Anna: Welcome to Yap Sesh. We're your hosts. I'm Anna Diemer.

Maurice: And I'm Maurice Goodwin.

Anna: And unbeknownst to each other, we both got haircuts right before this recording session.

Maurice: We are coming in fresh. I don’t know if our voices sound a little fresher too, but…

Anna: You know, it upgrades the whole persona, right?

Maurice: Ha ha ha ha ha.

Anna: The crisp fade here.

Maurice: I know, I know. My voice sounds better when I have a haircut. Actually, yeah, this is great. I sound clearer, more resonant.

Anna: It's the holistic approach to the voice.

Maurice: Biopsychosocial includes a haircut. Yeah.

Anna: Includes a haircut. Well, anyway—thank you for tuning in, y’all. We are excited because we are back from the summer, back at it, with our first course of the fall. All released and ready to sign up. We’ll be putting on Building Balance: Addressing Vocal Fold Lesions in Singers on Saturday, September 20th at noon Eastern. Whatever the exact time zone—Standard, Daylight—noon Eastern.

Maurice: It’s one of those. If you’re on the East Coast, we’ll see you at noon.

Anna: If you're on the West Coast, we’ll see you at 9:00 AM.

Maurice: This is a two-hour case-based learning experience. We always describe these courses as “strap in and get ready to go.” We definitely understand the value of your time and resources in attending a VoiceProEd course. We want to make sure these courses are packed with things you can apply immediately to your work. That’s always been a goal of ours—if you come to a course on a Saturday, by Monday morning you have things you can use in your practice. And this course is certainly that type.

Anna: Yeah, we have laryngeal exams, case studies, exercises you can take straight into your practice. Plus, the replay is available for one year.

Maurice: Yeah.

Anna: So if you can’t make it on the 20th, that’s OK—it’s available. And this time, we’ve done this course before, but it’s the first time we’re offering ASHA CEUs. So if you took it before and want a refresher while earning CEUs, you can do that now.

Maurice: We had a great question recently: how do you know if you’re ready for a course like this? Is it beginner-level, or advanced? I’d say it straddles the line between beginner and intermediate. We want to respect you as a clinician—maybe you don’t see voice all the time, but you have some exposure. All the resources we cover are ones you can revisit, and Anna and I are available if you have additional questions during or after the course. So yeah—beginner to intermediate, and we think you’ll gain a lot.

Anna: And we love our Q&A sections. We always get the best questions. Ultimately, we’re here to help you and spread knowledge. So come live and ask questions. If you can’t make it live, slide into our DMs—we’ll happily address it for you in the replay. We hope to see as many of you as possible live on Saturday, September 20th at noon Eastern. You can register at voiceproed.com/course.

Maurice: Cool. We’ll see you there. One thing I’ve been thinking about—especially with case-based courses—is when you’re in front of a client, evaluating them, looking at their history… how do you know what to do, where to go next?

Maurice: That’s a question we get a lot, especially in Q&As. How do I know what exercise to pick? Straw phonation or lip trills? S-to-Z or resonant voice? Rest or more activity? A term that feels helpful is clinical instinct. What is your clinical instinct telling you in that moment? I thought it would be helpful for us to talk about what it’s been like developing our clinical instincts, and how they’ve changed over time. So Anna—if you had to describe a clinical instinct in voice, how would you describe it?

Anna: Yeah, that’s such a good term. Clinical instinct. What comes to mind immediately is my first forays into teaching voice—having that feeling of, “OK, what do I do now? The person is in front of me, what do I do?” I don’t experience that anymore. Looking back over the past decade, I can see this is something I’ve developed, and it’s nice to have a term for it.

Maurice: Mm-hmm.

Anna: I feel more confident addressing what’s happening in the studio, and if I don’t know, I’m confident I can research and find what I need. Confidence is part of it—being OK with that liminal space of having a large body of knowledge but also knowing there’s more out there I don’t yet know, and being able to exist between those. So I’d say my first clinical instinct is developing my own personal body of knowledge.

Maurice: Yeah.

