15

The New World of Presentation

I’VE SPENT my life honing and teaching the skills I’ve described so far in this book, and have polished thousands of voices. But in the past few years, I’ve gone beyond helping people make their voices stronger, more resonant, and more expressive. I’ve zeroed in on a particular set of sounds that have completely transformed my work with speakers: the sounds of emotion.

I’d like to give a taste now of what I’ve learned about the ways in which you can consciously adjust the variables of your voice—pitch, pace, tone, volume, and melody—to guide the emotional response of your listeners.

If you’ve ever teared up listening to a TED talk, heard a sermon that made you want to shout Amen!, or been charmed and dazzled by a super salesman, you know the power of sound to move you on a pure feeling level. Were you influenced by the words? Probably. But what grabbed you viscerally were the sonic qualities attached to the message. The sound became the message. Sound reaches straight into the emotions, and I believe that you can shape your voice in particular ways to evoke specific feelings in your audience.

I’ve shown thousands of people how to do this, and in the process, I’ve become known as an influence expert. Because influence is what you gain when you know how to tailor the sounds you make to shape the way people feel about you and what you have to say.

You don’t want to leave your emotional “imprint” to chance. A recent study revealed that within one second of hearing your voice, people form a judgment about you. Researchers played recordings of the word Hello to a group of listeners, and found that they instantly decided how warm, trustworthy, likable, and strong the speaker probably was—an entire first impression. The good news is that you can learn to control what happens in that first second, and all that follow. The sounds of emotion open the door for you and close the deal, whether in a meeting, a webinar, a presentation, or a tête-à-tête—and they do the job almost independently of your words.

In this chapter I’ll help you make the sound/emotion connection that can give you new power as a presenter and amplify your effectiveness in every part of your life.

To Master Emotions, You Need Your Entire Vocal Range—Just Like a Singer

When singers come to me and I show them the parts of the voice, the one piece of information that’s the Holy Grail for them is middle voice. If they didn’t understand it before, it’s as though they just got a message from above that explains everything they’ve been doing wrong in their singing voices. When they can smoothly move from high to low, singers often cry tears of joy.

But when I show speakers middle voice, many of them are underwhelmed. “I get it that my voice is maybe interesting and higher when I use middle,” they tell me, “but why do I need that for speaking? I’m not trying to sing opera. I’ve got no reason to cross that bridge from low to high.”

They think all they need is chest voice, the place their voice usually occupies when they speak lower, and the rest of the range is for when they decide to sing karaoke or (rolling their eyes) try out for The Voice or some other singing competition.

But to be a master influencer, you need access to every part of your voice, because the sound waves you create enter the bodies of your listeners, triggering memories, feelings, and physical changes that determine how receptive they’ll be to you and your message. Just as the melody of a song creates the emotional soundscape that determines whether an “I love you” is an excited discovery or a longing goodbye, the melodies of your speaking voice, shaped and supported by your breath and the other elements that create your sound, send an instant emotional message.

Each part of your vocal range produces sound waves that affect listeners differently. Remember the Three Tenors, the trio of opera greats—Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras—who became a pop sensation in the 1990s? They famously gave a one-night show in Dodger Stadium that was seen by a billion people around the world. Notably, there was never a supergroup called the Three Baritones. Why? Because it’s the higher tenor part of the range that makes the hair stand up on people’s arms. It’s full of frequencies that make people excited enough to fill a stadium and scream. Baritones have a certain gravitas, but they can’t get a crowd on its feet with the same tidal wave of feeling.

To generalize in a very broad way:

Chest voice is thick, strong, weighty, powerful, commanding. It puts across the feeling: I’m in control.

Middle voice has an energetic quality that makes people pay attention and might just get them up and cheering you.

Head voice is full of sounds that people experience as kind, loving, and compassionate.

When you know how to use all of those sounds, you can combine them in ways that make people want to agree with you, or believe you, or give you what you want, whether it’s a deal, a date, or a Kickstarter investment.

I’ve become convinced that success is based on those sounds. If I want a smart and beautiful woman to kiss me on the mouth, I need to persuade her to do so. If I want a bank to give me a loan or people to do business with me, I have to break through the static and make them believe I’m not only a good risk but a good person. I can’t do this with a text or an email or the perfect presentation I’ve written out. I have to do it with my voice.

The danger of having a limited palette of sounds is that you’ll wind up coming across with far less nuance and range than you have in real life. Bosses who live in chest voice may be underlining their sense of control, but they struggle with inspiring, energizing, and connecting with their staff or audience—because no matter what they say, they don’t sound energized. They don’t sound like they care. They’re not believable because their words say one thing and their voices say something completely different.

