Mannette Antill - Ignite Your Voice, Your Vision, and the World: Shape the Future to Create a World Rooted in Social Justice, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

In this powerful episode, Mannette Antill shares her expertise on authentic communication, diversity, and the power of connection. She dives deep into the importance of embracing our unique voices, fostering inclusive spaces, and using our energy to create meaningful change.

Host Kimberly Crowe guides the conversation as Mannette breaks down her C.O.N.N.E.C.T method, offering key insights into how we can amplify our voices and step into our power.

Ready to unleash your authentic voice? Hit play now!

About Our Guest

Mannette Antill is a voice empowerment coach, award-winning actor, teaching artist, and best selling author, whose signature blend of artistic and legal expertise offers a signature approach empowering her clients to command attention and inspire, move past stage fright, and unlock the full potential of their authentic creative voices.

She works with women thought leaders, politicians, and advocates—as well as mission-driven entrepreneurs and professionals—to develop confident, resonant voices that inspire action and the transformation they know they can bring to the world.

Certified in voice methodologies taught at the most respected and elite theatre programs worldwide, Mannette’s coaching goes beyond technique. She helps clients cultivate confidence, authenticity, and commanding presence. She empowers them to reach, touch, and move their audience and communicate with clarity and impact—whether on stage, at outside events, in boardrooms, the halls of government, or in high-stakes conversations.

A former lawyer, media spokesperson, and civil rights advocate, Mannette has spent decades at the intersection of voice, leadership, and justice. Her mission is to help women reclaim their voices, break barriers, and drive social and political change through powerfully transcendent communication.

 

00;00;38;29 - 00;01;11;12

Kimberly Crowe

Hey, folks, I'm back. And I have with me one of my dear friends, Manette Antill. Mannette and I met through an amazing program and she is a powerhouse woman with a lot to offer. So I'm so excited that she is here and on our diamond track. Mannette is going to be speaking about Ignite Your Voice, Your Vision, and the World: Shape the Future to Create a World Rooted in Social Justice, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. So you can see she's my type of girl. Welcome to the program, Mannette.

 

00;01;11;14 - 00;02;02;06

Mannette Antill

Hi, Kimberly. It's always good to be with you. You're amazing how you put all this together. And I want to just start out by, you know, the person you just had all the voices that you're going to have today are so unique. So one of a kind, so important to be out there. And if nothing else happens in my talk, my sharing is that everybody knows that their voice, no one else can have the impact on the world that their voice has. We cannot rely on other voices to make the difference that we want to make because no one was sent here with our purpose to make the difference that we can make. And that's why [inaudible]

 

Kimberly Crowe

I love it.

 

Mannette Antill

And the use of the voice and learning how to make it powerful is so important.

 

00;02;02;08 - 00;02;23;29

Kimberly Crowe

I love it. Put she's not wrong in the chat box. Hashtag she’s not wrong. That's our hashtag for today. And I love it. You're totally right. And I am all about having people be able to raise their voice. I think that's something that we have been steered away from, at least in my generation it was children are to be seen and not heard and not encouraged to raise their voice and share their message.

 

00;02;24;06 - 00;02;43;09

Kimberly Crowe

But we're the only ones who can do it right. We're the only ones who can share from our perspective. So I love what you say. So powerful stuff. All right. Well, let's get into it. How are we going to change all these things where we're going to shape the future to create a world rooted in social justice, diversity, equity and inclusion?

 

00;02;43;11 - 00;03;07;08

Mannette Antill

First, what's so interesting about you talking I love that you gave me such a wonderful Segway. Is that the beginning of my voice journey that I remember is my mother, when I was about four years old, said to me with this piercing, penetrating layer, Mannette Antill lower your voice.

 

00;03;07;10 - 00;03;10;20

Kimberly Crowe

I got that a lot too.

 

00;03;10;23 - 00;03;50;02

Mannette Antill

You know, you just it you know, I needed my mother's approval, you know, she’s [inaudible] place in the world. My father, my dear father, with such integrity and loving and generous was a World War Two veteran with PTSD. And so he kind of swung with these different parts of himself. And so my mother really was my core and my center. I had to have her back. So what do you do? She's angry, right? She wants me to be different somehow. What do I do? And so I use a technique from my father. I use humor. And I said, Is this low enough Mother?  [inaudible] breath-

 

00;03;50;02 - 00;03;53;03

Kimberly Crowe

That’s clever-

[overlapping speech]

 

00;03;53;05 - 00;06;49;15

Mannette Antill

That was kind of sassy, right? Lower your voice.

 

Kimberly Crowe

Yeah.

