Knowing your public speaking voice can help build engagement and get results
Building an authentic, engaging public speaking voice that connects and inspires action and change.
Your voice.
As a speaker, your voice.
What does that mean?
Obviously you form words and release them into the air for your audience with your voice.
And this public speaking teaching, or tip, is about that.
But there is another meaning to the word voice.
It is an opinion, an attitude.
My dictionary gives the example of “a dissenting voice”.
As a speaker, your voice, then, is your attitude, your opinion, the way you present those things, the way you present your message.
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Here is the tip that is normally delivered to trainee speakers …
If you speak in a monotone, you will lose the audience.
They will be bored.
Add excitement by varying your pitch.
You can also use change in pitch, volume and speed to emphasize new or important ideas.
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Let’s look at that in two ways.
It’s true.
But to expect someone to insert change in pitch, volume and speed, just to avoid monotony, is useless.
It feels fake and foreign to any idea of communication that the speaker novice might feel as natural,
just reinforcing the negative idea that public speaking is an unnatural performance, rather than authentic communication.
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But what if we saw voice as just an authentic, natural expression of your opinion, your passion, your message, your feeling of connection with your audience;
an authentic, natural expression of the thing that you need to get out into the world,
the thing that you want your audience to hear and know and understand and act on?
Then, surely that change in pitch, volume and speech would come naturally
(unless you have a deadpan presenter style.
I saw it done, just once or twice, most famously by an international champion speaker.
She wore a pair of half-moon glasses over which she glanced at the audience. She delivered mostly in a monotone.
But her material all came from an incredibly insightful dry wit and that delivery style just highlighted her essence, suited her message perfectly.)
For the rest of us, we need our voices to reflect our message, our passion and conviction, our connection with our audiences.
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But that’s not to say that we can’t highlight part of the speech by artistically enhancing voice changes.
There is a certain amount of leeway to an authentic speech that allows a certain amount of performance layered on top of your genuine, conversational tone.
Once you have the appropriate level of conviction embedded in your material,
have defined the feel of the connection you want to develop,
then you can work on adding and enhancing the changes in pitch, volume, and tempo.
Use pause for drama.
Speak quickly to communicate your energy and enthusiasm, and then use a slower rate for emphasis.
You can also deliberately vary the structure of your sentences. A single word can have huge impact used on its own, particularly if it comes after a wordier segment.
All of these are keeping your audience hooked.
Not only do they maintain and strengthen your engagement with your audience
they also reinforce your own confidence and conviction.
Not a word of that was mentioned in the original tip about voice, was it? And yet it works.
Try it some time!!
As a speaker, your voice, then, is your attitude, your opinion, the way you present those things, the way you present your message.
That voice is your brand, as a person, as a speaker.
And if you can define it,
know it in all its details
and all its layers,
you can much more easily speak to engage,
to persuade,
to get results
and much more easily build your confidence and authority
Join me here to learn how to find and define your voice, your speaker brand voice.