Four Emotions to Master First

In the first instants of any presentation you make, your audience, whether it’s a single person or a crowd of thousands, wants to know one thing: Is this person likable? You have just a second or two—that might give you four to eight syllables—to convey that you’re honest, you have charisma, and you’re an upbeat and approachable human worth listening to.

1. Start with Happy

So the first emotion you want to master is Happy, because happiness is magnetic, and we tend to equate happiness with success. When people pick up the literal vibrations of happiness from your voice, and see that your physiology matches, they wonder what you’re happy about. It might be because you’re healthy, have money, or offer a cure for the problems of the world—and they’re curious to find out more. This is a lightning-quick impression: We hear and see Happy, Happy feeds and radiates confidence, and confidence signals, “My life is great!” The brain of the listener decides, in that instant, to pay attention.

The basic elements of Happy are increased volume, wide-ranging melody, and a brisk pace. How does that add up to Happy? When you are happy your pulse increases. As your heart rate rises, your body is filled with a blood flow that creates more energy, awareness, and focused attention. As the energy in your body increases, your senses become heightened and you become more attentive to what you see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. Your brain kicks into a well-tuned gear that allows you to process information faster and more efficiently. Here’s how sound relates to each of those changes. As your pulse increases you begin to speak more loudly, simply because your newfound happiness cannot be quieted. You want to tell the world what you just won or did or heard or saw. Happiness isn’t soft! It wants to be shared with everyone around. You want to let the world know, and you can’t do that without extra volume.

You speak more quickly because everything in your body is flowing freely, including the words that are suddenly running out of your mouth because of your excitement, and your desire not to contain them or your feelings. Next, as more blood flows, your senses heighten; you cannot be confined by one monotone note. You find yourself low and high in the range, one moment on the left side of the piano keyboard, the next moment veering to the right. So the intense, extra energy comes out in bigger intervals from the low notes to the high ones, instead of just deliberate, calculated, step-by-step melody swings.

People who hear these sounds register Happy, and the interesting thing is that if you’re brimming with happiness but do not amplify the vocal signals enough to send them to your audience in a second or two, you can miss your opening to connect. To sound as happy as you feel, you need to practice Happy.

On audio 37 on the website you’ll hear me deliver a typical opening line of a talk, first sticking to low volume and chest voice, then with the sounds of Happy. Same content, very different effects.

2. Immediately Move to Grateful

Happiness is a good start, but it’s not enough. People know that you can be happy and still be a jerk. So you can reinforce your identity as a good person by using sounds in a way that communicates that you are honored your audience is listening to you, and lets them know that you sense their attention and appreciate it. Grateful, because it is a response to the audience, is slower and softer than Happy. It’s a pause to say, “I noticed you, and I’m savoring our contact.” Slightly drawing out the syllables of your words creates a subtle reason for the audience to lean in and feel the appreciation you’re sending it. Grateful is gracious—it doesn’t rush. Grateful is softer because it comes from a place of honor, a place that is noncompetitive. Too many conversations are like a boxing match—you punch, they punch. By lowering your volume you are saying, “I do not wish to overpower you, only hear you and show you how much I respect your presence.”

On audio 38, you’ll hear the sounds of Grateful.

3. Master Passionate

Presentation is an energy exchange, and audiences tend to match the level and flavor of the emotion you send out. Your passion for your ideas, your cause, or your product can be infectious when it’s carried on the back of frequencies that say your belief in and enthusiasm for your message is genuine. Genuine passion is big enough to fill a room. Yet it’s not bullying or coercive. This type of passion is not the same as romantic passion. I am specifically talking about passion as it relates to sharing your enthusiasm and excitement about someone or something.

To sound Passionate, start with consistent volume. When I mentioned Happy earlier, I told you to be louder, but Happy showcases a variable volume that rises with your building level of enthusiasm. Passionate needs a solid level of volume that’s carried through most of the words in each sentence. It does not let up. It stays strong and consistent, giving people the subconscious feeling that you are not going to back down, that you are a force of good to be reckoned with and you cannot be silenced.

Melody also changes when you’re Passionate. I often say that you should go up in melody when you get to a comma or a period, especially if you are demonstrating Happy. Now, for Passionate, I want you to work on staying higher in the range most of the time. Then, when you get to that comma or period, I want you to stay on the same note. I don’t want the last note before a comma or a period to go up so much. Passion is long-lasting, and you can suggest that with your voice by keeping the notes more linear, like a timeline. You won’t sound monotone, because you are already on the higher side of your vocal range, and you have a solid amount of volume that signals to people that you’re serious.

Passion sounds more thoughtful than Happy, so the big jumps in melody for Happy are not needed here. We just need smaller steps up and down with the solid volume.

