whether you were changing your voice or just changing your voice characteristics. This is because throughout the book Joni uses ‘voice’ - the shorthand of the industry - when she is actually referring to the characteristics of the voice. This leads to mass confusion as changing the voice to me means changing it to sound like someone else’s, whereas changing the characteristics of the voice to me is changing it from say firm to soft, nasal to warm, authoritative to bubbly.
I must say I did try out some of the excercises (especially those relating to jaw problems as I know I have a tendency to grind my teeth) and found that there were things I didn’t realise I was doing that would impact my voice!
But on the other hand, the difficulty I had with this book is that I’d be concerned that the excercises could be misinterpreted, leading to potential vocal damage.
If you are seriously interested in the subject of the female voice, The Voice of Success is an interesting in-depth read into how we power our voices and how the vocal chords work.
Our rating: 5/10
By Alyssa McLash, Co-editor, Women & Leadership Australia eNewsletter
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