Charlie Houpert breaks down how Neil deGrasse Tyson uses tone, cadence, and pauses to hold an audience. Learn the vocal techniques that make him compelling and how to apply them to your own speaking.
What's up, everybody? This is Charlie from Charisma on Command. And today I'm going to be doing another video breakdown, this time of how you can use your voice to captivate attention and be more charismatic. So you can see here I've selected Neil DeGrasse Tyson to illustrate this point. If you don't know who he is, he's a science educator and a scientist. He's recently started the show Cosmos, and I think something like 8.5 million people watched the first episode, which speaks as much to the interest and the public's general interest in science as it does to the ability that Neil DeGrasse Tyson has to captivate people. And I think this video will do a really good job of showing what it is about him that makes this happen. So I'm gonna go ahead and play this, and you'll hear the question that he's responding to now.
What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the universe? The most astounding fact.
So, first thing I'm going to highlight here, he's got this silky smooth, Barry White quality of voice. I can't. I can't even fake that. A lot of people can't. What you can do, though, is generally, again, particularly for men, this is going to be very helpful. And for women as well, in some cases, by exercising your diaphragm, by doing diaphragm exercises, which I don't have time to go into here. They'll be in the book. Or you can just Google diaphragm exercises. By doing those, you can actually lower the timbre of your voice in normal conversation without stretching to do it. And I've been doing singing lessons and have seen, personally a shift in how I sound over different recordings that I've done. So that's the first thing about him. The second thing about Neil DeGrasse Tyson to notice is how he uses silence and how he shifts the cadence of his speaking to draw people in, to make them wonder what he's going to say next. So pay attention to that.
The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles.
So I want you to notice this. He's got an incredible range of ways that he speaks. When he says crucibles, he's got a very breathy quality to that. You'll notice that he whispers at times. Whispering when you have someone's full attention is a way to indicate that they need to listen up. That what you're saying is fascinating. And you'll oftentimes see when people are telling stories and they get to that emotional moment and they have people right there, they'll whisper like this. And as they continue to go on, that draws people into the story and they switch the cadence up. So pay attention to how Neil DeGrasse Tyson does that.
That cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars, the high mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then.
So notice the cadence he at the end of his periods, he doesn't always have that long pause. In fact, when he said these stars, it was right on the back end of a previous sentence. And mixing up the cadence like that of the way that you speak keeps people engaged. So pay attention now to the rhythm of how Neil DeGrasse Tyson speaks and how that makes this even more captivating.
And exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems. Stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that, yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe. But perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up. Many people feel small because they're small and the universe is big. But I feel big because my atoms came from those stars.
So it's a great example of a couple of very important things to keep in mind when you're trying to become more charismatic in the way that you tell stories or in the way that you use your voice. The first, and this is true for both men and women, studies have found that a deeper voice has a more commanding and a more authoritative tone. So the degree to which you can do diaphragm exercises to lower your voice is going to help. You want to breathe from your stomach. You'll feel it there, as opposed to your chest. So when you take a deep breath, you should feel the, the expansion right around your belly and your sides and your back, as opposed to the expansion in your pecs. It's a complicated thing. Talk about it more in the book and you can read more just by googling diaphragm exercises. The second is that you need to have a range of tonality. You can imagine what this would sound like if I talked like this the whole time. And you ensure that you know someone who speaks like that. A range of tonality is going to help engage people, and a range of cadence too. This is something I personally working on right now. That is one of the things that makes Neil DeGrasse Tyson such an engaging speaker is that he sucks you in with those pauses and then puts you almost back on your heels by jumping right back in at unexpected times with new enthusiasm. So I hope that's helpful in terms of breaking down charismatic things that you can do when telling stories and using your voice. If you like this video, we've got other ones on eye contact gesticulation, so feel free to check those ones out as well.
