How do we make people respond to our bidding? How do we sell the customer a product or get the investor to back our concept?

How do we make them listen and respond as we want?

Let’s hear how Samuel Coleridge told it back in 1798.

It is an ancient Mariner,

And he stoppeth one of three.

By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

The bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,

And I am next of kin;

The guests are met, the feast is set:

Mayst hear the merry din.’

He holds him with his skinny hand,

“There was a ship,” quoth he.

Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’

Eftsoons his hand dropped he.

He holds him with his glittering eye –

The Wedding-Guest stood still,

And listens like a three years’ child:

The Mariner hath his will.

ST Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798.

He only utters four words and the Wedding Guest is hooked.

“There was a ship…” Why is he hooked? Because the Mariner’s look and voice ring with authenticity. He has lived his story and the listener sees it and hears it.

For women, though, we live in a world where the male voice is the voice of authority – even of authenticity. From Maggie Thatcher to Julia Gillard what we hear is a conflicted voice trying to create for itself a self-conscious, ‘image’.

As  Dr Louise Mahler, puts it…

“Many of us are hindered by the psychic-vocal-prison of our culture, and further restricted by the solitary-vocal-confinement of our organizational and social contexts, in which vocal discovery is antithetical to dominant visual, patriarchal and linear thinking. This reinforces poor habitual patterns and works against coherence…” Ph D. abstract.

It was in working with Louise – and Speech Pathologist, Jocelyn Priestley – that I finally freed my true, inner voice: my female voice. I discovered that voice comes not just from the throat and tongue but from the whole body and mind together. We speak from our hips as much as from our lips!  Don’t believe me? Go Youtube Elvis.  In this clip Ann Margaret also shows how a woman can free her voice and her body.

Watch how Doris Day spreads her legs as she hits ‘Now I shout it from the highest hill!’ in ‘Secret Love’…standing, or on her horse. A human being is also a sexual being.

But as I worked with Louise in other settings I began to realise that once we had mastered Voice we needed something to say. A voice is not just breath, it is also words. Who writes our scripts for us? Are they written by men?

“Red River” is a great movie about the relationships between men. But when the unfortunate Coleen Grey or Joanne Dru have to speak their lines…they’re in trouble! Either breathing sweet, powerless sexiness or sounding out short, sharp, angry sentences before slapping Montgomery Clift’s face. Compare their lines with John Wayne’s homespun oratory. He doesn’t need to slap anyone around to get his way.

It’s time now for women to get out of the saloon and lead the cattle drive and we need to do it with the authority of our own, female voices. The way it sounds and the ideas it expresses need to be as one. Joan Crawford almost got it right in ‘Johnny Guitar’, but the male scriptwriter wouldn’t let her stand alone. There are two conflicts in this scene: Joan v. Sterling, and the scriptwriter’s need to hold her back and not let her power run its true course.

The way we express our ideas through how we marshal our words is the content shaped within the form of voice. It is the wine in the bottle of voice. It is the actress and the script.

Louise opened up my voice. But the marshaling of words is what I’d been doing for fifty years. Getting the right words in the right order to create the best effect. In short stories, journalism, novels, screenplays and – above all else – in ‘Pitches’. Those terrifying moments when we have five minutes in which to secure a big development deal…or fail. To get the cowgirls to commit to the drive, or go it alone…and be stampeded by the herd.

Seeing that – and knowing the synergy that flickered between us when we worked together -  I knew what Louise and I together could offer to other women.

Thus were born, THE BITCH PITCH SISTERS. Dr. Louise Mahler and Josephine Emery. Music and words. Form and content. The bottle and the wine. Our vision is to liberate women through mastery of The Pitch. Bring to us your unformed ideas, your new product and service descriptions, your interview rehearsal or your team focus speech – or just your own voice – and we will work with you to transform both it and you. Let the real you Speak!

We’re planning our Maiden seminar for November. If you’re a woman who wants to change her voice and her life then register your interest now. with Dr Louise Mahler or Josephine Emery.

Let’s go out with George Clooney’s Auntie Rosemary!