Anna: To draw from.

Maurice: That makes a lot of sense. I was thinking about this earlier in the week while preparing for another lecture. If I’m in the kitchen—I feel comfortable cooking. I like cooking. I feel comfortable working off a recipe and playing around with flavors. What I haven’t fully developed is what to do when something goes wrong. If it’s too salty or sour, or the edges are burning but the middle’s undercooked—someone with more experience has a natural instinct because of their knowledge base. They can pivot quickly, while I might need to spend a few minutes Googling so I don’t ruin dinner.

Maurice: I was thinking about that in terms of the studio. Early in my career, if someone presented with something I didn’t know, it took me time to figure it out. Now my instinct kicks in: “You’ve seen this before—do this.” My instinct is grounded in my experiences and knowledge.

Anna: Yeah, but I think you make another good point—another clinical instinct is problem-solving when something goes wrong. Maybe you’re trying something in the studio, or in the kitchen. I also love cooking, so that’s a great metaphor. My brain is right there with you.

Maurice: Mm-hmm.

Anna: Because you’re right—that’s another level of knowledge. The ability to address things in real time, to react and say—

Maurice: Yeah.

Anna: I feel like I’ve said this a million times on the podcast, and I’ll say it a million more, but I am so quick to ditch an exercise if it’s not working. I’ll say, “Forget the last two minutes of your life—we’re trying something else,” because that’s not moving us where we want to go. That doesn’t feel like the right effort level. So having that instinct to pivot, instead of pushing through something that isn’t the right tool for the moment, is huge.

Maurice: Mm-hmm.

Anna: And doing that with as little frantic Googling as possible—that’s another instinct for sure.

Maurice: Yeah. One thing I think about a lot is that many of our learners aren’t necessarily early-career clinicians, but they may be new to voice, especially working with singers and professional voice users. And the truth is, this step—developing clinical instinct—is not one you can skip. You can’t just decide you want to be competent and confident with all types of voices without going through that awkward phase of figuring it out. Sometimes you’re not sure whether your “clinical gut” is right—whether pivoting or changing an exercise is the right move. And the only way to develop that instinct is by making decisions, sometimes getting it wrong, and learning from that.

Anna: Yeah, absolutely. That makes me think—how do you actually develop these instincts? Is it just a matter of how many things you put yourself in front of? When you make the wrong calls, you learn from them. When you do the things that work, that’s equally valuable knowledge. So is it just a time and experience thing?

Maurice: Yeah.

Anna: It might be.

Maurice: Yeah, yeah.

Anna: Umm…

Maurice: As we pause and think about our own responses—yeah. For me, time seems like such an important variable, along with exposure: the number of cases and people you see. But I’ve also really come to appreciate that time is a variable we can’t control, and yet it’s essential. We don’t have to look far—these are the same principles we apply with our voice clients. If we think about learning, whether motor learning or otherwise, it takes time, exposure, and practice. Our brains need reps just like muscles do. And again, there’s a time component we simply can’t skip.

Anna: Right. I’m thinking back to my first client with a vocal fold polyp. That was my first-ever case like that, and I had to figure out what to do. Now, I have the confidence that no matter what’s going on with a client, I can help guide them in the direction they want to go. And maybe here’s another clinical instinct: knowing when to refer out. If something is beyond my skills or knowledge, I need to recognize that.

Anna: I had someone come into the studio recently, and we made some sounds. I told them, “If I’m not the right person for this, I’ll help you find the person you need.” Sometimes that means getting them in with an SLP, or even sending them to an ENT for a scope. Knowing where my expertise begins and ends—that’s another instinct.

Maurice: Yeah. That happened to me recently. I was working with a singer who reached out for an initial session. I met with them as a voice teacher, but very quickly I was wearing my speech-pathologist hat because what I was hearing lined up with things I’d seen clinically. In that moment, I had to trust my instinct: maybe this is just muscle function we can work through, but maybe it needs an ENT evaluation. Having the instinct to pause, dig, and problem-solve together was important. I think we made the right call, but that’s another instinct you develop.

