presentation – 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 »

Where Do You Start?

The question “where do you start” with regard to training the voice, has to be preceded by another question, “why would you start?”

It’s a simple fact that nobody thinks about voice training unless something occurs to make them suspect their voice is inadequate, or unhealthy.

If there is any pain experienced while speaking, at all, the first step is not training, but some form of medical intervention. Get referred by the GP to a specialist, and make sure there is nothing physically amiss. If there is nothing actually wrong with the larynx (voice box) then therapy is usually advised to address the behaviour that is causing the pain.

Two common problems that bring people to the idea of voice training are quiet voice, and mumbling. While they are caused by specific and different behaviours, they also have much in common.

Someone who speaks so quietly that you have to constantly ask them to repeat what they are saying, is failing to apply adequate muscular effort to aspects of their voice, so that they create insufficient sound waves to be easily audible. It’s like trying to pick up an object with the hand, but leaving the fingers so floppy that the object slips through them. This is not because that person is lazy, or doesn’t care if you can hear them or not. It’s much more likely that they don’t have a strong physical sense of the energy needed to make themselves heard.

Often there’s a background of criticism, (possibly self criticism) in their lives that makes them reluctant to fully voice their thoughts. They may speak “off voice”, a kind of breathy sound such as we hear a lot in film and tv these days. That’s fine when there are powerful microphones and sound systems picking up and transmitting that soft sound – although I admit I find it intensely irritating and monotonous, even if I can make out what they are saying – but that’s another story.

When someone speaks consistently in this breathy, semi-whispered manner, not only do they fail to be heard properly, they are also potentially damaging their vocal apparatus.

Just speaking quietly is not dangerous to the voice, but it’s not good if you need people to hear you for your work. It’s a fairly simple matter to learn how to provide a more consistent supply of air pressure to the vocal folds, and to keep the upper chest, throat and neck muscles relaxed so that they don’t provide a barrier to sound waves leaving the body. Learning to relax the jaw, and open the throat more allows for more sound waves to be created for no more effort, and that means more volume.

Then, of course, the new behaviour patterns associated with making more sound have to be gotten used to. Learning to listen to oneself without judgement, observing the physical sensations of making a full-bodied sound, and being mindful of those sensations as well as the actual sound itself gives the speaker control over their means of vocal expression. When you know how to do it, you can modify your own behaviour, getting louder or softer at will.

Next time, I’ll talk about how to address mumbling.