Executive Speech Coach NJ - Sims Wyeth » voice and speech training nj

Presentation Tips: All in one book!

SimsBeth — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:55:13 +0000

Heads up! Those of you who read Presentation Pointers may be interested in buying a paperback or e-book version of:

A Zen monk had sweaty palms: Pointers on the path to better public speaking

The Tire They Want to Kick

SimsBeth — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 02:09:00 +0000

A few years ago, I was on a panel at the Princeton Club in New York. The subject was “best practices in raising assets.” At some point in the meeting, I said to a roomful of hedge fund managers that we should all take a consultative approach to selling our strategies, a suggestion that made the audience bristle. To remind you, the consultative approach suggests the best salespeople uncover the customer’s business problem through effective questioning, diagnose causes and consequences, and recommend solutions that will take away the pain.

But, as I was told, in raising assets for alternative investment strategies, this approach may not work, and in fact could be irrelevant. The problem potential investors have is patently obvious: they want to increase return and lower risk. And, I was told, they will almost certainly refuse to tell you anything about their portfolio of investments, thereby cutting off the possibility of you conducting an empathetic discussion about their business needs.

If this is the case, and I understand it usually is, then our best hope is to tell our story well and respond to their questions with candor. How can we do this so that we increase the likelihood that we can raise sufficient assets in the required time frame?

The Investor’s Point of View

One way is to reconsider asset raising from the investor’s point of view. At the core of the decision to hire a manager is the question of risk. While the investor will certainly have rational business concerns about your track record, performance, team turnover, etc., they might also be concerned about personal risk. After all, the decision they make will reflect on their judgment, and they may be rewarded for the performance of the manager they hire. This is especially true for large institutional investors, where lack of trust can cause them to delay their decision or prevent them from responding favorably.

So in a sense, we are back to a consultative approach to asset raising. The investor has a problem – he is full of skepticism, distrust, and fear. When we meet with him, it is our job to overcome these obstacles and persuade him that we are capable of meeting both his rational business needs and his personal emotional needs for security.

Persuasion

There are two ways to persuade people. The first is by using conventional rhetoric, which is what most executives are trained in. It’s an intellectual process – you build your case by giving statistics and facts and quotes from authorities. It’s what we do with our pitch books. But there are two problems with rhetoric. First, the people you’re talking to have their own set of authorities, statistics, and experiences. While you’re trying to persuade them, they are arguing with you in their heads. They’re questioning your selection and arrangement of the numbers. They’re comparing you to the six other firms they’ve been talking to. And second, if you do succeed in persuading them, you’ve done so only on an intellectual basis. That’s not good enough, because people are not inspired by reason alone.

The other way to persuade people, and ultimately a much more powerful way, is by uniting your strategy with an emotion. The best way to do that is by telling a compelling story – about yourself, your strategy, the founding of your fund, and all the obstacles you’ve overcome, and continue to overcome, as you strive to serve the needs of your investors.

In a story, you not only weave a lot of information into the telling but you also arouse your listener’s emotions and energy. The story you tell about your approach can communicate who you are, where you come from, where you’re going, what you believe, all in a vivid way that will enable your listeners to connect with you.

Persuading with a story is hard. Any intelligent person can sit down and make lists. A standard recitation of the fund’s history, staff, approach and accomplishments may be traditional, but your audience might very well find it repetitive and indistinguishable from hundreds of others they’ve experienced. It takes rationality but little creativity to design an argument using conventional rhetoric.

However, it demands vivid insight and storytelling skill to present an idea that packs enough emotional power to be memorable. If you can harness imagination and the principles of a well-told story, then you get people to truly listen, nod their heads and reach across the table to shake your hand, rather than sitting there slouching toward indifference as you round up the usual facts and figures.

Telling the Story Face-to-Face

The interesting thing is whatever you do in a face-to-face meeting with potential investors, you and your strategy become a story. While they’re listening, they’re telling themselves a story about you. When you leave, they tell others the story of your meeting. You become a story, filed away in their library of experiences.

Cognitive psychologists describe how the human mind, in its attempt to understand and remember, assembles the bits and pieces of experience into a story, beginning with a personal desire, a life objective, and then portraying the struggle against the forces that block that desire. Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points.