 

Mannette Antill

And she. Yes, Right. And I had her back. Right. And my guess is I thought the only time I got that direction. Right. And we developed this kind of routine, is this low enough mother. But pretty soon, that's what I did. I lowered my voice.

 

Kimberly Crowe

Oh!

 

Mannette Antill

Okay? My voice went down here. And it's not an unpleasant voice, right? It's kind of a deeper voice. Right. And this is the voice that I had. And, you know, there may be a reason I was told to lower my voice. I was a little ambitious and out there, I mean, and I use this voice when I would run for class, office and I did debate and I did theater and I sang in the choir. When I sang in the choir, I used my voice differently. However, this was my voice and I thought I was going to do theater and art and things like that. And it was the late sixties and the world was erupt with war that we were campaigning, you know, protesting against. The Civil Rights Act had only been passed in 1965. This is 1969, 68, 69. Martin Luther King had been killed, Bobby Kennedy. There was a time the women's movement sisterhood, you know, the second wave feminism sisterhood, was powerful. And I pivoted and went to law school and left the theater, left the arts. And this was I was on a different stage. Right. But this was the voice that I had. And I was a prosecutor with this voice. And I could be heard because quite honestly, it's not like we see on television. Courtrooms are fairly small. You're up close to the judge and the jury. I was a prosecutor and I could be heard. And later, when I went into corporate, I would sit in rooms, in boardrooms and meeting rooms and but what [unintelligible] to happen? What I begin to notice is that I would say something and it would be somewhat respectful. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And then 2 minutes, not 2 minutes. One minute less than that later, a man would say the same thing, and they go-

 

Kimberly Crowe

Oh.

 

Mannette Antill

Oh, what a great idea. And I'm like, That's what I just said. Now, this is in the late seventies, early eighties. There is clearly misogyny going on, but it was only when I went back, I had my own law practice. I was a media spokesperson for the ACLU. But then I stayed home with two Neurodivergent children for a while and-

 

Kimberly Crowe

Oh wow!

 

Mannette Antill

I didn’t want to go back into the world of this-

 

Kimberly Crowe

Yeah.

 

Mannette Antill

I did not want to go back to the world. So I went back to theater, and when I did, I was, you know, taking acting class and they said, you know, Mannette we think you have some talent, but, you know, we can't. We keep losing your voice.

 

00;06;49;17 - 00;06;52;29

Kimberly Crowe

We keep losing the voice because it trails off, because we were trained [inaudible]-

 

00;06;53;01 - 00;07;13;15

Mannette Antill

[inaudible] trails off. You hear it?

 

Kimberly Crowe

Yeah.

 

Mannette Antill

[unintelligible] trails off at the end. And they said, you got to learn, You got to go to voice class. All actors. The foundation is voice class. And when I was in voice class, [I’m going to do it?] [hums] I had to learn to bring my voice up-

 

Kimberly Crowe

[unintelligible] adjusted-

 

00;07;13;15 - 00;07;18;23

Kimberly Crowe

Yeah, absolutely-

 

Mannette Antill

And you hear that difference-

 

Kimberly Crowe

Right? Yeah, definitely-

[overlapping speech]

 

00;07;18;26 - 00;07;44;22

Mannette Antill

What it what it does is I had to find my resonant pitch.

 

Kimberly Crowe

Mm.

 

Mannette Antill

Now, often people think, oh, to be serious and authoritative and to sound like with confidence, you have to have a deep voice. Right. Deep voice need to be Morgan Freeman. Right. Right. But that's not your pitch. That's not your resonant pitch. When you go too long, you bury your voice and you trail off.

 

00;07;44;22 - 00;08;44;10

Mannette Antill

You become breathy because it's not doing what it needs to do. You know, Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King, Morgan Freeman. Martin Luther King had an amazing voice, but so does Morgan Freeman. And when he was interviewed, they will ask him about his voice. And he claims in these interviews that he got his voice in theater class at Los Angeles Community College from his voice teacher. Well, that's only partially true. He was born with Morgan Freeman's voice.

 

Kimberly Crowe

Yeah.

 

Mannette Antill

However during the course of his life, before he got there, he developed habits in using his voice that were not serving its fullness. And what he was able to learn in voice class was how to go past those poor habits, learn new habits in the use of his voice, and have the Morgan Freeman voice that we all can-

 

Kimberly Crowe

[That’s fascinating?]

