Nicki Kennedy Voicecast: Conversations around voice, stories, sound and identity
How does voice shape who we are and how we’re heard?
In this podcast, executive coach, voice coach and classical singer Nicki Kennedy explores the power of voice in all its dimensions: spoken and sung, personal and professional, fragile and fierce. With guests ranging from artists to business leaders and politicians, survivors to advocates, each conversation uncovers the ways voice carries our identity, our stories, and our place in the world.
Blending science, psychology, and the arts, this is a space for listening deeply, questioning assumptions, and rediscovering the human voice, and what it means to have a voice that counts in the world.
Nicki Kennedy Voicecast: Conversations around voice, stories, sound and identity
The Complex Tapestry of Voice: More Than Just Sound
What does it really mean to have a voice? In this short, introductory premiere episode, I introduce Voicecast—a podcast born from years of working with voice in its many forms. I also introduce my very first guest who will appear in the next episode.
As an executive coach, I help people find authentic expression and hone their listening to others in the workplaces where they spend so much of their lives.
As a classical singer and vocal rehabilitation specialist, I've witnessed first hand how vocal challenges often reveal complex stories beyond mere physical symptoms.
Voice connects to everything—our identity, our relationships, how we listen and how we are heard, whether in board meetings or family gatherings. I share how our vocal development is shaped by our upbringing, family background and most of all our confidence. Our early experiences profoundly influence how we express ourselves throughout life. Finding our own voice matters deeply, but I am just as interested in the power of listening, truly listening, to make sure that everybody can find the space for their voice to land.
The episode offers a glimpse into upcoming conversations, beginning with former prison governor Susie Richardson. After experiencing nerve damage affecting her own voice, Susie brings unique insight to her advocacy work for those without a voice—people who've experienced the care system, addiction, or interrupted childhoods. Her story exemplifies how voice transcends physical sound to become presence, identity, and the power to create change.
Whether you're working on leadership skills, wanting to speak with more confidence at work, recovering from a vocal setback, or wanting to move through the world with more presence and confidence, Voicecast invites you to explore what having a voice really means.
Vocal Health Disclaimer: I am trained and qualified in vocal rehabilitation for professional voice-users, or people who need to enhance their speaking or singing capabilities, helping them to use their voice more efficiently after injury or vocal compromise. I have a clear scope of practice. I am not a clinical practitioner, and I am not a speech and language pathologist or therapist. I work offering further support to individuals who have already had diagnosis and input from clinicians, or who are waiting for that support, helping them to use their voice well, and encouraging and educating them about good vocal health and hygiene. Most of all I listen and hold a space for the whole picture of the person in front of me, so that they really feel heard and understood, and can move forwards.
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This is VoiceCast, with Nikki Kennedy, exploring voice in every sense the sound you make, the story you tell and the presence you bring. I'm Nikki Kennedy, your host, a classical singer, vocal health and rehabilitation specialist and an executive coach, and my work is about helping people transform, find new directions, get unstuck and express themselves in ways that feel authentic and true. Together we'll look at how your voice and your presence can shape change in work, in life and in yourself. A warm, warm welcome to VoiceCast. And this is the very first introductory episode of a podcast. That's been quite a while in my thinking.
Speaker 1:I work with voice in so many different ways and all of the different strands of the work I do seem to kind of play in and out of each other. They inform each other, but it's almost always about voice and communication. It's a wonderful thing to start a podcast. There are challenges. I have had difficulties with some of the equipment and the technical stuff and I'm hoping that my listeners will bear with me in these first couple of episodes as I sort through all of the various different aspects of doing a podcast from home and working out how to edit and get the sound right. So please bear with me. I also you'll hear a little kind of tapping sound in the background. You can't predict these things. That's a pigeon on the conservatory roof and it's been there for a while and I've given up waiting for it to go away. So if you can hear the tap, tap, tap of footsteps on the roof, that is a pigeon. So welcome to the pigeon.
Speaker 1:I guess this question of voice let's just look at it. I'm working a lot with people who've got vocal injury. That might be from an event or a series of events, but more often than not, when people are struggling with the function of their voice and the efficiency of their voice, there's a much bigger picture at play. There's a really complex story, a tapestry of different things that can play into it. There might be on the surface, a virus or some allergies or a little bit of reflux or something that was affecting the voice. But when we really give a bit of space for that story to come out, often more pennies start to drop about, I don't know, hormones, stress and anxiety and events that we didn't really think about at the time, vocal load generally in life. So lots and lots of different things complain to the voice.
