Voice – Page 14 – Being in Voice

Put Your Best Pitch Forward

Flloyd Kennedy 28 November 2012 Performance Skills Training, Voice entrepreneur, pitch, presentation, public speaking, speaker, Startups, venture capitalist, voice

When you only have 5 minutes to make your presentation, to persuade busy, influential people that your idea is the best, the only entrepreneurial idea worth supporting, you’d better sound as good as you believe your idea is.

Five Minute Pitch Competitions are a great opportunity for would be entrepreneurs to be heard by a venture capitalist who might be willing to fund their startup. So let’s think about what needs to be heard, and why.

1) Your passion. You need to be heard as a professional entrepreneur who cares about your potential company, and your product.

2) Your conviction. You need to persuade the audience that you are convinced your idea, or product is excellent because you have done the homework, and your research is thoroughly tested.

3) Your commitment. You need to convince everybody that you are in this for the long haul, and that you have the courage to make it your first priority.

4) Your understanding. You need to share the specifics of your product or idea clearly, succinctly and entertainingly.

Now, you might be forgiven for thinking that if you just write it all down, memorise it, and then speak it out loud, that you will be doing all you need to do. And you would be wrong, very wrong. Because in the words of the song: “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it”.

Sounding genuinely passionate and dedicated with conviction is not as easy as it… sounds. It is easy to sound like an infomercial salesperson, because we hear them on the telly and we know how to imitate them. However, pretending to sell something, over-enthusing about it is a real turnoff, and many a brilliant potential entrepreneur has disappeared over the horizon as a result of a poorly presented pitch. At the other extreme are the “um-mers” and “er-ers”, who may be very passionate and well-prepared, but who simply do not hear themselves accurately, or do not have enough innate confidence in themselves to allow their speech to flow naturally and easily.

For a thoroughly excellent run down of the kind of things you need to include in your presentation, check out this blog posting by Bill Cunningham, “The Pitch Doctor”.

Then think about your voice, the physical means by which you will share those excellent facts and that passionate conviction.

You ARE your voice. The you that exists in the moment of speaking is the one that is heard. So if you are tense, nervous, aggressive, shy, arrogant, insecure or a combination of some of all of these, that is what your audience hears. Your words may be full of confidence, but if your voice is apprehensive then that is what the audience perceives.

And that is one extremely vital element that stands between you and the fulfilment of your entrepreneurial dream.

Have you ever taken part in a Pitch Competition? Are you comfortable with the sound of your own voice? When you are irritated by a particular speaker, are you aware how much the sound of his or her voice contributes to your response?

Join the conversation, and leave a comment below. I’d love to hear your views on this topic. And please share with your friends and colleagues.

Performance Skills Training, Voice

Put Your Best Pitch Forward Read Post »

Mumbler Jumbler Talk

Mumbling is just a way of describing unclear speech, or speech that cannot be easily heard or understood. It’s annoying if you are the listener, because it requires extra effort to translate the bits of information you can glean from what you hear into something wholly intelligible. It’s also annoying for the speaker, who is often asked to repeat what they have just said.

While it may be a mild annoyance in a social situation, it can be quite damaging in a professional situation. People who speak clearly and audibly are much more likely to get the job than those who don’t get their message across first time.

teacher chap — getting the message across

There are many, complex underlying causes for mumbling. In physical terms, the muscles involved in articulating, or shaping the speech sounds are simply not activated adequately. This could be because the speaker is tired, or holding back because of shyness, or insecurity about the situation.

Let’s look at the last one: insecurity. If you are not comfortable that you know what you are talking about, either because you haven’t done your homework, or because you don’t have faith that you have the right to be talking on this topic, it may well be that you are unconsciously restricting the muscular effort in an attempt (misguided!) to protect yourself from criticism.

Whatever the underlying reason, speaking is a physical act, involving muscles, and if the muscles are not positioning themselves accurately or powerfully enough, the speech will be unclear.

Now, let’s be very clear about which speech sounds we are talking about. The most popular remedy for mumbling is to do lots of tongue twisters. These are phrases involving complicated sequences of consonants, that require a relaxed jaw, an agile tongue and accurate placement. For example,

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers

Thirty thick thistle sticks

She sells sea shells by the sea shore.

In my opinion, heading straight to the tongue twisters is putting the cart before the horse. You Doing them does not address the underlying problem, which is a tense, immobile jaw and a tight, inflexible tongue. First you have to learn how to relax the jaw, creating more space in the mouth and providing more room for the tongue to be more flexible, and agile. A relaxed jaw also means relaxed facial , mouth and throat muscles, including the lips and the soft palate, so that they will be in a better position to allow for more accurate placement of the combinations of lips, tongue, teeth, jaw and palates.

So if you have a problem with mumbling, start working on relaxing your jaw. That means actually letting it go, letting it drop down until you can slip 2 fingertips between your teeth without straining. This takes time.

Be kind to your jaw. It’s been working hard all your life to keep you safe behind its guardrail. Give it a break. Send it to the Bahamas for a rest. It will thank you for it, eventually.

I’ll pop some jaw relaxation exercises online in a day or two, on the Products page.