Breathing for Confidence:
Your Voice, Your Superpower
By Angelina Kalahari
Start breathing optimally today for better health, great voice production and amazing confidence.
With over 35 years teaching, singing, acting, and directing experience and having been recognised by Queen Elizabeth II for her contribution to music, Angelina Kalahari is proud to present the first book in her fabulous new series — Your Voice, Your Superpower.
In Angelina's vast experience, she has found that stories are the best ways to learn and more importantly remember what we have learned. Angelina has chosen to use the story of an imaginary voice student, Jake Tyler, to illustrate how important breathing is to improve your health, voice production and self-esteem.
So, what are you waiting for? Let Angelina show you how to breathe optimally in a way that supports not only your voice for speaking or singing but also your physical, mental and emotional well-being.
“Our lives begin and end with the breath.”
But do we breathe correctly? Are we using our lungs the way they were meant to be used? And how does the way we breathe affect our voice, our confidence and our overall health? All these questions and more are answered in Breathing for Confidence: Your Voice, Your Superpower by Angelina Kalahari.
With over 35 years of experience in teaching, singing, acting, and directing, and having been recognised by the Queen for her contribution to music, Angelina Kalahari is widely respected within the industry. Breathing for Confidence: Your Voice, Your Superpower is Kalahar’s first book in what promises to be a very informative and practical series about the voice.
Kalahar has taken a novel approach to this course. Breathing for Confidence: Your Voice, Your Superpower does not read like the average self-help book. Instead, it reads like a story. We glimpse into the life of the fictional character, Jake Tyler. Jake is an understudy for the West End award-winning show, Wicked, but his dream is to make it big as an international singer. But when an opportunity comes to audition for the hit television show, The Singer, which could launch Jake’s career, his nerves and his voice failed him. In desperation, Jake reaches out to a close friend who advises him to make an appointment with the experienced voice teacher, Ann. We then follow Jake’s journey as he learns from Ann and implements her teachings. I thought this was a very unusual approach for a book such as this, but it was one that worked very well indeed.
In detail, but through the narrative of the story, Kalahar describes practical ways of controlling your breathing as well as breathing the way nature intended us to. Kalahar starts by explaining how to achieve the correct posture and then goes onto diaphragmatic breathing. Diaphragmatic breathing is something I am familiar with, but I have to admit, it is something I have always found very difficult to grasp — habits once learned, it seems, can be tough to break. I thought Kalahar’s approach to this subject was not only unique in the telling but also one that was very easy to understand. This is no dry textbook. Kalahar’s protagonist, Jake, asks the questions that I would have asked if this were a face to face lesson, and his understanding and his recognition of the difference that these techniques made, not only to his voice but also to his confidence, gave me the courage to have a go myself. Thanks to Kalahar, I found myself standing in front of a mirror trying to correct my posture, and then trying some of the very straightforward exercises to help with achieving that essential diaphragmatic breathing technique.
After each chapter, Kalahar goes over the key points and breaks down the lessons in easy-to-follow bullet points, which reiterated what she had already said in the story. This repetition really helped me to grasp the exercises. It is also useful for a quick recap when needed.
With simple exercises that the fictional singing teacher, Ann, teaches Jake, the reader can gain an intimate knowledge of the right and wrong way to breathe for the optimal capacity of the lungs. This book is the next best thing to having a private lesson with Ms Kalahar. Breathing for Confidence: Your Voice, Your Superpower is a book that should be on the shelf of anyone serious about wanting to enhance their voice through training, and it is an absolute must for those interested in pursuing a singing or acting career.
I Highly Recommend.
Review by Mary Anne Yarde.
The Coffee Pot Book Club.
Pick up your copy of
Breathing for Confidence:
Your Voice, Your Superpower
Angelina Kalahari
Angelina Kalahari has worked for over thirty-five years as a professional actress, stage director and operatic soprano, performing around the world. She appeared on many diverse platforms, such as opening the busking scheme on London Underground to a recital at the Royal Opera House and everything in between.
She holds degrees in drama and opera and in 2005 she received recognition for her contribution to the music, culture and economy of the UK from Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.
Angelina has always regarded herself as a storyteller, either through music or through acting and directing. She honed her storytelling skills from a young age, writing and telling stories to her siblings at bedtime. It became a habit through the years and a solace while travelling for singing.
Born in Namibia, and having lived all over the world, she currently lives in London, UK, with her husband, her fur cat daughter, a rapidly diminishing population of house spiders and a smallish herd of dust bunnies.
She writes non-fiction books on the voice, her specialism and obsession for over thirty-five years, contemporary romance to explore love, women's fiction to understand love and middle-grade novels to give love. What more is there than love?
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