Angela Lansbury

They were not alone.  Most Broadway actors have strong speaking voices.  The question is:  did they become successful because they were gifted with such speaking voices, or did they work to develop their instruments?

The answer?  Who knows?  Some of us are born with a distinctive speaking voice, some of us are not, and others work their butts off to develop their speaking voice so they can have the career they want.

You are not an actor, and yet like an actor, your success depends on the impression you create and on how you perform on the job.  In fact, the sound of your speaking voice is arguably the most memorable thing about you: it echoes in the minds of those who have met you and worked with you.  Yet most of us get no training on how to use our speaking voices.

That’s too bad, because the speaking voice is perfectly trainable.  It can be tuned, like a guitar or a piano.  And training your speaking voice can be incredibly fun.

Here in New Jersey, training the speaking voice is a personal and professional goal for many.  Whether they are young women seeking to increase their image of authority and gravitas when they speak, or men with successful careers who want to minimize the stigma of an accent, they seek out private or group instruction in training the speaking voice as a passport to success.

Training the speaking voice covers:

• how to breath in order to support your sound
• how to release habitual tension in the speaking process
• how to expand the range, resonance and deep dark color of the voice
• and how to enunciate vowels and consonants with clarity and precision

Because New York and New Jersey are melting pots of ambitious and successful people—people who see opportunity and want to take advantage of it—many of them want to develop their speaking voices as their number one calling card.

Also a large number of major corporations in New York and New Jersey want to retain highly skilled knowledge workers who must interact with teams and present their specialized knowledge to others.  Helping these people to contribute to the organization is one of the many reasons why companies seek out training for voice and speech.

The speaking voice is the world’s greatest instrument—of leadership, change, and communication.  Tune your instrument.  Practice your instrument.  Become a master of your instrument. 

The rewards, for you and your company, will be positively resounding.

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.

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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.

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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.

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