For instance, the traditional pitch follows a predictable pattern, and in fact, most funds will make more or less the same claims about their managers, strategies, processes, and teams. This is a safe approach, but not optimal. Instead, you want to display the struggle between expectation and reality in all its nastiness. Tell the truth, in other words.

Most companies and executives sweep the dirty laundry, the difficulties, the antagonists, the struggle under the carpet. They prefer to present a rosy and boring picture to the world. But as a storyteller, a blood and guts guy who’s out there every day running money for his clients, you want to position the problems in the foreground and then show how you’ve overcome them.

The typical positive, polished pitch doesn’t ring true. They know you’re not spotless. They know everyone slants their statements to make their company look good. Positive boilerplate actually works against you because it foments distrust among the people you’re trying to build trust with. When you tell the story of your struggles against real antagonists, your audience sees you as an exciting, dynamic person.

I was pretty upset with myself when I left the Princeton Club, thinking that I’d demonstrated a lack of understanding of the hedge fund market. But in the end, I think I was right. If you take a consultative approach to raising assets and look at the investor’s business and professional problems, you discover several things: (i) they see a lot of pitches that look and sound the same, (ii) they are skeptics, and rightly so, (iii) the decision to hire a manager represents both a business and personal risk.

In the end, given relative parity between your strategy and others, their decision is about you, the manager. You’re the tire they want to kick. If you dramatize the challenges you face, and tell stories about how you overcome them, you make yourself more real and increase the awareness of your alpha. And that should help you raise assets more efficiently.

The 3 Greatest Presentation Skills

SimsBeth — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:30:05 +0000

I came to the career of speech coach and presentation strategist from the world of the theater. I was an actor, director, and writer of plays for 15 years before I joined a consulting firm that served the pharma industry. At this point in 2011 I’ve been counseling business leaders, experts, scientists, researchers, sales people and marketing folk for 21 years.

I have grown.

With my first clients, I was all about the physical stuff, the acting stuff: eye contact, voice and body language. It was all I knew: I had no idea what anyone in business was talking about.

Then I got interested in presentation structure. “Have a grabber,” I’d say, “Something to make them sit up and listen.”

I also found myself urging clients to have a call to action at the end of their talks. I quoted Confucius: “To talk much and arrive nowhere is the same as climbing a tree to catch a fish.”

And of course, I was advocating that they limit the number of points they make in their talks and on their slides.

For ten years or so, these bits of advice kept me off the bread lines. However, there were at least three problems with offering up these helpful tips.

1. My competitors were saying the same things.

2. It felt cosmetic instead of transformative.

3. I was giving everyone the same advice.

As a result, my business suffered, I was frustrated because I wasn’t truly making an impact on people’s lives, and I was bored saying the same thing all the time—which is the curse of the advice giver.

What to do with this mid-life crisis, this search for meaning and integrity? Never mind that I also needed to build my savings for retirement, pay off my child’s mountainous college debt, and maintain my self-image as a card-carrying member of the upper middle class.

I stumbled around for a long time, quite honestly, holding it together with duct tape and chewing gum. But I think I may have stumbled on a few ideas that could restore my sense of self-worth. Let me explain.

It is my belief that presentation skills get greater as they become more meaningful for the audience. This means that a presentation skill that makes the speaker look good is not as great as a presentation skill that benefits the audience.

Many skills that are taught by the likes of me are cosmetic, more packaging for the speaker than meaningful contribution to the audience. This is not to say that packaging is unimportant. It is important for the speaker because it helps to predispose the audience to see the speaker as a trustworthy source of information. An example of packaging you may have heard is the injunction to dress for the job you want, not the job you have.

Cosmetics such as this do nothing to strengthen the actual intellectual , emotional, or ethical appeal of the speaker. In fact, they make it harder for the audience to discern the truth. And when such packaging overpromises and under-delivers, trust is broken, the speaker loses influence, and the audience looks elsewhere for meaningful value.

