He is the best orator who . . . teaches and delights, and moves the minds of his hearers.
—CICERO
When you speak, your voice is your most important tool. Fortunately you can learn to use your voice, like playing a musical instrument, to increase your power and persuasiveness in any conversation or speech.
Singers are famous for training their voices for hours each day, sometimes for months and years, to reach a higher level of quality and resonance. You must do the same. Powerful voices are deeper, more sonorous, and stronger. They are infused with energy and power. When you speak with strength and confidence, as though you know your subject and believe in the importance of the points you are making, your listeners will believe you and accept your point of view as well.
When you speak more slowly, your voice has more power and authority. Your listeners have an opportunity to absorb and reflect on what you are saying. You exude confidence. You lend your words greater importance. All powerful people speak slowly, enunciate clearly, and express themselves with confidence. Loud, confident speaking is powerful and moving.
When you speak too rapidly, however, your pitch increases, often to something squeaky and childlike. Thus, the impact of your words and your influence on the audience both decrease because listeners downgrade the importance or value of what the speaker is saying.
The most important element of excellent speaking is energy. Speaking has been described as “enthusiastic conversation,” projected at a higher level of energy, to more people, and over a greater distance.
Some years ago, I spoke to 3,000 people at a new hotel in Orlando. My talk was a major part of a four-day conference. Because the sound systems were new, they hooked me up with two separate microphones, just to be sure.
Within five minutes of beginning my talk, both microphones stopped working. But the room was jammed with people and the schedule was tight. I therefore resolved to speak without the microphones and project my voice so that the entire room could hear me.
Somehow, I was able to pull it off. For ninety minutes, I threw my voice to the back row of the room. Afterward, I was exhausted. It takes an incredible amount of energy to speak loudly for any period of time, let alone the 90 minutes scheduled for my presentation.
The good news was that the talk was well received. Copies of the presentation were reproduced and distributed to thousands of people.
When you speak to an audience of any size, your goal is to project your voice to the people sitting in the row furthest from the stage. By projecting that far, you will capture the complete attention of everyone in between.
In every case, the sound system is your best friend. Test it out carefully in advance. Walk around the room to see if there are silent spots anywhere. Be sure that every zone in the room is properly wired for sound.
Not long ago, I was giving a one-day seminar for about 800 people in Philadelphia. I had spoken in the same room in the past. The sound system had been checked out and seemed to work just fine.
But when I began speaking, the back half of the audience began waving their arms and complaining that they could not hear me clearly. As you can imagine, when half your audience is upset and complaining, it is hard to continue speaking calmly and confidently.
As it happened, the people in charge of the sound system had not turned on the speakers in the rear half of the room. They had simply forgotten. And when the seminar began, the sound people had disappeared into some other part of the hotel. This is common as well. It took half an hour to correct the problem. In the meantime, I almost had to shout the entire time.
Some time ago, I was giving a seminar for 1,500 people in a convention center that I had spoken in several times over the years without any problems. On this occasion, the convention center staff had “sold” the seminar organizers into using the exhibit area for the seminar rather than the banquet area we had used in the past.
The difference between the two rooms was that the banquet area had carpeted floors and acoustic ceilings. The exhibit area had polished concrete floors and high, airplane hangar–like ceilings.
Because of this construction, which was designed for shows and exhibits, the room had no sound integrity at all. Every noise bounced off the floor and ceiling and collided with itself, creating echoes and unintelligible noise. When I began speaking, no one in the room, aside from the first few rows, could clearly understand what I was saying. A revolt broke out. People stood up and shouted. They left their seats to argue with the seminar organizer. It was chaos.
The people from the convention center were called and brought into the room. As is customary with convention staff, they denied that there was any problem and then further denied that there was anything they could do. We were stuck with the room and the nonexistent sound system. We were also stuck with a room full of irate businesspeople who had given up a day to attend this seminar, many of them having traveled long distances.
Because audience satisfaction is my highest concern, I made an executive decision. After quickly conferring with the staff of the convention center and determining that a carpeted room would be available two weeks later, I announced to the audience that this seminar was being canceled for today, and would be held again in two weeks. As compensation for their inconvenience, we offered to let each person who had paid to attend the seminar bring another person at no charge two weeks hence.
Some of the participants were considerably displeased, but fortunately most of them, being salespeople and entrepreneurs, rolled with the punches. They accepted that this was an irresolvable situation and agreed to come back in two weeks, which they did. The next time, we were in a different room, the sound system had been checked out thoroughly in advance, and the seminar came off without a hitch.
