Voice Modulation

Foreign. Voice modulation and broad spectrum appeal. Now, this is one of the most important things that you can learn about speaking, and that is that your voice is communicates so much more about your message than the words you're using. The way you use your voice is going to create the engagement that's going to let people know that there's something interesting going on. Look, we've all been to this presentation. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen and members of the audience. Now I'm going to give you a perfectly articulated message with complete sentences and a regular set of cadence. Well, unless this is a meditation tape, this is a bad idea because it's going to put the audience to sleep. What you got to realize and what I want you to really practice and think about is that your audience is made up of people who prefer visual, auditory or kinesthetic communication. Put in another way, there are some people who really like loud and fast messages with lots of visual language. Picture this and imagine that. But there are other people who prefer a steady cadence that like a more reasoned voice. They like the sound of things that really clicks with them a whole lot better. And then there's another group of people that really want you to slow down. They want you to take pauses so that you can let the information sink in. And as I've gone through each of these methods, you've probably found that you might like one more than the other, or in real truth, that you enjoy all of them. That a really good talk is going to have all of that voice modulation in it. And one more super black belt skill that you want to know about this is you should start your talk at whatever modulation your audience was already at. So if you are at a huge rah rah personal development event, you probably want to start quite visually. Hey, everybody. I'm so excited to be here with you. Wasn't that last speaker fantastic? But if you're at a more sedate medical conference or say, business function, then you might want to start in a more auditory tone and then move into a more visual energy as you move along. You want to meet your audience where they are and then take them on a roller coaster of experience. I also want to tell you something about this. Think about a story. If I tell you that I climbed Kilimanjaro and I do it like this. So we arrived in Kilimanjaro and we started walking up the mountain. At first we were in the rainforest and then we saw colobus monkeys and I even caught a chameleon. Then we continued to walk toward the oh, my God. That is not going to work for anybody. Not anybody. But you know what is going to work is using different voice modes. So imagine for a minute, I'm now at the summit of the mountain. Could I do it kinesthetically? We got to the top, and we could see the sun cresting on the horizon, and we felt the warmth on our skin and a sense of accomplishment like nothing we'd felt before. But could I also do it at the other end of the spectrum, visually? And each step we took took us closer to the summit. And as we climbed up and actually reached the summit, a feeling of celebration took over. The sun crested the horizon. The warmth came ripping across the savannah, and we felt it hit us. And then we knew we were really at the top. Both are powerful. You want to be able to use all of them. You want to become trilingual. You want to be able to communicate visually, auditory and kinesthetically. Voice modulation is key.