Engage and Inspire Your Audience with Your Voice

So how can you use the tones of your voice to create a positive and warm atmosphere with your audience? Well, there's no easy way of doing this. I wish I could say, do that, and your voice will be warm and friendly all the time. It's not that simple. You got to step back a minute and ask yourself what's messing up your vocal tone to begin with? Typically, it's because you're nervous. And when you're nervous, your voice can kind of sound like this because you're thinking about, what am I going to say five seconds from now, and I don't want to mess up anything. Or I'm reading a PowerPoint bullet point, and that sounds awful. The voice is too consistent. It's flat. It's a type of monotone. But I'm willing to bet when you're with your best friends and you're talking about some sporting event where you were all there together or you're actually watching a sporting event together, your voice is fine. It's because your voice is occasionally going louder, sometimes softer. Sometimes you're yelling, sometimes you're whispering. There's a full range of your voice. And that's why if you're with your friends, you might be together eight hours talking, and nobody's bored. You're having a ton time of year, life, maybe you're taking a road trip and you're just BSing about everything you did in high school, it's interesting. It's not interesting because you used a professional tone of voice. And do you remember in 10th grade in chemistry class where Mr. Baldwin asked us to dissect the. No, that's not how you're talking. You're talking with constant changes of voice. You're not consciously thinking, let me use the full range of my voice. When your voice is really working well and you're warm, inviting, and you're with your friends and you feel friendly and they feel like you're friendly. You're not trying to do anything special with your voice. It's coming out naturally. So what good is that, though, if you have to give a formal presentation to your boss or the board of directors, to a group of investors, because by definition, you're going to be a little uncomfortable. It's a formal setting. They're high stakes. Well, the biggest thing you can do is to rehearse on video. What most people do is they think, wow, this is a really important speech. I better get it just right. So they rewrite the speech and rewrite the speech and rewrite the speech and send it to people to get edit suggestions. They change this comment, change this paragraph break, and if they're using PowerPoint, they change the logo and the slide and the color scheme and the size font and the type of font. All of these things are just an excuse to keep you from having to do the one thing you should do but you don't want to do, and that is to rehearse. Because the thing about text on a piece of paper or a PowerPoint screen is you can't tell the vocal intonations. You can't tell if someone sounds friendly, confident, warm or mean, scared or nervous by looking at text. You only can gather that information by listening to someone. You cannot listen to how you sound in your speech unless you practice it in advance. I know you don't want to do it. None of my clients want to do it. The problem is, it's the only thing that really works. It's the only thing that will give you feedback on how you sound. Whether your voice is warm and friendly, whether you sound like someone other people would want to have a meal with, or to avoid need to rehearse. Just use your cell phone, capture the audio, capture the video and watch it. Here are the things to watch for. If your voice is too consistent and you sound like you're going from point A to point B to point C, that's not warm and inviting. I take it back. It is inviting. You're inviting people to take a nap because it's so boring. You're putting people to sleep. What you want in your voice is ups and downs. Faster and slower, louder and softer, occasionally pausing. You want variety in your voice. That's what's going to make you warm. That's what's going to make you easy to listen to. That is what's going to make you sound friendly.