Find Your Voice

You are self-conscious when you open your mouth. Your words are all spoken with the same pitch, the same inflection. You feel your listeners drifting off. You've come to the right blog. Here are two simple ideas.

 

First, push your voice to the limits in rehearsal. (You ARE rehearsing your talks many times, aren't you?) Try varying the volume, pitch, and rate of your delivery as much as you possibly can. Yes, this will sound ridiculous. The idea is to break out of the old pattern you are in, much like stretching your muscles before a run. You may not need the full range, but it will be easier to move around within it.

 

Second, study actors. These professionals work their voices for all they're worth. Here's an exercise we use in my basic speech class. I bring in a DVD of an animated movie. I happen to like The Incredibles, but most other feature-length animated films will work. I put pictures of the actors in front of the class for the students to look at during the scene we watch. This allows the students to imagine the actor delivering the lines, allowing them to realize how exaggerated the delivery actually is (it just seems normally for a cartoon character). The students are assigned one character to follow through a scene, noting the emotion the character starts with, the emotion the character ends on, and the emotional cues in the pitch, rate, and volume of the voice the fill us in. Even if you don't want to be this formal, try watching a film like this and closing your eyes every so often during scenes that you know well. Now ask yourself, does your delivery even come close to the work the actors are doing? Yet far from embarassing themselves, they have become stars partly by using the full range of their voices. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for you, right?