There’s no doubt about it; the candidates for the U.S. presidency are getting hoarse. The fall campaign is still months away, the primaries are only half over, and yet the candidates are coming to the end of the line vocally. If you listen to the wannabes on TV, whether Democrat or Republican, you’ll hear the one thing, at least, they have in common: they’re losing their voices.

Why, in an era of high-tech sound equipment, high-cost drugs, and highly sophisticated medical knowledge, are our highly funded candidates ruining their voices? Don’t they realize that it all depends on those pipes being kept functioning? That if they become silent as a result of a worn-out voice, they can’t possibly keep debating and harassing their opponents?

The reason for this doleful state of affairs is an incredible ignorance about the human voice – its care and feeding, and its importance – in contemporary life.

It’s probably too late for the candidates, given the pressures they’re under. But it’s not too late for you. And if you talk every day to do your job, then you’re destroying your voice in the same way the candidates are, just a little more slowly. So in a minute I’ll give you three exercises you can do – should do – daily to keep your voice strong. But first a bit more about why it’s so important to take care of your voice.

Researchers have known for a long time that when we speak, we put out low-frequency sounds that we’re not aware of—consciously. We can hear them, dimly, if we focus on them, as a kind of hum, but most of us screen out the sound as not meaningful, so we’re not aware of it. The researchers assumed that these noises were meaningless by-products of our vocal chords working away as we communicate with one another and shout at passing cars and other annoyances.

They were wrong. Those sounds are not only meaningful, but they determine who’s in charge.

The good news is that you can learn how to increase your production of these secret influencers in order to make sure that you are the leader of any group you want to control. You can gain mastery of others by using your voice to influence them unconsciously.

How does this unconscious conversation work, this conversation that you’ve never before been aware of that runs your life?

Every sound produced by a human—or a musical instrument, an animal, or a machine—has an aural fingerprint that you can measure by charting its frequency responses in units of sound called “hertz.” We can hear sounds ranging from twenty hertz at the low end to twenty thousand hertz at the upper end. Anything at about three hundred hertz or lower sounds to us like a low bass note or, as they go lower, not like notes at all, but rather like rumbles of thunder.

It’s important to understand that most naturally produced sounds are not pure emissions of one note at one frequency. The quality of a sound—the difference between your mother-in-law’s voice, for example, and a chain saw—is determined by the overtones and undertones that the sound produces. A sound gets its quality from the number of over- and undertones, as well as the intensity of them.

Very broadly speaking, we like sounds that are rich in overtones and (especially) undertones. The “thinner” a sound is, the more likely we are to find it irritating. There’s a wide individual variation in the kinds of sounds we find appealing, but on the whole, for example, a thin, nasal voice is less appealing to us than a rich, resonant voice.

Here’s the amazing part: people who put out the right kind of sounds—below the range of conscious human hearing—become the leaders of most groups. Moreover, in conversations and meetings, people rapidly match each other’s low-frequency sounds. Why? In order to have a productive conversation or meeting, we need to literally be on the same wavelength. We humans need lower-frequency sounds to add some very important emotional aspects to their communications.

In one experiment, researchers filtered out the lower-frequency sounds and played the recordings to subjects who were asked to rate their impressions of the speakers, positively or negatively. Without the lower-frequency sounds, subjects rated the speakers more negatively.

But the power of the low-frequency end of the voice goes even further than that. Lower-status people match the low-frequency sounds of the higher-status people in the room.

The conclusion? We not only want to be on the same wavelength, but we want to know who’s in charge. So the process of picking a leader has more to do with having the right kind of voice than it does having the right ideas or the right physique.

Sorting out who is the most powerful person in the room is an important game that we have used for as long as we have been human because relative status is important to us. This need to defer and assert probably goes back to more primitive times when our lives depended on it.

We get together, we start talking, and in a couple of minutes, we’ve unconsciously picked a leader and lined up behind him or her.

So it’s hardly the case that much conscious thought has gone into determining who should be top dog. Rather, an important part of our relationships to others is determined, at least in part, unconsciously and with incredible speed.

We’re not aware of making the choices we make. We just let our unconscious minds do it. In fact, a study of the sounds that US presidential candidates make during their debates before the election found that the amount of dominant sounds made by one candidate over the other predicted accurately the outcome of the upcoming election.

If you’re a betting person, then studying the sounds of the eventual two candidates in the current US presidential sweepstakes should allow you to pick the winner long before November.

So I hope I’ve convinced you that voices – the sounds we make – are important. Here are three quick and easy daily exercises you can do to make sure your voices are strong, and that you’re accessing those low, leadership tones.

1.Begin each morning with some deep belly breaths. I’ve blogged before about the diaphragmatic breathing that gives you a strong voice. So I’ll just reference it quickly here. Rather than breathing with your shoulders and neck, expand your belly as you breathe in, in effect using the stomach as a bellows to draw air into your lungs and then, when you’re ready to breath out, gently push the air out using your abdominal muscles. Do this as many times as you can each morning when you wake up – slowly and mindfully.

2.Begin each day with a vocal warm up to strengthen and preserve your voice. There are many good vocal warm ups; every singer and actor has his or her own set. Here’s a good resource for a wide variety. But I’ll give you a quick one here that I particularly like for opening up those low, authoritative tones. Drop your jaw open, like you’re astonished, and relax it. Then, using those belly breaths, take air in, force it gently out your open mouth, saying “maaaaa,” as you exhale. Try to do as little work as possible with your throat and face, and as much as possible with your stomach. Do this for about a minute.

3.Begin each day with vocal movement around your face. All the sitting we do, and the work on computers, tends to drive our voices up into our noses. We don’t support our voices with good breathing, and as a result, our voices get nasal. So do the following. Put your fingers on either side of your nose, and make a sound like a bleating sheep, “baaaa, baaaa.” You should feel your nose vibrating; make the sound as nasal and nasty as possible. Then, drop your jaw and open your mouth as in #2, and say, “baaah, baaah,” but move the voice out of your nose and into your chest. You should feel the vibrations stop. Now your voice is nicely situated for a good day’s work. Enjoy your new-found leadership!

We’ll be working on your voice and the voices of the other participants at our first public conference in six years in Boston on April 22nd. Sign up soon — spaces are limited and going fast!