Maurice: When did you feel like you became comfortable and confident with your clinical instincts—your clinical gut?

Anna: Oh, I think fairly recently, in the past few years. To put it into perspective, I’ve been teaching for about a decade and opened Diemer Voice Studio in early 2018. So, seven years in business now—which they say is the milestone where if you make it that far, you’re solid. For me, maybe it took five full years of seeing 20 or so clients a week to really feel like I had that confidence.

Maurice: Yes.

Anna: Which is not an insignificant amount of time. It’s not that I wasn’t confident before, but I’ve always been “fast and loose” in the sense of, we’re discovering your voice together. I don’t know your voice yet, so I’ve always felt like I’m in an ongoing learning process. I don’t feel not confident—but I also never feel cocky.

Maurice: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anna: So that’s kind of hard to pinpoint—like, when did it turn into “anybody can get in the studio and I’ll at least know whether I can help you or whether we need to go somewhere else”? That’s maybe been in the past couple of years.

Maurice: Yeah. Yeah, I would absolutely agree. I’ve been a speech pathologist now for eight years, and I’d say around year 4 or 5 was when I was like, “OK, OK, I can do this.” I had seen thousands of clients in that time, and it took until about year 5 before I felt like I could really settle in it. Now, being in year 9, I feel like I can rock and roll most of the time. Because this is something that’s constantly developing, constantly growing, constantly strengthening.

Anna: And I think that probably sounds scary—like, “Wow, it takes that long?” But I actually think that’s encouraging, because we get the question all the time: “I’m starting out, I feel so unconfident, when will that change?” And the answer is—if you keep learning, if you keep exploring with your clients and with the body of knowledge—it just takes time. You’ll get there.

Maurice: Yeah. And I also want to say, encouragingly, that in those first five years I didn’t think I was doing the wrong thing. I didn’t think my clinical work was inaccurate or unhelpful. It just meant that now I spend way less brain energy figuring out what’s next. When something unexpected happens, I know how to pivot. I can listen to a client’s history and the important things stand out right away. If someone’s having symptoms in one area, I know another area likely isn’t related, just from experience. It helps me get to the thing faster. Years ago, I might have made the same decisions—I just didn’t know they were the most efficient or accurate ones.

Anna: Yes. And when someone is in the studio and we’re in the middle of exercises, maybe this is the opposite of that—I don’t necessarily feel pressured to figure it out quickly. I like to take a moment and think about what the right tool is. I’ll even make a GPS joke and say, “Recalculating…”

Maurice: Ha.

Anna: …while I’m coming up with an exercise. And having that comfort—sitting in that moment without pressure—while the client waits, trusting that if I take a few moments to run through the possibilities, we’ll land on something that’s a better fit.

Maurice: Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure. I have one or two ideas in my head, but do you have tips or tools you think would help an early clinician grow their instincts?

Anna: Yeah. Listening as much as you can. Especially if you’re not as familiar with singing voice but want to work in it—listen to singers. Professional singers, yes, but also so-and-so’s junior recital on YouTube. In my pedagogy class in grad school, we listened to like 50 different recordings of Sebben Crudele. I’ve mentioned this before—I can’t hear that piece anymore. But that kind of listening—what do I hear in these voices? What might I address? That’s such an important instinct to develop.

Maurice: Mm-hmm.

Anna: And while you don’t have the client’s goals in those situations, just training your ear is valuable.

Maurice: Yeah. One thing I did a lot early on was active reflection. Asking myself: why did I make that decision? Sometimes the answer was clear—like switching from straw phonation to an /ŋ/ because straw phonation had too much airflow, and /ŋ/ narrowed the pharynx. Other times it was like, “I don’t know, I just felt like we needed to change.” And that’s actually OK. Something in your brain says, “Pivot,” and even if you don’t know why, you pivot. You figure out the why later.

Maurice: Mistakes are helpful too. I’ve definitely made mistakes—going too far, being too unstructured, not direct enough. But recognizing those moments, and even getting feedback that it wasn’t helpful, further develops instinct.