It is quite common for hotels and convention centers to install cheap and ineffective sound systems. Toward the end of construction, almost all hotels are over budget. They continually look for places where they can cut back on construction costs. The two areas they settle on, over and over, are the sound system and the air conditioning system.
I never cease to be amazed at the number of hotels and meeting facilities that have inferior and inadequate air conditioning as well as poor sound systems.
Almost all the meeting planners and seminar organizers that I work with arrange to bring in their own speakers and sound systems. It may cost a little more money, but it is an insurance policy against a disappointed or irate audience.
The human voice is like a muscle. It can be made stronger with exercise and use. Many people with weak voices have become powerful, confident speakers by building their voices over time with exercise.
One of the best techniques for building your vocal power is to read poetry aloud. Select a piece of poetry that you particularly enjoy, memorize it, and then recite it regularly as you drive or walk around. When you recite a piece of poetry, imagine that you are making a dramatic presentation in front of a large number of people. Put emotion, strength, emphasis, and energy into the words. Go slowly. Change the emphasis on each word in a line of poetry and thereby change the meaning of the line. Imagine that the words are like piano keys. As you recite a line of poetry, change the emphasis from word to word each time you read the line.
My favorite poet is Robert W. Service. His poems are more like verses with wonderful rhyming and alliteration. They are easy to learn and remember. Once you have committed them to memory, you can recite them to yourself, and to others, for the rest of your life.
Each time you recite a line of poetry, as if you were presenting it on the stage, you not only improve with that particular line, you actually become better as a speaker with all your other lines when you stand on the stage in front of an audience.
Another way to build vocal power is to read aloud plays, especially the monologues from Shakespeare. When I was in high school, I memorized Mark Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar from Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar. I still remember and recite that oration to this day for practice and to warm up prior to a talk.
As you develop your ability to speak powerfully, record yourself reading poetry or parts of plays onto a Dictaphone or tape recorder. Replay these recordings over and over, looking for ways to improve your pronunciation, delivery, and pacing.
When my company teaches presentation skills, we instruct the participants to stand up and share a story about any part of their lives with which they feel comfortable. Some people explain their jobs. Others talk about their children. Some recount a recent experience. We instruct the participants to speak loudly and forcefully and to use their hands and gestures to make their points with great emphasis.
We then videotape the brief presentations and play them back. In almost every case, the students are astonished. They had no idea how poorly they came across when they were speaking to a small group of people.
The most common mistakes people make include limited voice projection, stumbling over words by trying to speak too fast, pausing too much or not at all, saying “um” continually, and using insecure or ineffectual body language.
When students are told to be more animated, energetic, and passionate about their subject, and they attempt this during the videotaped presentations, they are almost always amazed at how what they consider to be high levels of animation comes off as small, self-conscious movements.
To expand your vocal range in front of an audience, speak as loudly as you possibly can, almost shouting, on a key point. Expand your arms widely and then let them drop all the way down to your sides. When you see this on a video, you will always be amazed at how limited and self-contained it appears.
My wife, Barbara, was raised in a household where her father worked the graveyard shift and slept during the day. The children were continually admonished to “be quiet.” They developed the habit of speaking in whispers and tiptoeing around the house throughout their childhoods.
When Barbara began learning how to speak in front of a group, she was encouraged to speak louder. She raised her voice to what she felt was a “shout.” But when it was played back on the screen, her “shout” was just slightly above a conversational tone. She was amazed. When you videotape your own presentations, you will be amazed as well.
One of the best ways to improve rapidly as a speaker is to videotape your presentation and then review the videotape with someone who will give you honest feedback. Stop and start the video each 30 or 60 seconds. Discuss how you could have used your voice and body more effectively to make a particular point. Stop the video at certain points and repeat what you said, exactly as you would if you had another chance to give this same presentation.
You can increase your level of vocal mastery by recording your side of telephone conversations and then listening to them afterward. You will be amazed at how ungrammatically, haltingly, and often confusingly, you speak on the phone. But the good news is that every time you record and play back your own voice, you will see and hear different ways that you can improve your delivery and articulation next time.
Perhaps the most powerful vocal technique you will ever learn in speaking is the “Power of the Pause.”