Tune in to audio 39 to hear the sounds that color you Passionate.

4. Let Them Know You’re Confident

Confidence is currency for a presenter. When it flows through your voice, listeners experience your belief in yourself and your message, and give credibility to you and what you’re saying. At the same time, they experience your belief that they can take your message and put it into action, your confidence in them. Confidence is built on the bedrock of your hard work and expertise, and it doesn’t jump up and down begging for attention or respect. It walks into the room assuming both are there, and it returns both to the audience. So to sound Confident, you can have solid volume but never feel like you’re raising your voice.

Confident doesn’t go loud like anger or soft like timidity. It functions like the lead violin in the orchestra, happy and vibrant alone, but ready to play with others when the occasion arises. You should extend the syllables of your words to their longest possible lengths for a Confident sound. To create the sound of Grateful, you sustained syllables a small amount. As you hold out the vowels in Confident mode, you are saying: “Listen to me. Every word counts. Every thought matters. Each word is crafted to share a long-lasting bond that we are creating together.” The Confident sound profile tells your audience: “My words are long and strong, and I am confident that you will be stronger by listening to and communicating with me.”

Listen to audio 40 to hear my demonstration of what Confident sounds like.

Using Emotion Doesn’t Mean Acting, or Going for the Depths

I’ve worked with hundreds of people in settings that allow me to call individuals up from the audience so I can help them improve their presentation skills. What I’ve often noticed is that the lovely people I sat next to at lunch, who were comfortable, entertaining, and candid as we got to know each other over a sandwich, get onstage and suddenly believe they have to act. For many people, that means telling the most dramatic stories they can and delivering them with what I think of as acted-out emotions.

I’m surprised at how often “dramatic” means negative. “Tell me about yourself,” I’ll say, and they’ll go straight to the time their parents got sick, their wife left them, and their dog died.

I know we’re all looking for a universal point of connection, something we’ve all been through, and it’s true that everyone has faced hardship. But even so, your saddest story probably isn’t your most inviting opener.

When you do decide to bring it out, though, here’s the secret: You don’t have to act sad as you tell it. A sad story, like every other story, is best told by a happy, grateful person—the person who made it to the other side, not the person who’s still stuck and suffering.

When you share something tragic, make sure you go up in melody when you get to the last syllable before the commas and the periods. That gives people the impression that the story might have a happy ending. Also, don’t take all the melody out of your voice and hold the lowest note in your range like you are Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh. The words you say are sad enough; you can add a little melody to be sure the listeners know they’re not seated at a funeral.

And for goodness’ sake, no fake tears. When you talk about your challenges and the moments that have tested you, you don’t have to act out your emotions and pretend you’re going to cry. I’ve been onstage with people who’ve told a story about some tragedy in their lives and punctuated it by falling to the ground. I don’t know what effect they wanted, but they didn’t get anything but shock and uncomfortable laughter. Even a Ben Kingsley or a Brad Pitt would have a hard time making that kind of drama seem close to genuine.

You don’t have to learn to be a good actor to be a powerful presenter. You don’t have to be an actor at all, because you’re not acting—you’re guiding listeners through a landscape full of ideas and emotions. Your job is to decide what you want your audience to know and feel, and to use your voice to help them experience it in the present.

You’ll be off to a terrific start if you master Happy, Grateful, Passionate, and Confident, and incorporate those specific sounds where they’re appropriate in your presentations. (In the next chapter, you can see how three very different influence experts tap the power of emotion with their voices and bodies to connect with audiences that number in the millions.)

The Sounds That Bring Men and Women Together: Overlapping Frequencies

We live in a mirroring culture. When you walk down the street and see someone coming toward you, if you say “Hey,” they say “Hey.” We look for signs of danger, and if we don’t see them, we want to connect. We adopt the accents and tones of the people we’re with, because we resonate with mirrored sounds—they make us feel safe and included. (That’s another reason your sounds of Happy, Grateful, Passionate, and Confident draw the same sounds and emotions from your listeners.)

Until boys and girls hit puberty, they enjoy the powerful connection that comes with sharing precisely the same frequencies when they speak. Their vocal cords are about the same length and thickness, and their voices are in the same range. But at adolescence, their larynxes and cords grow at different rates, and boys wind up with the larger sound-making equipment. Their voices drop approximately an octave, and at that point, something fundamental shifts between the male and female of our species that stands in the way of our ability to communicate across gender boundaries. Our sounds are out of sync.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with a way to bring men and women back together sonically, and I’ve found a useful tool for reconnecting the genders and giving each side a new level of trust and influence with the other. There are parts of the range where our frequencies still overlap, and I believe that learning to use those frequencies in speaking to people of the opposite gender is a key to helping each side understand and be heard by the other. When we use our common frequencies, I believe we communicate with fewer barriers and gain greater closeness.