 

Mannette Antill

[unintelligible]

[overlapping speech]

 

00;08;44;13 - 00;09;22;11

Mannette Antill

And so you are born with a voice that's like a snowflake. There is not one voice in the world of what is almost eight some one billion people in the world. No one has your voice. Scientists speculate no one in the history of the world has had your voice, you know? It's just like you know, we have fingerprints. We know those are unique. We know our faces, our eyes. That’s how we‘re that’s how we get into our phones and everything. They have a very unique face. The [whirls?] of your ears are completely different. Do you know you have a tongue print? So-

 

Kimberly Crowe

Oh, gosh, I didn't know that.

 

Mannette Antill

Right, so every part of us-

 

Kimberly Crowe

But I believe it. That's awesome.

 

00;09;22;14 - 00;10;07;17

Mannette Antill

Every part of us is unique. And our. Your voice comes from your body. We have this idea that our voice is here. And, yes, you go down here, you find your your your larynx, your Adam's apple. You can move it back and forth inside that little, like little cup of cartilage lies your vocal cords, your vocal folds. They ultimately make the sound that we all hear, right? Your vocal folds-

 

Kimberly Crowe

With the vibration. Ok, yeah-

 

Mannette Antill

With the vibrations.

 

Kimberly Crowe

Yeah.

 

Mannette Antill

Can you feel it?

 

Kimberly Crowe

Yeah.

 

Mannette Antill

You can just feel it. But, I’m going to have you do something. I'm going to have you make this sound like [humming] like you're [inaudible]

 

Kimberly Crowe

[humming]

 

Mannette Antill

[inaudible] turn off the sound. It's-

 

00;10;07;21 - 00;10;44;09

Kimberly Crowe

Oh, yeah. You can stop. If you all are trying this at home. And it's not just Mannette and I [puffing?] into the mic. Like, really you guys are trying-

 

Mannette Antill

[I can be?]

[overlapping speech]

 

Kimberly Crowe

[unintelligible] Put that was fun in the chat box. Let us know that you're trying it along with us.

 

Mannette Antill

[humming] And then [humming] becomes F-

 

Mannette Antill

Make a Z-

[overlapping speech]

 

Kimberly Crowe

From a Z to an F, you can feel that your vocal cords stop vibrating.

 

Mannette Antill

Right. So make a Z. Now, now turn the sound off. It becomes S.

 

00;10;44;09 - 00;10;52;11

Kimberly Crowe

I like it. Angela and Lisa are playing with us. I love it.

 

Mannette Antill

So this is where the sound is made. Right?

 

Kimberly Crowe

All right.

 

00;10;52;13 - 00;11;18;20

Mannette Antill

And, you know, you hear a lot of times that you need a lot of breath for sound your breath’s job in making your sound is to vibrate those vocal chords. They're like this. They sit on top of your windpipe. And when your brain says, I want to speak right, the vocal folds close. That's weird, right? You take a breath and like, I want to talk. Think about when we call it inspiration, When you want to talk, you're kind of like-

 

Kimberly Crowe

Yeah. Yeah.

 

00;11;18;23 - 00;11;53;10

Mannette Antill

Right. There's this little integrator. Right? Right, right. And you take the air in the vocal folds close, and then the breath’s going to exhale. Right. And it builds up pressure underneath the vocal folds, forcing them apart. And they begin to vibrate. And they vibrate not just like that, but with that and the size of your thumbnail. Your thumbnail, Right. Your thumbnail, your vocal folds and other things, very different. Right? So the size of this, the length, the width. That's why men have bigger vocal folds. They have larger-

 

Kimberly Crowe

Wow.

 

00;11;53;12 - 00;12;59;02

Mannette Antill

Vocal folds. That's why they're deeper. Their vocal folds are bigger and wider and thicker. That's why there's the change of voice when that happens. But anyway, so that creates sound waves. Those sound waves go up into your your your head and the breath brings them then your breath only goes for about here. You can scream as loud as you can and your breath will only go about this far. What goes is, is those vibrations. They go up. They. They resonate against these bones, your jaw, your cheekbones, your forehead, your cranium. They go down. They they vibrate on your you become a vibrating resonant chamber. These these sound waves go out and they hit, you know, the surfaces around you. And then they hit into the person you're speaking to as they they hit they touch they touch the people you're speaking to. It vibrates their bones and eventually it goes these little bones inside their ears, which their brain translates into sound. Even people who are deaf feel that vibration you are [inaudible]

 

Kimberly Crowe

Oh, that's fascinating.

 

Mannette Antill

[inaudible] The people you are communicating with.

 

00;12;59;05 - 00;15;04;01

Kimberly Crowe

That's fascinating. Even the people who are deaf can feel the vibration because the vibration is physicality. And even if the ear is not functioning as a listening device, they can still they still receive the vibration.