In music, all the beauty is contained in the silences between the notes. In speaking, the drama and power of the speech is contained in the silences that you create as you move from point to point. This is an art that you can learn with practice.
Many speakers are nervous when they stand up in front of an audience. As a result, they speak faster, with a higher pitch to their voices, and without pausing. When you are more relaxed, you speak more slowly, pause regularly, and have a deeper, more authoritative tone of voice. There are four kinds of pauses you can use to put more power into your presentations.
1. The Sense Pause. Use this pause by stopping regularly at the end of a sentence or point to allow people to absorb the new information and to catch up with you.
Listeners cannot handle more than three sentences in a row without going into a form of mental overload. At that point, they become distracted and tune out. Their minds wander and they are only brought back to your talk when you do something that grabs their attention.
There is nothing so attention-grabbing as a pause. When you pause, you bring people up short. They mentally trip and fall into the silence that you have created. They immediately give you back their full attention. Each time you pause, you get them to recenter themselves on you and what you are saying.
2. The Dramatic Pause. Use this pause on a particular point that you want to make stick in listeners’ minds. You can use a dramatic pause immediately before delivering an important point or immediately afterward to allow people to absorb the importance of what you just said.
3. The Emphatic Pause. Use this pause to emphasize a key point. For example, partway into a seminar, I will often stop and ask curiously, “Who is the most important person in this room?” I will then pause and wait for a few seconds while people grapple with the potential answer. Some people will say, “I am!” and some people will say, “You are.” After a deliberate pause, I will then continue by saying, referring to everyone, “You’re right! You are the most important person in this room.”
I will then pause for a few seconds to let that statement sink in. I then continue, “You are the most important person in your entire world. You are important to all the people in your life. And how important you feel you are largely determines the quality of your life.” I then go on to explain the importance of self-respect and self-esteem, and how a person thinks about herself determines the quality of her relationships with others in both her personal and business lives.
4. Sentence-Completion Pause. This is where you make a statement or quote a line with which everyone is familiar. When you give the first half of the line, the audience mentally leans forward to complete the sentence with you. This causes people to engage more closely with you and to listen with greater attentiveness to what you are saying.
When I talk about how business is becoming more competitive and that we must continually increase our own competence if we are going to survive, I say, “When the going gets tough, the tough . . .” Then I pause and wait while the people in the audience complete the sentence by saying, “. . . get going.”
Whenever you use this technique, you must discipline yourself to stop and wait until the audience speaks up and completes the sentence. You then repeat the words to finish the thought. You will have the total attention of the audience.
When you want to emphasize a particular point, you speak louder and stronger. The greater strength and emphasis you put into a statement, the greater relevance and importance your listeners will give it. When you want to share something sensitive or emotional, drop your voice and speak in a more intimate tone.
In a good talk, your rate of speech will be faster and slower, louder and softer, and broken by a variety of different pauses for drama, emphasis, and to allow people to breathe and catch up with you. The more you vary the various vocal elements of your talk, the more interesting and enjoyable it will be for the audience, no matter what the subject.
Your voice is the instrument with which you speak and persuade. There are things that you can do to ensure that your voice and throat are performing at their very best.
Energy is essential for good speaking and voice projection. Before a short talk, you should eat lightly. This ensures that you are bright and alert when speaking and that your brain is functioning at its best.
Before a longer talk, such as a half-day or full-day seminar, it is essential to eat well. Protein is best. A solid-protein breakfast or lunch will give you energy to burn for four to five hours. Protein is brain food, and you need it to think and speak effectively. Your voice will remain strong and your mind will stay clear.
To ensure the best possible voice, only drink room-temperature water prior to and during your speech. Cold water, commonly served with ice cubes, can chill your vocal chords and decrease the amount of warmth in your voice.
There will be times when you have trouble with your voice. When you have a sore throat, it can be difficult to speak clearly and project to the last row in the audience. If this occurs, drink hot water with lots of honey and lemon juice. This miraculous combination has saved me on several occasions.
Because of long flights and short nights, I have a sore throat about once a year. But by continually sipping hot water with honey and lemon during my seminar, my throat remains clear and my voice remains strong. I have been able to speak for eight solid hours, from morning to evening, with a sore throat, by continually massaging my vocal chords with hot water, honey, and lemon juice. You should do the same.
Training and using your voice like a musical instrument, varying your tone and speed, allowing silences in your talk, and delivering to the back row of the audience will enable you to speak with power in every situation.