Speaker 1:I also work as an executive coach and that might seem quite different work, but actually that's really where I've come to this podcast from, because ultimately, that seems to me. The work seems to me also about having a voice, about how you use your voice, how you turn up in a workplace and use your voice so that you can really thrive in that environment. Because we spend so much time at work in that environment, because we spend so much time at work and I believe we have the right to thrive and to be happy in that space, just as we do at home and with our families. More often than not, when I'm working with people in a business or executive context, the challenges are either around relationships between people in a team or a department or a corporation, kind of cultural questions or they're around confidence or knowing exactly where you want to go. Next sort of solving the problem of direction, of intention, of really where you want to go with your work, professional life. So they can be quite big questions. Or sometimes it's just simply I need to prepare a meeting and I need to think through it. But often there are deeper, underlying questions that people want to ask of themselves what are my values, what's my purpose? How is that aligning with how I'm actually turning up in my work now. Is that making me happy? Is that making me happy? Do I have a voice where I work? Do I listen to the voices of others?
Speaker 1:And so part of this podcast series will be a lot about listening as much about voice. Because, as I was speaking to my friend Jennifer Williams yesterday, we had a lovely long chat and she referenced somebody on the radio who had commented that we have two ears and one mouth. Let's use them in that proportion. So quite a lot of the conversations we have are going to be about listening so that people can be heard, so that other people have a voice. It's not just about our own voice going out into the world. It's about hearing the voices of others world. It's about hearing the voices of others. Sometimes hearing the voices of others needs a little bit of bravery actually, because sometimes we might be receiving feedback that we're not sure we want to hear.
Speaker 1:The question of having your own voice what might be holding somebody back from really turning up, even in just simply in a meeting? I talk to people in businesses who struggle really to land their point in a board meeting. They get anxious and nervous about small space speaking, and then others who are wanting to hone their public speaking skills, and we all know that for a lot of people that's something which comes with a degree of dread people that's something which comes with a degree of dread. So working with all of those aspects of voice is what really fires me up. And over the last few years what I've come to understand is that the picture of a voice is complex. It's around identity. It's around bigger stories the size of the family we grew up in, if we were in a large family all competing to be heard, or whether we were a little bit more alone and the only child in a family. What that brings in your development as a person, whether you've had to fight to be heard, whether you have perhaps chosen not to be heard. I've worked with a lot of people who come from all kinds of different family backgrounds, but that nearly always plays into our voice and how it develops and shows up later on in life.
Speaker 1:I've got a lot of really fascinating guests lined up to come and speak to you. My first conversation happened yesterday, so the next episode will be that conversation, which was with Susie Richardson. Susie was prison governor and a deputy prison governor in the UK and in Jersey for 17 years, I think, and 20 years or so in the prison service 17 years, I think, and 20 years or so in the prison service. So she is somebody who has advocated for people who don't have a voice for a very long time. She left the prison service in Jersey and then went to work as the chief executive officer for Jersey Cares, which is an organization which is all about advocating for people who have experienced the care system and who need help with getting their voice out abuse of addiction, of a childhood that has been interrupted and has not been as loving and as safe as it ought to be and Susie speaks incredibly articulately about her work advocating for others. We cover a great number of topics, but the reason why Susie was my very first choice of guest was actually because we worked together in a context of the physical voice.
Speaker 1:Susie had some nerve damage after an operation and it affected her voice. It's a little unclear exactly how, whether this is nerve damage, a paralysis of a vocal fold but one way or another, susie's voice has been compromised and remains compromised. She struggles with stamina and she finds that the quality of her voice has been affected. And this is a woman who is incredibly articulate, incredibly bold, incredibly strong and capable, and her insights from around what it means to lose that voice, that presence, and to have to redefine what that presence is, is a really interesting conversation, and especially in light of how that informs her advocacy work. So it's a fascinating conversation. We touch on a lot of different things, from organisational culture right the way through to her own experiences and to the business of listening and hearing people and giving them a voice in this world. You've been listening to VoiceCast with Nicky Kennedy. For me, voice has always been more than just sound. Thank you that your voice finds the space it needs to be really heard.