 

Mannette Antill

If you remember that historic scene in the Miracle Worker interview where Helen Keller is being taught how to speak. They put what the her teacher puts water here, puts her voice out, and she speaks and she feels the vibrations.

 

Kimberly Crowe

Oh, wow. All right.

 

Mannette Antill

So we are vibrating resonant instruments. And so only when we have this body that's open, right, open to the breath, open to movement, open to the vibration, can we have the full power of our voices? Right. And tell you other things so that the breath makes the sound. So as little breath as you have in your lungs, it controls the amount of breath you have and the support you can give it. So if you put your hand right here like this against your ribs, right. And then put your your find your ribs can you find go down in your ribs and find how they become like a cutaway coat, they kind of go, you can put your fingers underneath your ribs. Okay. Exhale. Inhale, exhale. Inhale. What you're feeling, this is your diaphragm. Your diaphragm is pasted at the bottom of your ribs. There's-

 

[overlapping speech]

 

Mannette Antill

You're feeling your diaphragm as it goes down. Press against those muscles. When you do that, if you put your your hand here over your belly button. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in. The more this goes out, the more sound you'll have. But what's happening is the breath isn't going into your belly. The breath can only go into these lungs. What's happening is-

 

Kimberly Crowe

They are expanding this way so you can feel it on the sides, expanding out. But in the belly, you feel it dropping. Yeah. Well.

[overlapping speech]

 

00;15;04;04 - 00;17;08;00

Mannette Antill

Your ribs are floating up and out. And then they're floating down there. Floating up and out. And then they're floating down. At the same time, the diaphragm is going down. The ribs are going out. And you see how much space there is in the lungs for breath. And then it relaxes and then it fills up and then it relaxes. Right. And the other thing is it’s wonderful. The diaphragm going down when you got to be loose here, you can't do like we're told. Keep it in. Hold it in. Right. It's got to be loose here because what happens is when the diaphragm goes down, the more it can go down, the more your lungs can fill up. It's also giving a massage to these viscera down here. Also the heart is and the kind of sits in the diaphragm as the diaphragm goes down and massaging the heart. So when we have tension in our bodies closing down, we're holding in. We can't have a full breath, we can't have a full voice. And of course, the situation in our world today and trauma difficulty, stress, tension brings us in, brings us in brings us in like this. Right. And you can't talk very well when you're tense like this. And so when you're tense here, you know that I will tell you that one way to know you're going to feel is the distance of your ears from your shoulders. You float that head and neck up, you float down- [inaudible]

 

Kimberly Crowe

Oh yeah.

 

Mannette Antill

Right. If you float the head up like this, this little string. Right. Just kind of float it up, let it float up, and you flow your shoulders down. Right? You open this whole area up. You set up a what? Less that calls a relaxer energizer, one of the best relaxer energizer, which you can give yourself is a yawn you want. Not only unlike this, like this, like you did, everybody can yawn.

 

00;17;08;03 - 00;19;34;14

Mannette Antill

[yawns] you feel that your throat open up, that soft palate goes up. This whole oral cavity becomes nice and full and full for resonance. You hear many voice teachers talk about dropping your jaw when you say drop your jaw. Many people put force in the like, right? You release your jaw, just release it. Right. And there are exercises we do and there's massages and things we do to open this up, relax this jaw, relax these muscles, and then we take it on down. Relax. We do things that relax and open the ribs, relax the belly, relax the whole body that also teaches you to recognize and have a relaxation response that you can learn to trigger. You learn to trigger that relaxation response in your body for your voice, that relaxation response sends the message to this little amygdala back here, Who's looking for, Oh my God, what's going to happen? What's going to happen? Right. It keeps us safe. It's a wonderful thing to have this little amygdala, but your [unintelligible] relaxation. You're saying to the amygdala, I got it. Everything's okay. Stay on. Stay on. Stay on board. If there's smoke or something, let me know. But I don't know. I've learned to make a default place in myself. A [unintelligible] relaxation serves our voice, serves our ability to get out of our cognitive brain and into our bodies, because that's where we feel we even say it. That touched my heart. Can you say I touch You know, something I think is something that touches your heart? That touched my heart. Like into the looking into the eyes of a loved one or watching kitties on on online something it just like, oh, that touched my heart. And you feel kind of a warmth and openness, a lightness here, right? A buoyancy that touched my heart. That's how we say it. That's how we don't we think up here, but we feel here. We also say, Oh, that gave me butterflies in my stomach. I have butterflies in my stomach, Right? Because we're excited. We're excited. And that's where we feel it. I'm excited or I'm afraid or I'm flirty or I'm laughing. We feel that here be a radiant feeling. You're in our middle then-

 