Should the speaker wear more humble clothing and lose his chance to shine? No, not at all. Looking good is a good presentation skill, but it’s not a great one because it benefits the speaker and not the audience. A great presentation skill provides a meaningful contribution to the audience. The improved image, authority and influence of the speaker is a by-product of that contribution.

So here’s the question. Whether as a leader, sales person, researcher, or influencer of any kind…what are the great presentation skills that one must demonstrate in order to make a meaningful contribution to an audience?

The speaker must:

1. Take apart the thinking of the audience on a given topic and rearrange it so that it’s new, improved, and widely embraced by the audience.

2. Move the audience out of a state of contemplation and into a state of action or preparation for action.

3. Give himself so generously and authentically to the audience, and create such a memorable experience for them, that he forges a personal bond with the majority of his listeners.

Please keep in mind that I do not claim these are ironclad laws of the presentation platform. Rather, they are my attempt to define great presentation skills (as opposed to merely good ones), those skills that would enable a speaker to make a meaningful contribution to an audience.

Ask yourself, can you do any of the above three things sitting, slouching, mumbling or standing with your hands in your pockets? I believe the answer is YES. Can you do any of these with poor eye contact, disheveled clothing, and awkward body language? Yes.

Of course a pleasing personality, a lively voice, and expressive, even colorful body language could help. But strangely, such attributes can harm as well, because polished speakers can become slippery ones, and slippery turns people off.

Let me supply examples. Charlie Green of Trusted Advisor Associates took my thinking about sales and rearranged it. I now think of selling as problem solving, as doing well by doing good, so now it’s a lot easier to pick up the phone and prospect.

Barack Obama got me out of my state of contemplation and into a state of action. For me, he was exciting, new, and a welcome change from the previous administration. I was against him at first because of his lack of experience, but he got me fired up, and out of my seat. I took action.

Beth Frates is a physician at Harvard Medical School. She speaks on the subject of exercise—her theme is exercise is medicine. Not only is that a powerful idea, but she has all the science to back it up, and the stories to make it compelling. Plus, she’s working on changing the role of the physician from expert to coach, or change agent, with the interpersonal skills to help you do what’s right.

Good presentation skills benefit the speaker. Great presentation skills benefit the audience. I urge you to start the journey from good to great.

Presentation skill: Problem definition

SimsBeth — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:00:36 +0000

Our audiences are interested in their own problems and how to fix them. This is old news to anyone who has studied the arts of rhetoric, persuasion, and of course advertising. If you can define the problem faced by your audience, you build your credibility and engender in them a need – an itch – to solve the problem.

So how and when can a public speaker talk about the problems of the audience? The answer is: right off the bat.

A few years ago at Cisco, the sales organization got together for a major overhaul. Individual sales guys were hoarding client information, which benefited them but undermined the progress of the enterprise and the quality of the company’s service.

Among the speakers was a young woman speaking on a new subject: the data warehouse. She stood in front of a large auditorium filled 99% with men, and said simply, “Cisco, we have a problem.”

You could have heard a silicon wafer drop.

She went on to describe the problem, its causes and consequences, and only after she had finished her problem definition did she introduce the solution: the data warehouse.

There is a point at which the presentation skill of problem definition becomes tedious. But it doesn’t come as soon as you think. If you truly understand the issue, and tell stories that illustrate the problem, then you have got the audience hooked emotionally and intellectually: they are going to listen hard to your problem definition, and your proposed solution.

You may get push back, because every idea gets scrutinized by critics and skeptics, but that’s good – they are pressure-testing your reasoning. And it’s better to get them involved in a discussion than to have them ignore you.

The presentation skill of problem definition helps your audience move forward in the right direction, creates dialogue, and gives birth to creativity and innovation. Plus it makes you look like one smart cookie.

Good presenters are problem solvers.
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.

The purpose of presentation skills

SimsBeth — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 19:54:12 +0000

When we watch American Idol, we may talk about the competitors’ singing skills, but what we really care about is whether or not they created a little moment of magic for us.

When we go to the symphony or the opera, we may discuss the mechanics of the fingering required of the first violinist in Bach’s B Minor Mass, but what we really care about is the enchantment we experienced, the transport we felt as we were taken out of ourselves by the music.

