How an Indy opera singer is helping professionals find their voice

Anne Fuchs found her voice on stage at church and later as a professional opera singer. Now she’s coaching lawyers and other executives to find theirs in the courtroom or boardroom.

A native of southeast New York state, Fuchs now lives in Indianapolis, where she uses her talents as a singer and communications specialist to help clients of her business, Foxy Opera LLC, develop the confidence to stand in front of peers or an audience and powerfully communicate their ideas.

“I truly, truly believe that confidence is a skill set, not a personality trait,” Fuchs said. “There are physical things that you can do to project confidence but also embody it.”

In a conversation with The Indiana Lawyer’s Maura Johnson, Fuchs shares more about her journey in opera and how she’s giving back to a legal community that has supported that journey.

Listen to the full conversation on The Indiana Lawyer podcast, where you can find more information on Fuchs’s training.

How were you introduced to opera?

It’s a little bit of a silly story. I was a very expressive child with a lot to get out of my system, apparently. My parents put me into a children’s choir at our church. And the children’s choir director’s name was Peggy, and Peggy was an opera singer.

So at a really tender age, I grew up hearing that kind of singing and apparently wanted to imitate it. I would stand next to Peggy in the church and make that [operatic singing] sound next to her, much to the embarrassment of my parents.

At the age of 7, she started having me go up in front of the church and start singing, and she would tell my parents, ‘Annie’s not the best singer, but she doesn’t get flustered. She’s unflappable, so I just keep sending her up there.’

She never thought I had the best voice, but she thought I had the chutzpah to do it.

When did your career in communications and public relations come into play?

After I did my undergraduate studies in opera, I went to do my master’s at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey. I got done with my degree and didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. So, I’m trying to gig up and down the East Coast. I’m not making enough money to live, and I ended up meeting an attorney who said, ‘I’m an opera singer as well, and I have a practice. And if you would come and work with us, we’ll teach you what you need to know.’

When did you realize you could combine your background in opera with your legal and communications career?

That was a more recent development. I spent the past four years with the Court of Appeals of Indiana. I started spending lots of time in the courtroom and seeing attorneys go up to advocate. I noticed something was a little off, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. But I was observing things where I thought, ‘Huh … this isn’t reading right. Why is that?’

A friend of mine who came to see me do an Appeals on Wheels event in the Court of Appeals courtroom, said, ‘There’s something that you’re doing differently when you speak, when you lead people, and I think it has to do with you being an opera singer.’ I realized, ‘Oh, my gosh, these things that I’m seeing attorneys doing in the courtroom that’s not reading quite right, I’m seeing things that I would do as a performer, that I would do differently in that forum.’

There was a day that I watched a woman arguing in front of the Supreme Court of Indiana while standing on one leg. … She had no balance, no grounding, and her arguments were every bit as flimsy. At some point, I don’t know if it was a chicken or egg situation, but she put the other foot down. And suddenly she was grounded. The argument was delivered, and that’s like opera 101. You never do anything with your voice unless your feet are firmly grounded.

I worked with someone who was very concerned about their voice being high. It was kind of pinched and high, and they self-described it as maybe having a little bit of a baby sound to it. We just wanted to get the voice lower and in a more grounded place. We don’t do anything artificial, but we did a series of exercises to really get her in that place. And then we picked some music that she could sing in that range. In opera, we call that the tessitura … the place in your voice where you feel most comfortable. So, we found a happy place for her that felt authentic and natural.

Now you have a business addressing these exact issues. Tell me about it.

I did [the Mitch Daniels Leadership Foundation] program as a fellow and was charged to come up with a capstone project as part of that experience. I’m so grateful to my amazing mentor through that program who encouraged me when I said, ‘I think I have this business idea; I don’t know if this is the right place to do it.’ She said, ‘Yes, do it.’ We started talking about what opera singers could teach professionals about how to level up your voice, how to level up your leadership using secrets from the stage. I started putting that plan together, started working with lots of different folks from different sectors. Not only is it fun, but I get to see and hear them improve. That is the greatest joy of all.

How do the teaching sessions work?

I do 45-minute sessions, 90-minute sessions, or even half-day workshops. It’s lots of interaction, so it’s not for the faint of heart. The shorter versions are more explanatory and, occasionally, a few exercises where we do [it] together. It’s very physical, where we figure out how to use our body in certain ways to produce our sound more effectively.

You’ve probably heard that people (mainly) receive communication through body language, but something people forget about is your tone and your vocal presence. It kind of drives me nuts when I see that someone who’s got the best ideas and the most articulate, cogent points, they’re being overlooked quite literally because their voice is not present in the room. They don’t know how to physically take up the space. That, I think, is what really drives me towards this. I think the best and brightest leaders that we have sometimes are the meekest and humblest people. I want to push my weight behind them and help them feel empowered to be those leaders.

Who’s the audience for this program?

I’m primarily working with professionals, so people who want to level up in their careers using these skills. I love working with women but have also been working with a lot of men, too. Attorneys have been the earliest adopters. But there’s also been interest from leadership groups, HR groups, HR directors and HR management teams that want to figure out, ‘How can I use my voice and my body more effectively to get the result I need in this room?’

Do you work with attorneys who may not be in the courtroom but still need those speaking skills?

Absolutely, that’s been a big one — just to have authority at the tables that they sit at in their firm or on their teams. When they start to realize, ‘Oh, wow, my voice is not present in the room, so I’m being overlooked.’ It’s not because they weren’t speaking. It’s because they weren’t projecting with confidence and clarity.

And it doesn’t mean that you have to be loud. We always talk in opera, and I talk about this in my training: It’s not about volume; it’s about resonance. People love a resonant voice because they can hear it. They can understand it. It carries in the room, and you associate a sense of competence with a resonant voice. •