9. Mmm yes that sweet sound of competence

Want to sound smart? Like you really know your sh*t? Want to stop mumbling? Then take a trip to the speech gym with me - and warning: there will be weird noises!

Transcript

Eleven benevolent elephants. Try saying that five times. It's pretty challenging. If tongue twisters get you in a knot or you'd like to sound more articulate, or you're a gym junkie and want to take a trip to the speech gym with me, then stay tuned. This episode is all about how you can get that sweet sound of competence.

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

Thanks for tuning in, but before you continue, I need to be upfront with you. In this episode. We're going to be making a lot of pretty weird noises, so if you want to participate, which I hope you do, then you might want to consider getting off the bus or getting off the train or being somewhere in private unless you want somebody approaching you and checking that your mental faculties are all there. So now we've cleared that up. This episode is all about how to strengthen your clarity of speech. So when we make words, we want them to sound crisp and clear and articulate. Because when we do that, we sound smarter, we sound more competent, and people can understand us a lot better as well. And it's pretty straight forward. All you need to do is exercise your organs of speech.

Although in saying that, it is a bit confusing? Because when you think of an organ you might think about your heart, your lungs, your liver, don't know what state mine's in.. But you're not thinking about your organs of speech. Our organs, the speech, we've got about six of them and two of them, we can't really move. So we don't want to worry about that too much. The ones we can't move are our teeth and our hard palate, we definitely need them to speak, but you know, there's not much you can do about it. And that's why when little kids lose a tooth, their speech changes. Oh, maybe when you get a little bit older and you don't have teeth at all. It can also affect the way that you talk. So let's not worry about those. Let's focus today on the four organs of speech. We absolutely can move and we want to move. So I mentioned in the intro, come along to the speech gym and look before you go, "oh my gosh, I don't want this to be some sort of active podcast." Don't worry. Definitely not one of those, but it is kind of like the gym in the way that we need to go there to get fit. And then we need to keep going if we want to stay fit.

So today I'm going to take you through the exercises that you can do to strengthen your speech and also warm up before you have to speak. And the organs of speech we're interested in are our lower jaw, our lips, our tongue, and our soft palate, which is that squishy thing at the back of the roof of your mouth. And that's attached to a little dangly thing. Some people think it's the tonsils that's not right. The tonsils are on the side. The little dangly thing that you can see shaking in cartoons when the character screams, that's what we call a uvula. I know it sounds a little bit like lady bits, so don't worry about that. You don't need to say uvula, you just need to think of it as the soft palate. So let's go back to where we started. We're going to start off with the jaw.

I always say with exercises, it's kind of like that scene in Titanic when he's sitting down at the dinner table and he's got all the knives and forks and he doesn't know what what to do. And the woman next to him says, "Oh, just start from the outside and work your way in." So we're doing the same thing here. Starting from the outside, we have our jaw and I want you to find that hinge where your lower jaw attaches to your skull. So it's like a little bit of a, you know, joint there. And for most people it's pretty tight because in Australia especially, and sorry blokes, I'm going to put you in it. Men especially don't like to open it too much. And I just talk like this "hey mate, how you going? How bout the footy hey?" And it's quite amazing that this country hasn't produced more ventriloquists considering that hardly anybody opens their jaw. So we do hold a lot of tension there, myself included. So if you give it a little massage with a couple of fingers one way then the other way, and then drag your jaw down like you're screaming, open it wide - and it might feel a bit weird.

Oh gosh. I just felt something crack then and I do this every day. So don't worry if you feel some tension. So we're warming up the jaw. Now we're going to try the Surprised Donkey. So the donkey is EE AW - AH. That's why he's surprised. So you can try it now. EE, AW, AH - and we've opened the jaw.

Now let's move onto our lips. The best thing you can do and I'm sure I've demonstrated this in heaps of videos and perhaps even a podcast, just blowing air through them like a braying donkey or a braying horse. I don't know. I've been disputed on which animal does this. So I'm open to suggestions, but it sounds like this. Let's throw some sound in there. Bit of up and down like the roller coaster. Nice. And then now we're going to take our donkey to the opera. And we're going to do M-M-MEE, M-M-MAW, M-M-MAH. MMM is a great one to get the lips all warmed up and ready to go.

Now we move onto the tongue and one thing you can do for your tongue, and this is going to look weird if you're in public, but just stick it out and stretch it as much as you can to one side. I'm imagining everybody doing it. Then the other side, see if you can touch your nose, see if you can touch your chin. See if you can curl it? I can curl my tongue, but I can't roll my R's, which is crazy. I've never been able to roll my R's - I would love to learn how to do that. So rolling your R's and curling your tongue a great way just to strengthen all of those muscles that are in there. L is also a good one for the tongue so we can make our donkey go to France for a little bit.Ooh LA LA LEE, Ooh LA LA LAW, Ooh LA LA LA. And if you feel that's a bit too easy then just add a few more L's in. Ooh, LA LA, LA LA, LA. Oh, this is going to test me, isn't it? I think that's, that's about as much as I've got in me this afternoon. So that's the tongue.

Now we're going to work the soft palate. That's that squidgy thing at the back of the mouth on the roof. So you've got the hard palate goes into the soft palate and the soft palate is a little gate and it directs the air between the nasal cavity and the mouth. So you might think, "Oh, do you really want sounds coming out your nose?" Well, we have three, in fact the sounds M, N like an N sound and also N G, NG. M, N, NG - all of those come straight out our nose, so I want you to imagine that you're around a campfire of some weird cult and you're all chanting MM, NN, NNGGG.

See why I gave the disclaimer at the start of this podcast episode. So we want to strengthen our soft palate because if it's not in good shape, it'll hang down all the time. And if it hangs down all the time, far too many sounds are going to escape straight out our nose and that's not going to sound nice. We also use our soft palate to hit the back of our tongue to make sounds K and G. So we can also try K, K, K, G, G, G, G. And you'll feel it snap like an elastic band. Now that's important to strengthen as well because if the soft palate and the back of the tongue isn't strong and toned and terrific, then you might find yourself saying things like nothingk or somethingk. I'm sure you've heard that before. So we want to strengthen our self palate so that doesn't happen.

Once you've worked on all of these organs of speech, then you can do tongue twisters very proficiently. So you might remember in the last episode I picked up Annie, Annie Farrugia for saying Peter Piper - missing out the T. So what we want is "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, a peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?" Now you might be thinking, "geez, how'd she do that?" Well, you know, I don't really have much of a life. This is just what I spend my Friday afternoons doing. And after a while you get pretty good at it. But definitely go back and try that one from the start, the eleven benev - see, I can't even do it myself. The eleven benevolent elephants is what I find from my clients, the most challenging tongue twister to do. I try to get them to do it three times, and every single person that's walked through my door has struggled with it. So give it a go.

So tongue twisters are a bit of fun. And I'll tell you what. If anybody wants a sheet of my 50 most difficult tongue twisters, then get in touch and I will send it out to you. I know it's not ideal. I still don't have a webpage at this stage. I've been so busy with all your enquiries that I haven't had time to sit down and build it, but if you contact me either through the form on the holding page that I've got up there on sallyprosser.com.au or on Facebook and Instagram, I'm @sallyprosservoice, Twitter @sally_prosser or LinkedIn. If you contact me on any of those channels, I will send that sheet straight out to you.

Make sure you don't miss next week's episode, I'm excited to have a guest back on the podcast. I'm chatting to an airline pilot. I will see you next Monday.