00;19;34;14 - 00;19;54;19

Kimberly Crowe

Mannette. Thank you, Manette. That this is awesome information, but I want to be sure that we can get to the gift and everything else. That the title of your talk was Ignite Your Voice, Your Vision, and the World. Shape the Future to Create a World Rooted in Social Justice, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Did you want to speak to any of the-

 

Mannette Antill

Let me let me-

 

Kimberly Crowe

Say this is-

[overlapping speech]

 

00;19;54;21 - 00;21;07;21

Mannette Antill

Important for what that's talking about. Right here is where you have power. Right here is where that got me in the gut. That got me in the gut. That moves me in the gut. That's where I have power. And when you have the power of all of those body energies touched my heart, it made me excited. It got me in the gut. You can be a powerful, impactful and authentic connector speech and you're not. You're your voice is unique. Everybody's is, which is why we need diversity. That's why we need everybody with a place at the table. That's why everybody has to have an option to be there and give us what they have that they were set to give us. And we exclude people. If we don't have a culture of inclusion where we it we respect and take advantage of and bring in all the access, all the beautiful snowflakes that we have. Right. If we're less than what we can be. Right. So we need that diversity. We need equity so that we feel safe, so that we have housing, so that we have food, so that we can be open and relaxed and be able to really communicate.

 

Kimberly Crowe

I love it.

 

Mannette Antill

We live in a world.

 

Mannette Antill

Where we all, with all the full diversity of our sound and who we are and what we have to give and do powerfully, we need it. And that's what we-

 

00;21;07;26 - 00;22;05;02

Kimberly Crowe

Your message is so powerful. And I want to be sure that everybody gets that. You get a chance to share it all. But I don't. We are running out of time, so I need to move to your gift. You have an amazing gift for our audience. It is a connect. It's C.O.N.N.E.C.T with Your Voice and Your Vision: The 7 Key Fundamentals to Transform the World. And you're giving them a 30 minute video which is Present with Power: Energize & Free Your Voice – Upper Body Warm-up video. So we're going to go ahead and put that link in the chat When you guys get it, make sure you got it in the chat box so that we know that the link worked correctly for you. Sometimes we have trouble with links on our last one we actually had a couple people that weren't able to grab it, so put I got it in the chat box if it worked and that way we know that the link is working out there. And then you also have an amazing VIP gift for our VIPs. So let's talk about the C.O.N.N.E.C.T real quick and then we'll move to the VIP gift.

 

00;22;05;05 - 00;22;46;08

Mannette Antill

C.O.N.N.E.C.T is: Connect with breath. Right? Open your body, learn New habits, Nurture those new habits. Engage with the energies, the unique energies and power of your voice. Then Communicate and practice communicating and using the language in the way we've learned to use it and Transform the world. C.O.N.N.E.C.T. And it explains those different aspects of it, right?

 

Kimberly Crowe

Awesome. When you click-

[overlapping speech]

 

Mannette Antill

So that's why my, my, how I do business. Is that your your voice connection? Because our eyes are the windows to the soul. Your voice is the window of the doorway of your soul to the world.

 

00;22;46;10 - 00;23;32;17

Kimberly Crowe

All right, awesome. And then your VIP gift. This is an admission to a three hour workshop that you're teaching. Grow Your Voice: Ignite Your Power / Shape a Just & Equitable World - A Jumpstart Workshop. Is that correct?

 

Mannette Antill

Yes. Yes. It's a three hour jumpstart little taste workshop of this work.

 

Kimberly Crowe

Awesome. All right. Well, it looks like people got it. So I'm so glad you guys are engaged with us. Cynthia Got it. Claudia Got it. Lisa Lacey Got it, Angela got it. Esther got it, Ray got it. Oh, great. It's good to see you here. And still, we have a lot of our older folks here, and Stu got the download, and then Miriam got it as well.

 

Kimberly Crowe

Angela says, Thank you. So many powerful things here from you today Mannette. We've got another speaker coming up soon. But before we let you go, Mannette any final words for the crew?

 

00;23;32;19 - 00;24;09;22

Mannette Antill

You know, Arthur Lesniak is one of the best lines that I love and learn from says the more you learn to feel things, the more you learn to feel. And the more you learn to feel, the more you learn to connect and engage and be the authentic, open person that can reach and touch others.

 

Kimberly Crowe

Beautifully said. All right. Our next speaker is Ruth Elayne. She's going to be talking about The Four Reasons Emotional Intelligence is Your Superpower. All right. Mannette this has just been a joy. Thanks so much for being here with us. All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'll see you back at the bottom of the hour. I'm Kimberly Crowe. Cheers.