When we attend a business presentation, we may momentarily think about the presenter’s ease and comfort at the front of the room, but what we care about, and remember, is the value of the experience, what we learned, and how much it shed new light on an issue important to us.

Our audiences want to get our big idea, and have that idea illuminate their battlefield like a flare, so they can do business better, or make a better decision. They don’t give a hoot about our presentation skills unless they’re having trouble grasping what we’re trying to say. They’re looking for an “Aha!” moment, not for body language or eye contact.

It reminds me of my transition from theater into business. In theater we spoke about the truthfulness of the moment, about what the actor was trying to say with the words, about his expression of intention, his ability to be in the moment – responsive and alive to the immediate circumstances.

In business, I was suddenly engulfed in conversations about the mechanics of speaking – how to stand, gesture, move, and use your eyes. It was all about appearing, and not about being – being enthusiastic, being full of conviction, being able to bring new ideas to life.

I recognize that actors have scripts written for them – scripts they memorize, and that they are pretending to be passionate, or ambitious, or sly. So do we. But the audience doesn’t want to see acting skills. Acting skills are a given. The audience wants to be deceived to such an extent that they believe that what is happening on the stage is really happening. That it’s real. We want to suspend our disbelief, and live vicariously through the dramatic (or comedic) struggle to which we are witnesses. Otherwise, without the illusion, we don’t get the emotional kick. When we see the mechanics, the illusion is destroyed.

The art of presenting lies in hiding the art. As long as you can suspend the audience’s disbelief – in other words, get them to believe in you and your message, you’re doing your job.

Your skills are in service to the creation of value for the audience, and like all good servants, they’re at their best when they don’t draw attention to themselves.

Scientific Presentations

SimsBeth — Thu, 05 May 2011 17:29:03 +0000

Over the last few years, I have worked to help discovery scientists within the pharmaceutical and biotech industries make persuasive scientific presentations in order to sell their ideas for new drugs to decision makers.

The challenges were many. Often, scientists had to report to their bosses in Europe via video conference. The image projected in Switzerland was a wide-angle shot of six people sitting at a table in New Jersey. It was difficult to know which person was talking.

English was being spoken in a variety of accents. America is blessed to have brilliant people from all over the globe come to work in our pharmaceutical and biotech industries, but understanding each person, on both sides of the Atlantic, through a wire thousands of miles long, was a continual challenge.

When English is spoken as a second language, it is often delivered in the pitch pattern and rhythm of the first language, which makes it hard for us Americans to grasp, and perhaps even harder for those who come from yet another country and whose first language is different from that of the speaker.

Sensitive cultural issues arose. In some European cultures, one does not tell a senior scientist overseeing a vast number of crucial experiments that his presentations are incomprehensible. One calls on a consultant to say such things, if in fact the scientist in question agrees to meet with the consultant.

And then there’s the problem of the traditional approach to scientific communication. The language, form, and conventions of published scientific papers- which spill over into scientific presentations- could almost have been devised to conceal information.

Even in conversation, scientists use words that are perfectly ordinary within science but are simply never heard at a bar, dinner party, or on the side of a soccer field. When speaking to marketers, scientists have to learn to stand back from their own work and see it as strangers might.

They need to ask themselves what is the most significant thing about their research? Is it that they can’t account for 70% of the efficacy since the mechanism of action is unknown? What is the detail, the issue, the problem that will make most people sit up and pay attention?

Many distinguished scientists- Richard Feynmann, J.B.S. Haldane, and Peter Medawar among them- knew how to hold a popular audience, and they weren’t afraid to address their peers with the same vividness and economy. In fact, their fame became inseparable from their gift for words.

Scientists can be great communicators. Carl Sagan, Primo Levi, E.O. Wilson were (are) great examples. They each had the engaging quality of enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is derived from a Greek term that means divinely intoxicated.

In order to be useful to their companies, and to society, scientists must be able to sell their ideas. Most scientists can think clearly. Many can write clearly. Fewer are spellbinding on the presentation platform, but thoughts that are clearly expressed, especially in live meetings, have greater potential value, and bring credit to the presenter.

