TJ Walker argues voice is a speaker's most powerful tool and warns against monotone delivery. He points to talk radio host Lionel as a model for vocal variety, and recommends recording your own conversations to hear how naturally expressive you already are.
Chapters
One of the most powerful tools any speaker has is the voice. Well, unfortunately, too many speakers are sort of monotone. On my next slide, as you can see, boring, flat, monotone, dry voices. They are just the depth of speeches, and yet so many people have them. How do we get rid of that? Well, for starters, look at role models. Here's a role model for you. You may not be familiar with him. There's a talk radio host called Lionel. Now, he's not a friend of mine, but he's a fantastic speaker talk show host. Listen to his voice. Now, you can listen for free by going on the Internet and going to iTunes.com. you can listen to him right there. Now, his voice is playful. It's expressive. He can go high, he can go low. When you listen to his voice, it's like watching a balloon being batted around at a children's party. It's just popping all over the place. High, low, fast, slow. There's tremendous variety to it. He can make anything sound fun. He can talk about serious public policy issues. But it sounds fun. It sounds interesting. This guy has the voice where he can read from the phone book. You'd be more interesting and engaging than most people reading from the best material of Jerry Seinfeld or Chris Rock. So you can use your voice as a tool. Now, would you like another role model? Now, this one may surprise you. One of your best role models for your voice can be you. Now, you may think, I hate my voice. I don't like my voice. Get over it. Here's the thing. Tape record yourself for a day. Every phone conversation, every conversation, someone walking in or out of your office, tape record all of that. Now, don't tape anyone without their permission. Let them know what you're doing. But then after a day, go back and listen to it. At some point, you'll hear yourself when you forgot you were being taped. You'll hear yourself in a real conversation. And you'll hear your voice go high, low. You'll hear expressiveness. That's what you want in a speech. Most of us have perfectly good voices. When we're comfortable, when we're talking to one friend or one family member, or we're really emotional about something. But then we get up to give the speech, as you can see on my next PowerPoint slide. So find your natural voice. Find your real voice, and then capture it and let it come out. When you're giving a real speech.
