Different voices get different answers to the same questions; here's why.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James and I'm your host. This is the podcast for you if you've got value locked up in your organization and you're just trying to find some cost-effective and simple-to-implement ways to communicate that with your various stakeholders. Now, I've set up public relations companies on 3 continents and I've also run multiple businesses. So what I share on this podcast are tools and strategies that I know will work. Today we're going to talk about voice and the importance of voice, because it's how we all communicate. And especially if we're going to be doing podcasts like this one, or radio, or television, and even on Zoom calls, the way that we sound and how we come across can really make an impact on the impression that we give to other people. I was thinking about this as I listened to Professor Chris Whitty, who is the Chief Medical Officer here in the UK, and he is described in the news here as the calm voice of authority, the clear-headed expert at the helm of the nation's strategy to fend off coronavirus. So actually, one of the things about Chris Whitty is the way that he sounds, and they mentioned here this calm, warm voice. And as I listened this morning on the radio, Radio, I obviously couldn't remember everything that was being said, but I felt secure listening to their prognosis and really their defense of the government's next stage of lockdown plans. So I led me to thinking about the impact of voice. And doing this podcast, of course, I've had to listen to my own voice, as you've kindly done. And often we're not that fond of our own voices. In fact, often, like for me, had to kind of overcome. A displeasure with your own voice in order to share what's on the inside. But it took me then to looking at what makes a great voice. And I was interested by a study at the University of Nebraska in 2015 by Nitarudi Cheranrak. And Nitarudi submitted her thesis about the impact of tone and intonation and speech rate on how people respond to the questions being asked by an interviewer. So the other way of looking at this importance of speech is the response that people will give us according to how we sound. Now, when we're doing an interview, for example, like when Professor Chris Witt is on the radio, he leaves an impression with people. And so we are even just silently or implicitly making decisions or responding to their advice according to how they sound, because we've not met them, we're not personally involved with them. So I thought this study would be quite interesting just to highlight and then to look at what can we do about our voice. So, um, Nitarudi mentioned these elements of voice and of speech. One is pitch, one is intonation, the next is the speech rate, and the 4th one was disfluencies. And a disfluency is an involuntary disruption in the flow of speech that may occur during one's natural sort of speech or even due to a speech impairment. I was quite interested in that because I have a little bit of a disfluency myself. You notice probably, uh, then if I have to edit this out sometimes that I have to pause every now and again because I had a medical issue 5 years ago which has resulted in some degree of loss of control over the left side of my face. So I was interested as well in the impact of people's, if you like, own foibles. So what Nita Rudy found in this research that she did was that The research was coding the 5 different interviewer personality traits into the research when they tracked the responses that they were getting to standard questions from interviewees. Now, the 5 personality traits that the interviewers displayed were expertise, trustworthiness, reliability, confidence, and easiness to understand. Now, I would argue that these are the 5 elements that anybody speaking publicly on the radio, or even one-to-one in a client or company meeting, would still want to exhibit. So the interviews were taking place with interviewees orally, so they were taking place over the telephone, and the interviewers were instructed to read questions with the proper phrasing and inflection and to read the questions at a speech rate of 2 words per second. So they were then able to look at the different outcomes according to the different people and just their natural ways of speaking. In other words, they didn't ask the interviewers to speak in a different way, but just to speak in their own normal voice but at a certain pace. Now, it's a long 180-page document, but the summary is that the interviewers obtained better data quality when they read the questions with moderate intonation and disfluencies. The voice characteristics with the largest effect on data quality is speech rate. Interviewers obtain better data quality when they read neutral questions with 2 words per second. Interestingly enough, when they read socially undesirable questions, they should read them more quickly. Not quite sure what the psychology is behind that, but basically reading at a normal pace or speaking at a normal pace of 2 words per second is optimal for delivering information. Now, what they also suggested was that the interviewers could have their personalities understood by the interviewees by the level of intonation and also by their pitch and by their disfluencies. So it made a difference, therefore, to the outcome of the questions— how quickly, how much up and down in the voice, and the level of volume and tone, whether it's low or whether it's high. It made a difference whether people were speaking at a monotone level or at, uh, intoned pace level. All these different ways of throwing the voice would impact the outcome of the same questions to the same people and how they perceived the person that was asking them questions. So what was interesting was that people that were interviewed by those who they perceived to be trustworthy and reliable experts who were confident and helped them to understand, they answered more fully. And in cases of these socially awkward questions, they would answer with greater depth of response. In other words, if somebody came across as trustworthy and reliable and instilled confidence in the interviewee, they would share more intimate details. I'll put the link in to the dissertation, but I thought it was interesting because obviously, as we all are speaking, for example, on Zoom or on the phone or doing interviews on the radio or on television, how our voice sounds makes a real difference to how we're perceived, whether we like it or not. So then I did some looking to see what would be some ways that we could improve the quality of our voice. So I'm going to share with you some information that I found. Now, first of all, it's worth commenting on the technology and the equipment that you use. So I'm using a Rode NT-USB mic. And it's worth the investment, I think, in a microphone if you're going to be doing any kind of interviews. I've interviewed people on this podcast who just do it with the mic on the computer. With the headset mic. Obviously, the closer the voice is to the microphone and the better the quality of the microphone, the less echoey and also the more depth of tone that you get from the voice. So it can be almost impossible to sound like Pavarotti if you're standing a couple of foot away from your computer and just trying to shout and hoping the computer's doing all the work. So first of all, get the right technology. Second is being in control. So this idea that vocal control means kind of staying on pitch, means keeping the pitch of your notes that to be accurate. And obviously this can relate to singing, but also if