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The Too Soft Voice
By Dr. Carol Fleming

Louise was earnest. Mark worked hard. But neither one of them could get their voice to carry to the last row of the conference room. Indeed, even people in the front row had to lean forward to hear them. Their speaking style was geared for face-to-face conversation, not projection to a larger group.

People who cannot be heard will not be understood. People who cannot command a space with their voice cannot command the space with their authority or knowledge. Unless you can look forward to having a microphone always available to you, you will need to mobilize your resources for increased vocal power.

And your resources are: Motivation, Energy, Air. You access these resources with the following practice plan.

Motivation: If you are timid and unsure of yourself, your voice will certainly display your discomfort in speaking. You need to address this issue first. Do what you need to do to build your confidence (consult, research, rehearse, etc.) so that you’ll want to have your voice fill the space in front of you. Do the up-front work that pays off in performance comfort. Simple as that. The lack of adequate preparation is the major reason a person will not demonstrate authority in speaking.

Consult with experts to get proper focus
Research thoroughly through professional journals, on-line, etc. to make darn sure you are on top of the subject
Understand the difference between writing for a report and speaking to a group of people; a public speaking perspective that has its own requirements.
Rehearse, out loud, with real people, with projection and eye-contact uppermost in your mind.

This attitudinal shift is an absolute requirement to move your agenda. You can’t give it gas with your foot firmly on the brake.

Mark had put a lot of effort into a research paper for his professional association. His effort went into getting it perfect on paper for publication. No time was spent on how to present it verbally to his colleagues. So he just read it as fast as he could, with his eyes down toward his paper. He just wanted the presentation to be over; he did not want to command the room and be heard and understood. Sure, he hoped that would happen and but did not make it happen.. You must imagine yourself as in command of the room space, much as a lion’s roar takes ownership of the plains. You want to dominate the space with your voice. A reluctance to do this may well lie behind your small voice in the first place.

Energy. Your body actually knows how to adjust the force of your voice for distance. Mobilize this unconscious knowledge with actual practice of projecting your voice out across a room. You can practice this at home. Place large pictures of people on the far side of the room – any room. Now, speak to the pictures as if they were real people in the room with you. You will be practicing your eye contact as well as your projection if you focus on each face for five seconds as you speak, delivering a complete thought unit to each ‘face’ before moving on to another face. Yes, you will feel foolish at first but don’t quit too fast. In order to learn something from this exercise you need to keep it up until it becomes easy for you.

For best results, practice with real people – friends, family - to signal you that

they can hear you comfortably, and
they feel that you are making eye contact

When you are actually dealing with an audience, draw on this experience to speak to the faces way in the back of the room. If they can hear you, everybody can hear you..

Air: Effective voice projection costs you a chest full of air.

Louise wanted to become a trainer in human resources. Her lecture plans were great, visual aids and workbooks were just fine; she had done that up-front work to create a presentation that she was proud of. Her ambition large, she wanted to break out of the pack to be a leader. But she was all of 5’ tall, and maybe carried 100 lbs dripping wet, and was culturally shy. You couldn’t hear her unless you were within arm’s reach. A strong voice is powered by a good supply of air and that’s where we started our work on her projection.

When Louise tried to speak louder we found that she ran out of air rapidly and she was stopping to take in air at strange places in her stream of language. She was not used to opening up her chest to increase her capacity for taking that nice deep breath of air. In addition, I could observe that she had tension in her shoulders.( There’s something about modern life that makes us hunch our shoulders!) Her “trying” included upper body effort that was counter productive.

We started with some stretches of the shoulder girdle to get any residual tensions out of the way of maximum inhalation. Louise studied yoga and had good flexibility. Try them yourself to see if you are carrying tension in your shoulder area and get a sense of your own flexibility. You should be standing for both stretches with loose clothing.

As you try these, go at your own rate and don’t hurt yourself. Start with holding the stretch for five-to-ten seconds, and work towards holding it for 30 seconds to allow the stretch to do some good.

For the back: cross your elbows in front of you, and then wind your hands around to be palm to palm (sort of). Gently raise your arms so your fingers are approaching the ceiling. Hold, release, and experience the resulting sensation. Then cross again with the other elbow and repeat. You should feel those tight muscles that come off your back bone being stretched out and relaxed.

For the front: stretch your left arm straight up close to the head and let the elbow bend so you are touching your spine as far down as possible. The right arm goes behind your back and reaches up to touch and hold the fingers of the left hand. It may help if you hold a handkerchief in your left hand for your right hand to reach for, if this stretch is very difficult for you (which it probably is). Do the exercise reversed now. This should loosen up shoulder tension.

After you’ve loosened your shoulder girdle you should feel a relaxation in the shoulders and the upper back and chest. Keeping that relaxed feeling, letting the arms hang heavy from the shoulders. Take a deep breath of air using midsection breathing, not your upper chest. The focus of our work here is maximum air intake without shoulder tension; diminishing any tension allows the voice to be easy, relaxed and carry more resonance, at the same time having enough air under it to send it out into a room.

At this point, it would be useful to go back to your pictures, think of a statement to say to each picture, but consciously practice the midsection, relaxed breathing as you do so. You’ll find that you’ll need to counter-act your old habit of grabbing for air in the upper body. Please be willing to do the amount of repetitions to make this easy for you to do.

Louise found that she could muster up a larger voice for classroom teaching. At first she felt that her voice was ‘too loud’, but that was just because it was in fact louder than her habitual level. An audio recording assured her that that level of projection was appropriate and effective.

P.S. You don’t have to be a small person to have a small voice.

Contact us today to discuss how our workshops, coaching and training products can improve your Personal Professionalism and Communication Impact.

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