Anna: Yes. Related to that—taking good notes. If you have to document for work, that’s one thing (check out our course Voice Notes at voiceproed.com/courses). But even when I don’t owe documentation to anyone, I take robust notes. Being neurodivergent, it helps me remember. I usually see clients every other week, so I need those notes. But also, it lets me look back: “OK, this worked, that didn’t.” It’s a record I can reflect on.

Maurice: Yeah, for sure. Splitting my time now between SLP work and private practice, my own documentation is one of the most helpful reflections. I explicitly write down what didn’t work—“voice wasn’t clearer, didn’t get the desired outcome.” It keeps it fresh in my brain. Sometimes I’d even do this in front of the client—pull out paper, map things out, draw connections. Sometimes that process alone helped us advance the goal.

Anna: I love doing that too—at the end of a lesson I’ll ask, “What do you think I should put in my notes?” Because their reflections are just as important as ours.

Maurice: Yeah. That’s such a good question. Such a good question. Congratulations.

Anna: Thanks.

Maurice: Great question.

Anna: You’re welcome, listeners.

Maurice: Take it. It’s yours.

Anna: It’s yours. Well, speaking of questions and tools we’re using in the studio—do you think it’s tool time?

Maurice: Tool time, please.

Anna: I’ll go first. I’m pretty sure this is a Nick Perna special—the first time I did this was with him. It’s a tongue and diction exercise: delicata, gallocanta, delicata glycated, Klickitat glycated click.

Maurice: Ah!

Anna: I’ve been using that in my studio—Maurice’s jaw is dropping right now, y’all. The tongue is so busy: mid to back for the G, forward for the L, K same as G, then forward again for the T. Rocking back and forth. Especially with classical clients, it sharpens the diction on the K and T, but even beyond that, it’s just a great tongue twister and warm-up. I think I did it with almost all of my clients this week—with varying success and struggle (in a good way).

Maurice: Uh-huh.

Anna: It really isolates tongue movement, puts it to work. That’s my tongue exercise du jour.

Maurice: Tool of the week! Yeah. As you were talking I was like, man, I should have a cooler tool.

Anna: Even the unsexy tools are still helpful.

Maurice: True. One thing I’ve been seeing a lot in tenor and baritone voices is a disconnection from higher extended range and falsetto/head voice. I like to use octave exercises. Sometimes connecting them is hard, so we start with them disconnected—lip trills, straws, whatever. Then we connect top to bottom, bottom to top, and tie it all together. Sometimes that hierarchy helps people figure out where things aren’t connecting.

Maurice: For me, as a teacher who does voice exercises all day, it’s easy to make them sound easy. But for students, they’re weird and foreign. Breaking them down into bite-sized pieces makes them more accessible.

Anna: Yes, because singing can be such a complex coordination.

Maurice: Exactly. And sometimes, if an exercise is just not working, we abandon it. But other times, based on my experience, I’ll say, “Stick with this—it’s going to help.” It can take a second, but it’s worth it. Then they build that coordination, and suddenly we have more flexibility to do other things.

Anna: That’s fantastic.

Maurice: Yeah. Being in private practice now, functioning both as a speech pathologist and a voice teacher, it’s so interesting the types of clients that find you.

Anna: Yeah.

Maurice: I’d say I see two or three main types of clients, and it’s been really interesting—they just happen to be the ones I enjoy working with.

Anna: Maybe next episode…

Maurice: We could do this.

Anna: We could, because I know we’re wrapping up this one.

Maurice: I know, I know, I know. But it is interesting. So thank you again for joining us today. Our next VoiceProEd course is Building Balance: Addressing Vocal Fold Lesions in Singers on Saturday, September 20th. If you’re on the East Coast, it’s at noon.

Anna: You can register now at voiceproed.com/courses. If you have questions or want us to yap about something in particular this season, email us at info@voiceproed.com or slide into our DMs. We’re here for you. We can’t wait to learn with you on September 20th—and maybe in two weeks we’ll come back with a fun private practice episode.

Maurice: Fun private practice episode. We’ll see you soon.