How to persuade like an advertiser

admin — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:21:44 +0000

My friend Wick Smith told me about this approach to messaging. Wick has been in advertising for many years, primarily in Asia. He speaks Japanese and is an incredibly resourceful and creative person.

The Wick Smith Approach is based on the four elements in an ad:

The Headline, The Image, The Body Copy, The Logo

Each one has a role to play, and each viewer will have his or her own preference as to which is most important.

The Headline is the big idea or the claim being made by the ad. People who like the big picture and avoid the details prefer to read the headline. Since people make decisions out of fear or desire, a headline should target one of those emotions.

The Image appeals to the visual thinker. The Image could evoke a problem that needs to be solved, or an aspiration that the viewer has. Either one stimulates the emotions and moves the viewer to action.

The Body Copy is meant to give the reader reasons to buy—some would even say “permission” to buy. For instance, expensive chocolate companies often compose body copy trying to convince prospects that they are “worth it,” and deserve a little luxury in their lives.

Finally, the Logo is meant to build the relationship. It is the identity of the company, and therefore the sign of trust and reliability, or perhaps of excitement (Ferrari) or innovation (Apple), or perhaps luxury (Tiffany).

Speeches and presentations need all four of these elements.

First, the Headline. The speaker should be able to articulate the Headline, or premise of the talk, in one simple sentence. For instance, “Everyone can become a better speaker,” is the premise of this blog (and this article.)

PowerPoint should be used to supply visuals to support the spoken word, or if the speaker chooses to NOT USE POWERPOINT, he can tell stories or use metaphors and analogies to paint pictures in the mind of the listeners.

In a presentation, Body Copy is the proof you marshall under your claims. Each slide should have a Headline that makes a claim, and the imagery or data on the slide should supply the evidence that the headline is a valid conclusion.

It is ill-advised to put body copy on a slide because it is hard for the audience to read slides and listen at the same time.

Much better to put dramatic imagery on your slides and put the detailed narrative in the notes section of the PowerPoint page.

Finally, in a presentation, the Logo is YOU. You are not a corporation. You are a person, and your behaviors and look should be consistent with the message you strive to impart.

Furthermore, the presentation should be all about the audience, not all about how cool you, your company, product, or ideas are. So, in a sales presentation, I suggest that you remove your company Logo from all your slides except the title slide. Instead, put your prospect’s Logo on the slides.

Conclusion: Good ads persuade us to buy through four channels of communication:

1. The claim, generalization, or summary headline

2. The details and evidence to prove that the headline is true and valid

3. An image that enables us to feel the benefit of the offering

4. A logo, or a branded source of information, that strives to earn our trust in the argument being made.

Speeches and presentations have similar elements: Key take-aways! Data, facts and other forms of proof (such as stories) that justify the key-takeaways! And Imagery on the slides or created in the mind of the audience by the speaker telling vivid stories!

And then there is you, the speaker, the source of the information. Your comfort, confidence and ease on stage help you generate the willing suspension of disbelief amongst your listeners, which allows them to take a chance on you and your idea.

Sims Wyeth is a speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills andpublic 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.

Voice and Speech Training

simswnj — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:18:45 +0000

Henry Higgins was right. The moment we open our mouths to speak, people judge us. If we have New York accents, we get stereotyped. If we speak with a southern drawl, same thing, different stereotype. And if we speak like a professor, I would bet that many people avoid us like the plague.

Of course, we can overcome these stereotypes with the positive qualities of our character. We can sound like Tony Soprano and act like Mr. Rogers. But the lingering effect of the stereotype remains.

In our practice at Sims Wyeth & Co. we are asked to improve the voice and speech of employees whose are having trouble being heard. This takes several different forms.

First, there are those who have difficulty getting to the point. This is most likely a thinking problem and a habit with obscure roots, not a voice and speech problem.

Then there are those who speak English as a second language. We are a country of immigrants, but when 12 individuals in one department come from 10 different countries, there are many accents and many sets of ears trying to listen to many different pronunciations of English. If the conversations are crucial to strategic business issues, it’s a problem.

