up. The effects of this can be that you:
•Lose your thought track and start to waffle on.
•Mumble and become unclear.
•Sound monotone and uninspiring.
You therefore need to control the speed of your delivery so that you avoid falling into these bad habits. There’s one key way to do this. This is to use a pause, which acts like a brake pedal to help you slow down.
When you first start to speak, aim to pause for about 2 – 3 seconds after your first sentence. This may seem like a lifetime, but it'll actually help you to control your speed and avoid racing ahead of yourself. It’ll also seem very natural to your audience as the pause allows them time to adjust to your voice and take in what you have just said.
A good way to practice getting use to pausing is to read out aloud a piece of text. This can be from a newspaper, magazine, etc.
When you get to a full stop, make sure that you pause for 2-3 seconds before moving on to the next sentence. This will help you to train yourself to pause at the end of your sentences and maintain a steady pace.
If you practice this exercise, the next time you have to speak to a group of people, the effect will be quite noticeable. You will come across with greater:
•Focus.
•Clarity.
•Confidence.
Using Emphasis to Help Make Your Voice More Interesting
So now that you have learnt how to develop greater control over your voice, the next thing is to learn how to sound more interesting.
Some of the most common turn-offs to an audience when listening to a dull and uninspiring speaker are:
•A monotone voice.
•A voice that is too quiet.
•A voice that lacks emphasis.
You need to speak with energy and enthusiasm if you want your audience to want to hang on to your every word. If the audience can’t hear you they’ll switch off very quickly. To avoid this you don’t need to shout but you do need to learn how to project your voice.
To help project energy and power into your voice, emphasize the key words in your sentences, which will catch the attention of the audience. For example, take the sentence: ‘I encourage everyone to work together as a team so that we all achieve greater success.’
You could pull out the key words in this sentence such as Everyone, Together, Team, and Greater Success.
By emphasizing these words, you’ll automatically project energy and passion into your voice and your voice will sound stronger and more confident. Emphasizing words also tends to lift the pitch in your voice – so that it’s no longer monotone but more varied and interesting to listen to.
This voice practice workout will help you to strengthen your voice. To go to the next level, I also recommend that you do the following:
•Practice your speeches out loud.
•Warm up your voice every day, but especially before public speaking. Ideally, spend as much time practicing as you will in front of an audience.
•Learn to breathe properly and apply that technique to your public speaking
•Hum a lot. Explore and develop mask resonance.
•Take a singing class or private singing lessons. This is true strength training for your voice.
There are many more easy-to-practice exercises that help bring out the best qualities in your voice. If you attend a voice-training workshop or have some personal coaching with a voice coach, you can learn how to unlock the power of your voice.
You’ll learn to develop a much greater awareness of your vocal potential and how to use your vocal qualities to help influence others in a positive way in all speaking situations.
Voices are not fixed at birth. Like athletic or mental skills, they can be greatly enhanced by concentration and training. Following are the steps necessary to enhance your voice – and your business production.
First, determine what to be changed. The best way to do this is to record telephone conversations for later review. Reading into a recorder is not adequate. Record several hours of calls and listen to 15 minutes in the middle for several days in a row.
Grade Yourself in the Following Areas
•Rate – The speed with which we speak. Many people speak too rapidly. Very few speak too slowly. A slower pace is particularly important in telephone sales, as our attention-focusing skills – body language, eye contact, clothes, observation of the other person’s attention level – which have been developed in face-to-face conversations, become useless on the telephone.
•Pitch – The level of our voice. A good speaker may overcome many flaws, but a monotone is a massive handicap.
•Volume – The loudness with which we speak. Speak too slowly and no one would hear you; speak too loudly and you’ll make your listener physically and mentally uncomfortable.
•Variation – This is critical, and makes the above three elements effective. There is really no optimum single Rate, Pitch, or Volume. Rather, it’s the correct mixture in each of these areas that allows us to maximize the impact of what we say.
•Conviction – The firmness and apparent confidence that what we say is true without question. Conviction sells; it reassures; it is believable. Lack of it only adds to any doubts.
•Pronunciation – Slurring of words and poor pronunciation is not conductive to a confident, upper-class voice.
•Jargon and Useless Expressions – This refers to habitual phrases which add nothing to the meaning of what is being conveyed.
Next step is to improve it.
•Signs on Your Phone – Speech patterns are habits. As such, they require on-going efforts to alter. Placing appropriate signs on your telephone will help greatly to remind oneself of needed changes. Examples might be ‘slowly’ (for too fast a pace), ‘It is true!’ (for lack of conviction), ‘softly’ (for too loud a voice), or anything else that will be of help.
•Enhance Variations – Proper blending of all vocal elements requires variation. There’s no one perfect rate, pitch, or volume. Rather, it’s a mixture of highs and lows, loud and soft, fast and slow, combined with the proper words themselves, that will yield the desired result.
•Enhance Power and Conviction – The key to doing so is to stand in a large room and speak to a person or recording device in the back of the room, but do not alter your volume. Initially your audience of one will probably have difficulty hearing you. Keep trying. Soon you find yourself enunciating more clearly, using your lips to form the words more accurately, utilizing your diaphragm for more strength. When you have reached this point, which may take several weeks, try the same thing but this time do so while seated. This is