A man who can leave his chest voice to use middle and even head voice occasionally can enter the zone of overlapping frequencies, the sonic range that lets him approach women through the sounds of a trusted equal. It’s not a foreign skill—men do this all the time when they talk to children and let their voices go lighter. It’s almost reflexive, because they don’t want to scare the kids. But interestingly, most men generally don’t think to change frequencies, or at least let their voices enter the higher part of their range, when they speak to women.

I’m convinced that if they did, they’d find they could reach women in a way that they haven’t been able to while locked in chest voice. Many men to whom I introduce this idea balk. They don’t want to “sound like a girl.” But they begin to entertain the possibility seriously when I point out that women are the number one buyers in the world. Women influence the purchases of their families, control much of their own spending, and shape markets around the world. The biggest mistake a businessman, or any man, can make is to fail to use all the tools he has to influence the women he deals with and wants as clients, customers, and partners. I’m not talking about manipulation. I’m encouraging all of us to enter our vocal common ground.

I remind men to talk UP to women, letting their voices rise into middle, which mirrors a part of women’s range, and adding melody and the sound of Happy to neutralize the sometimes threatening tones of the deeper male voice. They can also limit sudden loud volume bursts. Men: Women do not like it when they perceive that you are trying to overpower them in conversations. By getting suddenly louder you not only scare them at a deep level, you also put them on the defensive, making them feel less than equal in the communication.

Women, conversely, can command attention in a group of men by learning to use more chest voice. Once again, I’m not suggesting that women try to sound like men. Rather, they can remind men with sound waves alone of their common humanity and intelligence when they incorporate elements of the male voice as they speak. Establishing that commonality, the “Hey, I’m just like you” connection that we all once had and now must work to build, is easy to do with the voice, even without words. Women can also stop trying to go super-airy and soft with men, thinking that those sounds always generate romantic attention and appeal. Quite often the airy, soft sounds just create more separation, making men feel as though there is no power or strength on the women’s side that is worth engaging with. No one wants to have a long communication or relationship with a cotton ball. So, women, understand that if you try to sound airy and light, you can easily be dismissed as not special enough by the men you want to impress.

Listen to audio 41 to hear a man’s voice and a woman’s speaking in the golden zone where their frequencies overlap. Then try introducing those sounds into your conversations and presentations.

To Have Emotional Impact, You Have to Be Bigger Than You Think

As I’ve pointed out to many singers, to communicate all the emotion you want your audience to feel, you have to be larger than life. I repeat that often when I teach because in my experience almost everyone uses too little volume and melody, too few changes in pace. Especially as a presenter, you’ll want to fill up the entire space in front of you with sound and engulf the people you’re communicating with in a sound stream that’s full of melody.

This may be uncomfortable at first, but you can grow into the voice that will have the emotion and influence you want by practicing. I know it’ll take courage to try out your “new” voice and see how people react. But summon all you’ve got and start big. Don’t judge yourself, just pay attention to how people respond to you differently.

People who know you well might be startled, and their immediate reaction may well be, “What happened to the quiet mumbling guy? Who the heck are you?”

So the best way of trying out all you’ve learned, and all the sounds and emotions you want to play with, is to take them out for a test drive in front of strangers or people who don’t see you every day. Communicate in a way that emphasizes the sounds of Happy and Passionate, and look for people to come back at you with the same qualities in their voices and communication.

You may think this is way too risky to try. But if you’ve been doing the exercises I’ve taught you, you already have a strong voice filled with melody and volume. You’ve weeded out the nasality, the squeaky hinge sound, and the airy sounds in your voice. You’re entirely ready to present the new you to one new person—because you’re already polished.

I’d also like to remind you that the vast majority of people you’re likely to encounter have probably never thought about their voices, much less paid attention to using specific sounds to express and evoke emotion.

As you take your bigger, more expressive voice into the world, your goal is to stay engaged in what’s going on at the moment. The best presenters have learned not to step outside themselves and judge what they’re doing as they do it. They trust themselves to flow with what’s in front of them—and that takes practice.

I practice at the dry cleaner and car wash, with the checkout people in the grocery store, at the coffee shop on the corner. I meet people with happiness and gratitude and passion, and I always have something to say, even if it’s “I’m so glad it’s not raining today.” I’m out there with the intent of being sure there’s volume and melody and controlled emotion coming out of me whenever I speak, so that when I need to step onstage, or be effective in a meeting, I’m ready.

No one is going to break into your cocoon and pull you out as a butterfly. But that’s hardly a problem, because you can do it yourself. Go out and start practicing. Connecting. Influencing. You have nothing to lose.