Then we have some good old American mumblers. These people need to learn how to use their articulators.

And then there are fast talkers, slow talkers, close talkers, soft talkers, and too-loud talkers. And up-talkers, nose-talkers, and talkers who sound like they have marbles in their mouths.

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching 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.

Voice and Speech Training: The Most Human Instrument

simswnj — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:42:35 +0000

Everywhere on earth man is born with a voice able to rouse households from their slumbers.

And everywhere in business, he struggles to keep his listeners attentive to his presentations.

Vocal power

We underestimate the importance of the human voice and we do so at our peril.

Surgeons are more likely to be sued when their tone is too authoritative. Air traffic control is more apt to keep planes in fatally prolonged holding patterns when pilots request permission to land without expressing urgency. And business presenters, who may be dealing with dry material, are doomed to lose listeners if they cannot set their reasoning on fire with passion and conviction.

Reason with passion

Of course, too much passion may lack credibility, but business presenters would do well to communicate excitement! I often hear from clients that they can’t express excitement because the material is so dry. And I reply that the drier the material, the greater the need to make it relevant and appealing to the audience.

Think of a pair of scissors. One blade is reason, the other is passion. In a good presentation, it is hard to know which blade does the cutting.

The voice that lost the client

One of my first clients was the consulting arm of KPMG now known as BearingPoint. When they called me, the firm had lost a major sale because, they were told, the presenters had sounded bored. The prospect did not want to hire a firm that was not excited about the engagement. They wanted me to help, and here’s what I did.

Human bag-pipe

The first thing I did was teach them to breathe properly-by filling the lungs and then contracting the abdominal muscles to drive the breath up and out to strike the vocal cords with force and thus create a full sound.

Sound making for humans is the same as it is for bag pipes. Pipers fill their goat skins (their bags) with air, and then squeeze the skins to release the air to produce sound. Same with people-sort of.

We fill our lungs with air, then squeeze our lungs with our lower abdominal and intercostal muscles (those between the ribs) to push out the air and create vibrations in our vocal cords which produce speech.

However, if we don’t take in enough air, or we don’t use our muscles properly, we won’t have enough energy to make our voices rich and powerful.

Uncork the bottle neck

Next I had to uncork the bottle neck. It’s amazing how many people try to talk without really opening their mouths and throats. In order to teach this basic skill, I introduced the yawning exercise, which stimulates the throat to open wide, and the “Floppy Jaw” exercise, which teaches how to open the mouth all the way for each and every syllable spoken. Both these exercises made the consultants sound like morons, which is very upsetting for people who are 1000% invested in appearing to be highly intelligent. But the experience reminded them that “to speak is to make a noise,” and noise, like music, has emotional qualities.

“You won’t believe it!”

Then, I modeled the “You won’t believe it,” exercise. I asked each of them, one at a time, to cup their hands around their lips and call out across the Grand Canyon to their friend Joe.

“Hey, Joe! You won’t believe it! I found the most amazing thing! You gotta get over here to see this!”

“What is it?” Joe yells back.

Here I would coach and say, “More excited! More amazed! More buzzing with energy!”

The exuberant, long-distance dialogue would continue.

“I found the most amazing consulting firm. They have this process designed to streamline the financial systems of global companies. It’s amazing!”

“All right, I’m coming,” Joe yells.

At first, clients struggle with the exercise, but soon they get the picture. They realize that a significant portion of their emotional impact on others depends on their verbal and vocal expressiveness.

Phone charisma

Most of us think that charisma-that magical appeal that some people exude-has something to do with beauty! It doesn’t. It has more to do with communication-the ability to send and receive emotional signals.

It is widely believed that the ability to communicate emotion over the phone, without the support of gestures and facial expressions, is a good indicator of your capacity for charisma.

To explore this, I asked my consultants to team up with a colleague and sit down in separate chairs with their backs to each other, taking turns speaking as though on the phone.

They either improvised a conversation, or used a script like this:

Jack? This is Jill. You won’t believe what just happened. Frank went into Bob’s office and told him he was quitting. (Listening) Yes! Flat out. He told him everything-that he was sick and tired of Frank’s meddling, that he was tired of being the last one to know, and…(listening) He’s already gone. He took his coat and left. Cindy saw him storm out. He was beet red-I mean crimson!

