How you use your voice in public speaking is crucial. Research shows a full 37% of an audience's first impression of a speaker is based upon the speaker's voice. It happens in seconds. What your voice does is every bit as impactful as what the rest of your body is doing.
Your Voice Needs Life
Most of us have had "conversations" on the phone with voice-recognition computer systems. It can be a little unnerving because the voice on the other end has no life to it. It's just repeating what it was programmed to do. A similar effect happens when a speaker is either just reading a script or rattling off memorized lines and not actually talking to the crowd.
When a voice has life, it has a personality behind it. That personality has emotions, intentions, and agendas. It can portray spontaneous happiness, sadness, nervousness, excitement and more. It can even showcase a person's honesty or dishonestly. So be transparent and sincere in the way you speak to an audience.
Your Voice Betrays You
In our voices are subtleties that convey many things we're often not even aware of. All these physical manifestations are a reflection of what's going inside ourselves. If you're feeling negative or less than enthusiastic about your presentation, your voice will reflect that. So check your thoughts and attitude before you step up on the stage. Your voice, like many other parts of your body, will be expressing much about you.
Your Voice Needs to be Dynamic
One trick to making your voice more interesting is to vary your range and pitch. Women especially in the broadcasting industry are taught this. The next time you're able, listen closely to an established female news anchor. Chances are you never really noticed the dynamic vocal fluctuations, but all the good ones employ the technique.
Broadcasting professionals use their voice in ways so that listeners are focused on the content. They use subtleties that don't draw attention to the actual vocal techniques. Your voice is the platform for the message, as well as a vehicle for your personal feelings about the message, but it should never distract from the message itself.
Start your sentences with your voice about where it is in a natural speaking tone, but then as you work your way through the line, use tone and pitch to stress points. End your sentences lower than when you start. This will create distinct breaks between thoughts and sentences.
The last thing an audience wants to hear is a mono-tone person who has no variance in his or her voice. Such a person sounds dull, boring, and not at all passionate about the message. This doesn't mean deliberately exaggerating different tones of voice, and yelling rarely works on stage. The idea is to enhance, not to be phony. Be natural, but more animated than you'd be when talking one-on-one to someone under normal circumstances.
Your Voice Needs Feedback
The best way you can improve your voice is to listen to recordings of yourself. If you have video feedback, listen to just the audio portion of it. Whenever I hear myself in a recording, I cringe, because it just doesn't sound like me. But it's crucial that you know how you sound to others. Remember that your own voice is vibrating around inside your head and it doesn't sound the same to others.
Your Voice Needs to be Loud
One of the most effective techniques I ever learned was the importance of being able to speak loudly and clearly, but without shouting. You need to speak at a higher volume than when talking in normal conversation situations. This will shed a huge I'm confident light on you from the get-go. You'll want to do this even when in a small conference room. It grabs interest and gets people to listen. When you first start practicing being louder, it'll feel uncomfortable. But doing this will immediately cause people in the room to focus their attention on you.
It's painful trying to listen to someone who's speaking in a volume that's difficult or impossible to hear. Such a person gives the impression that he or she is uncomfortable and would rather not be speaking--which is often the case! When you convey that kind of message, your audience ends up agreeing with you. People don't want to strain to listen to you, and won't make the effort for long. So speak up! Speak like the confident public speaker you are who knows exactly what message you want to deliver to the audience.
Kelly Libatique is a professional speaker, technical trainer, and author. He holds a Master's in Education and a Bachelor's in Psychology. He resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Anne and two sons.
