One of the things I try to encourage in my clients is a practice of mindfulness — this is a way of being self-aware, particularly when it comes to listening to how they sound and what they are doing physically to create the sounds they make.
I find that this is the key to change (probably for any change, but certainly for accent modification), and is the most difficult lesson to instill in my clients. People who I encounter as clients don’t pay a lot of attention to these physical aspects or to their outward sounds.
I’m using Ellen Langer’s books: Mindfulness and The Power of Mindful Learning as tools to help explain mindfulness to clients. I have to remember to check in with them about being mindful, and have created a little checklist for my folks.
