Image Credit: Brisbane City Council
No matter how happy (or scared) you might be when you are asked to give a speech to an audience, you are looking at a lot of work to get ready from the moment that you say “yes” to the moment when you take the stage. Since you are going to have to go to all of the effort of creating a speech that you think that your audience is going to want to hear, you sure should have a good understand of what it’s going to take to make sure that they hear what you’re telling them…
Roger Love Knows All Of The Answers
Awhile back author Paul Sterman sat down and interviewed Roger Love. Roger is a celebrity voice coach who has become famous because of the musicians and actors that he has worked with. This list includes Keira Knightley, the Jonas Brothers, Selena Gomez, Reese Witherspoon and Jeff Bridges. In addition, he spends his time providing coaching to Fortune 500 executives and business leaders. Roger really understands the importance of public speaking.
It turns out that Roger is both a good singer and a good speaker. He’s spent a lot of time studying how we speak and, more importantly, how we can speak better. Roger believes that how we speak is made up of 5 separate components. These components are as follows: pitch, pace, tone, melody, and volume. If any one of these is not working correctly, then your ability to reach your audience will be in jeopardy.
One interesting point that Roger makes is that most of us speakers are probably breathing wrong when we are giving a speech. When we breathe through our mouths what happens is that air that makes it down our throats and into our lungs is dry air. The result of this is that our vocal cords can start to become dehydrated and then red and swollen. When all of this is going on, you can start to become hoarse and you may start to lose your voice. A better way to breathe is through your nose which will moisten the air as it comes in and keep everything lubed up like it should be.
It Turns Out That The Secret Has To Do With Tonality
It is Roger’s belief that most of us don’t take the time to speak either loudly or confidently enough. In order to really connect with your next audience, Roger believes that the key is what is called the tonality of your voice. Tonality is all about how you sound when you speak. It is Roger’s opinion that your tonality controls up to 40% of whether or not a person who is listening to you will believe what you are saying.
When you are talking with an audience, you are going to want to use a voice that both commands attention and conveys authority. Roger believes that when most of us speak, we tend to stay in the range of one specific pitch. You are comfortable there and so there you stay. The problem with this is that the people who are listening to you hear a monotone. When they hear a monotone they start to think that they know what you are going to be saying next. When this happens, they stop listening to you.
As speakers what Love thinks that we need to learn to do is to mix our pitches up. What you are going to want to do is to use the tonality of your voice to keep them guessing as to what comes next in your speech. In a way, this is almost how popular music works – it has patterns of notes that grab our attention and make you want to sing along. In our speeches we need to take the time to lower our voices when a pause or a stop is coming up. Likewise, when effort or excitement is happening in our speech we need to raise our tone in order to bring our audience along.
What All Of This Means For You
Giving a speech is never an easy thing to do. As long as we’re going to go to the effort of creating and delivering a speech, we need to make sure that the audience that we’ll be giving it to will get something out of it. In order to find out how to make this happen, we need to turn to a professional. In this case, Paul Sterman sat down and interviewed Roger Love who has a lot of thoughts on just exactly what we need to do to make our next speech be memorable and so that we can get the most benefits of public speaking..
Roger is all about how our bodies work. He’s very concerned about how we breathe: we need to breathe in through our noses so that the important parts of our speaking system remain moist. He also believes that our tonality, what we sound like, is what is going to determine if our audience remembers what we have to say. The key here is to not speak in a monotone.
The great thing about what Roger Love has to say is that based on the famous people that he’s helped out over time, clearly he knows what he’s talking about. His suggestions regarding our breathing techniques and modifying the tonality that we use when delivering a speech are all very easy to implement. Listen to what Roger has to say and work his suggestions into your next speech and see if that speech turns into a top 10 hit!
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: Do you think that you can change the tone of your speech too much during a single speech?
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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!
What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
So when was the last time that you did something that you had to apologize to somebody for doing it? If you are like most of us, it’s probably been awhile – we don’t really like to go to the effort of doing the whole formal apology thing very much. However, as public speakers, if either we’ve done something or an organization that has asked us to give a speech has done something, we may need to use the importance of public speaking to apologize to our audience. What’s the best way of going about doing this?