38. Six steps to a great voice

I take you through six steps bound to improve your speaking - and the best part? They can be applied to any speaking scenario you find yourself in! They're also the foundations of my signature online group coaching course - My Six Week Voice Makeover.

Transcript

Speeches, videos, phone calls, podcasting, umpiring, whatever scenario you find yourself speaking, these six steps will help you sound amazing.

I'm Sally Prosser. You're listening to That Voice Podcast. No matter who you are or what you do, your voice matters. So unless you've sworn a lifetime vow of silence, this is the podcast for you.

Welcome to episode 38 of That Voice Podcast. Can you believe it? Today I'm going to take you through what I see as the basics, the fundamentals, the steps that will get you out of trouble wherever you find yourself speaking. And these are also the fundamentals that I go through in My Six Week Voice Makeover. So surprise, surprise, the six steps I'll go through today line up with the six weeks of the course. Now, depending on when you're listening to this, doors could be open, doors could be shut, or in the case of May 25 2020 which is the day this episode drops, this is day one of cohort number two.

If you're keen to join up and it's not too far past May 25 or on May 25 then email me sally@sallyprosser.com.au and I might be able to squeeze you in.

Okay, so let's get straight into these six steps to a great voice. Or as I say in the makeover course, how to make an impact every time you speak. And the beauty of these concepts is they honestly can be applied to any scenario that you throw at me where you're speaking.

So number one, mindset. Your real voice is a megaphone for your inner voice. So the mindset that you take into any speaking scenario is so, so, so important. So if it's a podcast, you can't go into it thinking, Oh, I have a terrible voice for a podcast. Another one I hear quite often, if English isn't your first language, it's oh my accent, oh my accent. And so it can be this real negative blocker to releasing your best voice. If it's an interview, you've got to believe you've got the job. If it's a speech, you have to believe people want to listen to you and you have something valuable to say. So remember with any speaking opportunity, you're grateful for the opportunity. People want to listen to you. And above all, you deserve your space. You deserve your space and you deserve to be heard. So that's number one.

Number two is body. So after your mindset is right, you've got to think about your posture and your body. Because we are the musical instrument. You wouldn't pick up a guitar and hold it right out in front of you and try to play it. It's the same thing with our voice. You have to set it up correctly first. So grounding your feet, imagining they're tree trunks, taking your shoulders back like you're wearing Victoria's Secret angel wings or like those fantastic Carnivale costumes that they wear in Brazil.

Pulling back the shoulders will also help your head to come up. Channel your inner meerkat. If you channel your inner meerkat, you'll pop your head up and you'll stand nice and tall. So these things are really, really important. There's gesture and eye contact and lots of other things to consider. This podcast is just a little bit of a taster of all of these concepts, so keep that in mind. This is a high level overview of these concepts.

All right, so we've got our mindset right, our posture, our body set up. The next thing is breath. I am always talking about breathing. We have to breathe in low and deep because oxygen fuels our voice. Oxygen fuels our voice. So if you're feeling like you don't have your voice, chances are you don't have enough air or the air is getting trapped and you're not letting it out as you're speaking. So breathing in low and deep, imagining you're breathing into your bottom and then freeing the air as you speak. So you want to be breathing out while you're speaking. I understand this is not a very Coronavirus safe message, but this is what you want to be doing. Breathing out while you're speaking.

Once you've got the breath doing what you want it to do, you can move on to step four, which is buzz. That's not a technical term, it's just what I call it. I'm talking about the vibrations. And so you'll feel your vocal chords vibrating if you put your hand on your throat and just say MMM or any other talking you'd like to do, you can feel them vibrating away. It's important we think about where those vibrations sit after the vocal cords come together. Now at this point you might be like, Sal Oh, you've lost me. Don't know what you're talking about. And yes, this is where we get into more technical voice work, but there's lots of parts of our body where the sound vibrates. I've got other podcast episodes where I go more into this, especially the one about pitch, pitch perfect talks about this. So our voice can vibrate up in the head, in the back of the throat or down in the chest, which is where we want it. So it's about thinking about where those vibrations are sitting. Often if we're feeling nervous, we'll be more tense. Our breathing will get more shallow, we'll breathe up into our shoulders and then the voice can go up into the head. So this is why often your voice gets higher or shakier when you're nervous. It's all about that air flow.

Okay, step number, what are we up to? Five, clarity. And I'm talking about the clarity of your speech because it's one thing to have this beautiful resonant, nice sounding voice, but if we can't understand your words, then what's the point? Right? So it's important that you warm up your jaw, warm up your lips, do the crazy lip vibration things like BRRR and there's an episode called the sweet sound of competence, where I talk a lot about these exercises. You know when you go to say something and you know the words, but you physically can't get your mouth and your tongue around it, like it just won't come out. If this happens, chances are that you haven't warmed up your tongue and your lips and your jaw as much as you need to. So one quick exercise apart from the BRRR that I demonstrated before. The other one is doing the Surprised Donkey. The Surprised Donkey is EE, OR, AH and you're just stretching your lips as much as you can while you do that. Kind of funny, I know these are the sorts of things you can do if you still happen to be in lockdown.

All right, so we're up to step number six. What have we got so far? Our mindset's good. Our body is set up, we're breathing well, our vibrations are sitting where we want them to. Our speech is nice and clear and the last step is expression because we don't want to be boring, right? We want to be interesting and engaging and it's all about being unpredictable. It's not about having a loud voice or a fast voice or a soft voice or any of those things. We want to keep people guessing. We want our expression to match what we're saying. So with pitch for example, you want to be able to go up and be able to go down. If I'm talking about my vision for something, I'll be higher. If I'm talking to you about how I feel deep down, then my pitch will drop. My pitch also drops when I'm saying something a bit more serious and it rises when I'm having a bit more of a joke. So the important thing is to keep it varied. The next thing is the pace of your speech. A little bit of fast, little bit of slow, so mix it up, match it to what you're saying and of course volume - get a bit louder - Hopefully I don't mess up my levels by talking like this, but then you can get really quiet as well because that can be really effective, especially when you've already got people's attention. Sorry if that's creeping you out. Me whispering in your ear.

So there we have it. These are the six steps you can apply to any speaking scenario. I challenge you. If you think you've got something where those six steps don't work, send me an email, hit me up on TikTok or Instagram @sallyprosservoice or get in touch through my website sallyprosser.com.au and give me a scenario where these things don't work. Okay, one more time. Our mindset's, good to go. Our body is set up. Our posture is good breath is coming in low and deep and flowing out. Our vibrations are sitting in the walls of our chest. Our words are nice and clear and we're using lots of expression, so we're interesting. If anything in this episode piqued your interest and you're thinking, Oh yes, I'd like to learn more about this. Then My Six Week Voice Makeover is the course for you.

Next week. How cool is this? I'm chatting to a guy called Kyle Barnes who takes tour groups through New Zealand's glow worm caves. I met him while I was there doing a tour - was between Christmas and new year back when you could still travel around. And it was so fascinating and I love the way that he used his voice and so I was really excited to touch base with him again and chat to him for next week's episode. I really hope you'll tune in.

Thanks for listening to That Voice Podcast. Can you do me a favour? I would love it if you would go onto Apple Podcasts, subscribe rate, and review.