While each participant took the part of Jack, the other consultants served as Olympic judges. At the end of each performance they held up papers with scores. The room resounded with lusty cheers for great vocal variety.

On a more technical note

English works best when a change of pitch occurs at every stressed syllable. To address this aspect of vocal expressiveness, I gave them a passage to read aloud .

Developed in 1941 by a committee from the faculties of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, among others, it describes a vision of a liberally educated person.

The liberally educated man is articulate, both in speech and in writing. He has a feel for language, a respect for clarity and directness of expression, and a knowledge of some language other than his own. He is at home in the world of quantity, number and measurement. He thinks rationally, logically, and objectively, and knows the difference between fact and opinion. When occasion demands, however, his thought is imaginative and creative rather than logical. He is perceptive, sensitive to form, and affected by beauty.

I found that introducing movement techniques helped with identifying speech patterns. As participants used their hands to “hit” the stressed syllables, they more readily brought emphasis and meaning to the text.

In addition to using the body to connect to expressiveness, I also asked them to use their imaginations. Some people responded to the suggestion that they speak like an eccentric British professor. Once they allowed themselves the freedom, they began to pontificate with greater color and expression.

And there was one consultant who channeled a pompous Southern Senator. It helped him to imagine he was stepping inside the skin of the senator, just as a hand fits inside a puppet. You step into the skin of a good-ole-boy Senator from Alabama, and all of a sudden, you’ve got a voice that can raise the rafters.

Caveat speaker

These exercises are meant for practice. They are stretching exercises for the voice. Just as dancers extend their legs at the barre, and pianists practice scales, speakers need to awaken their most human instrument-the voice.

And if you know someone who thinks this approach is foolishness, let me give you a few words of advice.

Admittedly, we have fixed traits-such as shyness, perhaps, or an unflappable reserve. But we also have free traits-behaviors that are outside our comfort zones that we can embrace for projects aligned with our deepest values.

For instance, many professors are introverts, but in order to earn a living, they force themselves to give lectures. And if they want to attract many students, and not have the dean drop their course due to lack of interest, they may even strive to improve their lecturing skills. Who knows? They may even try to improve the quality of their speaking voice.

These professors choose to act out of character in order to do their jobs well. One definition of courage is acting out of character!

If your mind is sharp but your voice is dull, your ideas may not cut through the clutter.

Your greatest calling card is a pleasing and effective voice. I urge you to explore your most human instrument.

Sims Wyeth is a 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.

Voice Training: The Vocal Fry

simswnj — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:02:56 +0000

When bacon fries, it makes a crackling, bubbling, splashy sound and smells delicious.

When young women fry their voices, they make a grinding sound in the back of their throats, and regardless of how they smell, they are undermining their stature and impact by doing so.

I am going to call the Center for Disease Control to announce that I have detected a dangerous new epidemic of The Vocal Fry. (Please see the bottom of this posting for a definition of Vocal Fry.)

It has mostly infected young women, and it makes them sound as if they’ve run out of air, and are generating their voices by grinding their vocal chords together.

It manifests itself mostly at the ends of sentences. To me, it makes them sound tense, cerebral, and unappealing. I do not want to listen to them speak about anything.

No doubt this is a failing on my part, but I am confessing now, in public, that The Vocal Fry is like fingernails on a blackboard to me.

I think it’s mostly educated young women, maybe even educated young women from a certain background that have developed this as a fashionable way to talk.

I am going to capture recordings of it and put them up here on the blog, or on my other blogs at www.simswyeth.com/blog or at executivespeechcoachny.com

The human voice must stand guard over the content of a spoken message, or the content will evaporate, no matter how precious it was in itself.

The Vocal Fry has to go.

Definition:The vocal fry register (also known as pulse register, laryngealisation, pulse phonation, creak, glottal fry, glottal rattle, glottal scrape or strohbass), is the lowest vocal register and is produced through a loose glottal closure which will permit air to bubble through slowly with a popping or rattling sound of a very low frequency.