I can think of any childhood friend and recall the sound of his voice, and I believe we can all do the same.  Your voice is an auditory thumb print, and it gets smeared on the memory of your listeners.

Yet few of us are happy with our voices.  We hear them on recordings of any kind and we’re shocked.  And we should be.  A lot of us have voices that do not do us justice.

Here are the 3 most common voice problems that could be holding you back.

Uptalk

Also known as Valley Girl, this is a pitch pattern that rises at the end of sentences that would normally resolve on a downward slope.  Repeated, the rising intonation causes the speaker to sound tentative, as though she were asking for agreement.  Anything repeated too often is annoying and destracting, but this vocal habit causes the speaker to lose any trace of credibility and gravitas.

Glottal Fry

Again, this is primarily a girl-thing.  Not sure why, but it seems to be more common than in the past.  A speaker with glottal fry grinds her vocal chords in the back of her throat when she speaks, so her voice sounds like she’s croaking, or frying her voice, rather than supporting it with her breath.

The most pronounced frying comes at the end of sentences, when the speaker has run out of breath to support the sound.  I even hear glottal fries on the radio, and it makes me think the mouth of the speaker is closed, and that she’s too lazy and self-important to generate any vocal energy.  A glottal fryer makes the listener come to her.  She is not making the effort to reach out to them.

Compression

This is a both-sex-thing.  And mostly a young person thing.  It’s basically speaking too fast, or machine-gun speaking, but it tends to come in bursts, rather than in a continuous flow.

For instance, a speaker could be walking calmly through his thoughts, and then suddenly burst in to a sprint through a particular phrase so that all consonants are lost (burs in oo a sprin through a particular phrase.)  Listeners are polite and don’t say anything, but they often have to work hard (offen hata wur har) to decipher what was said (wa wa seh), and while they are deciphering, they aren’t listening.

Again, this tends to happen at the end of a sentence or a thought, and it undermines the speaker because he sounds as if he thinks that what he has to say is not worth listening to and that his inner word processor has lost the functionality of the space bar.

Your career depends on how you speak.  These vocal habits make you look bad, and you should, and can, clean up your act.

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.

Once again, I am the speech coach who has run into a very accomplished person who mumbles.  He’s on the fast track at a major American corporation, and his boss has gotten word that senior people can’t understand him when he presents.

Receptive to help and concerned about the consequences of this life-long habit, he is struggling to be mindful of his speech.  Since the physical process of speaking is something we all do without conscious thought, the effort to be aware of the placement of his tongue and lips is a challenge.

He’s getting there.  He’s louder than he was, which is great, and he’s keeping his voice up all the way to the ends of his sentences, but he still needs to slow down and land on every vowel and consonant.  He tends to zip through syllables.  For instance, for constitutional he says cons-too-tional, leaving out that middle ti syllable.

When these mistakes pile up during a high stakes presentation, it makes him appear nervous, and makes him harder to understand.

Smart guy.  He shouldn’t be held back by something mechanical like not knowing where to place his tongue and lips when speaking plain old English.  Of course it’s nothing that voice and speech training can’t fix.

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.  Sign up for our presentation tips and learn more about us at http://www.simswyeth.com/.

Most of us need training because: 

1. We are unaware.
2. We don’t do what we want, or know how, to do.
3. We don’t practice.

We are not aware of how we come across.  We have blind spots.  Blind areas.  Our education is incomplete.  We have not read the great books on the subject of effective speech.  We have not trained under masters of the art.   We need to expand our awareness.

Even when we know what we should do, or want to do, we don’t do it.  Doing it a new way is hard.  It takes time.  It feels weird.  We experience a drop in our abilities before we see a rise. 

We need a teacher, mentor, trainer, guru, or coach to keep a tab on us.  We need that coach to give us the right tools—the right suggestions—convince us that his or her ideas are the right ones, and then attend to us, patiently, until we are able to make use of the optimal techniques he or she is offering.

We need greater awareness of ourselves and of the inherited traditions of highly effective speech, and we need a chance to practice those techniques under the watchful eye of a coach. 

All top performers have coaches.  They used to be called Dutch Uncles—guys you went to for advice.  Now the uncles specialize in narrow little areas of life, and get paid for their knowledge and their ability to help you implement that knowledge.

You need Dutch Uncles and coaches because this stuff is important, it doesn’t come naturally, and it takes time and effort to make it real.

Sims Wyeth is an executive speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.