we are trying to convey a message of anger or anxiety or of fun or of humor, The pitch of our voice reflects that, and so we need to be consistent with that pitch. Now next is the tone. So tone is the overall sound of the voice, and the vowels in the words which are sustained in lyrics like ah, oh, ee, and so on— these are the warm sounding, whereas the ts, ts, th are very sibilant. And so they can make the voice sound very sharp and jangly. So we also have the timbre, the characteristic sound of the voice. Is it hoarse or smooth, hard or soft, broad or narrow, light or heavy, and so on? Now, personally, I feel as though my voice is a little bit high. One of the things I find, of course, sitting here in the studio shed is that it gets a little bit damp and a bit chilly. If I have the heater on, then the noise is too loud. So thinking about the tone, because the tone is impacted by the environment. Caffeine can constrict the vocal cords. So when we do media training with clients, or we're going to tell them about going on to TV, we always suggest they don't drink coffee at least an hour before they do a recording. So creating tone is a key part, and that also can be about how we are lifting and raising the voice from our chest or from our stomachs. And the breathing, of course, is one of the things we'll talk about a bit later on. We also have this issue where some people are very nasal, so we have to be careful and try and drop the voice down. The next on the list is enunciation. People that can speak and articulate and enunciate each individual syllable will be more easily understood. We've talked on an earlier podcast about the soft sounds in English that are actually kind of put together by the brain, but actually don't really get articulated fully quite often. These words and these sounds cause a problem for understanding, especially with people that haven't got For example, English as a first language, or if you speak Spanish or French or any other language. So articulating clearly each sound and each letter is of crucial importance to being understood. The next is strong support. So this is about what we do with the body: sitting up straight, having an ideal, you know, warm environment, proper breathing. And feeling strong, feeling well dressed, maybe wearing a scarf. So the physical aspects of supporting yourself, just as you would if you were going for a workout, are really important. The next element is the volume. So the volume of our speech needs to be appropriate to the environment. Obviously, if we're talking at a conference or at a large event, we might be inclined to raise our voice, but that can then come at the cost of tone. I'm always very careful to adjust the microphone to make sure that I don't have to increase the volume of my voice beyond the desire to change my volume for effect, but it should never be in order to be heard. The next element is consistency. So trying to speak with a voice that has a consistent pace and a consistent style And a consistent pitch is really important. I find this especially when we get into sales presentations. The more anxious salesperson will speed up and give a real indication of their levels of anxiety by by kind of increasing the pace of their delivery rather than keeping it consistent. Because as that Nebraska report showed, it's this consistency of the 2 words per second that aids a sense of reassurance. Next must be around phrasing and not rambling. So phrasing, putting sentences into groups and paragraphs into chapters when we're speaking, creates some distinction for the listener because their brain is having to understand each of the different elements. And often you'll find, especially on an interview where the client has been asked by journalists to explain something, they'll start off well, but then after about a minute they just ramble and you really just want to shout at them to, to stop talking. So phrasing, identifying which groups of words or sentence are going to come together, is a really powerful way of helping the listener to parcel up the information and access it and to process it. The next is about being versatile. Now, we're doing different kind of speaking events. One may be a presentation, one may be a partner conference, one may be a staff or a client intervention. Having a versatile job means that we may be able to inject humor Into our voice at one moment and pathos into another. Sadness or hilarity, seriousness or sensitivity. Thinking about the different styles of the conversation and how versatile our voices can be. They're the best instruments of all. Now the parts that are harder perhaps are about self-awareness, listening to ourselves. I used to always practice my presentations. If I still do, if I'm going to present at a group, I'll always record it, play it back to myself as a video and an audio. It's a rehearsal, it's a presentation, it's a performance. So self-awareness really comes going through that rather awkward and slightly embarrassing watching oneself and listening to oneself. So that leads us on to this idea of using your ears and your eyes. So listening back objectively to yourself— I listen to these podcasts. It's not always a comfortable experience because I often wish I hadn't said something, or I think I said something poorly, or I didn't articulate properly. But listening back gives us the cues to improve next time, to find the areas where we might continue habitually To make some mistakes. The other thing, of course, is to listen to people that do it well. Now, breathing. Everybody that you find on the internet says breathing is essential for good oral, for good vocal. Learning how to breathe and when to breathe is another skill. My daughter's just about to take up flute, and I remember when I played flute at school badly, it was the breathing. That made the difference between able to carry on through the through all the chords or to drop out in and out of the notes. So breathing, controlling that, and making the breath come from the diaphragm, not from the chest, gives the warmth of the body. And as we've seen, you know, the ability to make singing or speaking seem easy. Is a skill, and it's something that can be taught. I'll always remember early videos of people like Barack Obama, you know, fumbling and anxious, but they had coaching. So it's not something that people are just born with. Some people have a natural voice, and that's wonderful, but the great ones train and work at it. And that's what we have to do as well, especially as most of us now are not seeing people, the ability to see and convince people from our body language has been reduced significantly. So our voice has an overwhelming impact. And as that Nebraska study showed, people listening to us will make judgments about who we are and how much they can trust us based on our pitch, on our tone, our pace, and our Idiosyncrasies, our disfluencies. Another small thing is to just practice opening your mouth and to smile. Smiling actually does warm up the voice. It opens up the face and it allows more air to come out. And also, you're supposed to have some fun when you're doing anything like this. So smile, have fun, and if you're having fun yourself, it will naturally come out to those people that are with you. So with that, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you enjoy your voice and share what you have to share with pleasure and with enjoyment, because what you've got to share is what people are tuning in to hear from you. And I hope these tools and tips that I shared today will give you the confidence to take up communication And share all that you know with everybody who'd love to hear from you.