Archive for the ‘speaker’ Category

How To Prepare Your Voice For Your Next Presentation

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
Your Voice Is The Most Important Speaking Tool You Have - Take Care Of It!
Your Voice Is The Most Important Speaking Tool You Have – Take Care Of It!

We can spend all the time in the world talking about how to prepare better presentations, capture and hold your audience’s attention, create great PowerPoint slides, etc. and it will all be for naught if we forget to talk about one very important thing: your voice. I don’t know about you guys, but I really don’t spend very much time thinking about my voice – until it’s not there!

So if everything is going along fine, then you don’t really need to worry about your voice. However, if you have a big presentation coming up, that’s when things can start to get bad in a hurry. You pick the cause: weather changes, allergies, a cold or flu, no matter the cause – the results are always the same. If there is something wrong with your voice, then that’s what your audience is going to be focusing on – not what you are saying!

We all have ways of dealing with sore body parts that we can get to like an arm or a leg. How does one go about taking care of a voice that is located “in there” somewhere? It turns out that it really comes down to a list of things that you SHOULD be doing as well as another list of things that you SHOULD NOT be doing. Let’s take a look…

Fluids, fluids, fluids. In the end, having a healthy / happy voice requires that you keep your vocal cords supple. Ways to do this include drinking fluids such as sports drinks which replenish sugars, sodium and lots of other nutrients.

Of course, there is a flip side to this – you need to stop drinking some things. You can say goodbye to coffee as your presentation date / time grows nearer. Oh, the same thing goes for alcohol in any form. The reason that you have to avoid these fluids is because they act as a drying agent and that’s the last thing that your vocal cords need.

How do you start your day? I personally enjoy having a glass of orange juice. However, it turns out that orange juice has the potential to irritate your throat. Dang! The OJ has to go on presentation day.

If you start to come down with something as your big presentation day approaches, there are some defensive activities that you can start to do. Adding a humidifier to your bedroom will help to lubricate your throat while you are sleeping. Additionally, you can spend some time in a steamy shower in order to sooth your entire respiratory system.

Once you get your fluids taken care of, you need to make sure that you don’t screw things up now. This means that you need to avoid clearing your throat because this will end up irritating your vocal cords.

If you feel yourself starting to become hoarse there are a couple of things that you can do. Try to gargle with warm salt water a few times during the day. Additionally, you should start to drink herbal tea with honey in order to fight back the hoarseness.

Be very careful about doing what we all normally do: popping a throat lozenges that contains menthol or some other anesthetics. The reason that these are so bad for you is that they numb your throat and this will hide your body’s warning signs that it’s time to stop using your voice.

One final recommendation: during your actual presentation you should do your best to keep your tone at a conversational volume level. By doing this you will be able to avoid overexerting your vocal cords.

Have you ever been in danger of losing your voice just before you were to give a big presentation? What did you do to save your voice? Did it work? How did you sound when you gave the presentation? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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A Few Notes About Notes

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

Speakers notes often get in the way of what is being said

How can you tell when you are going to be sitting though an absolutely terrible speech? There are a lot of ways, but one sure fire sign is when you see the presenter approaching the podium with a big handful of notes that seem to be exploding from whatever he/she has them barely contained in. As the speaker takes the next five minutes to find the start of their notes, everyone in the audience has a chance to sit and squirm because we all know what’s coming next – complete boredom! What’s interesting is that it’s often not the speaker’s fault, but rather the notes that they are using. If the job of every speaker is to connect with their audience, then notes sure seem to be a big brick wall that stands in the way of accomplishing that goal. Why is this?

Why do people who speak using notes have such a hard time connecting with their audience? The answer, it turns out, is actually pretty simple. When you are standing in front of a live audience and every so often you pause to look down at notes, this really screws up your brain. I mean think about it, there you are having this wonderful conversation with your audience when all of a sudden you stop the conversation, look down and start to read. Then you look back up and while your brain is trying to process what you’ve just read, your mouth opens up and tries to jump right back in where you had left off. If you look down frequently, you are almost certain to screw up your speech eventually.

Having said all of this, it may come as somewhat of a surprise to you that I’m going to tell you that I’m actually a big fan of speaker’s notes. Why you ask? I have seem too many speeches where the speaker was half way through and then for some unknown reason just lost it. If the speaker didn’t have notes, then there was this very long, painful, silence in which the speaker completely shut out the audience while he/she desperately tried to remember both where they were and what came next. Ouch! So I fully believe that every speaker should have a nice outline of their speech with them and lay it on the podium as a sort of insurance policy. If everything goes well, then hopefully the speaker will never have to refer to it. However, in case there is a perfect storm, then there is a lifeboat ready and waiting for the speaker.

Dr. Steve Reagles has a couple of suggestions: oral writing and oral practice (don’t laugh). When he talks about oral writing he’s really suggesting that you keep four points in mind:

  • Keep it simple: make it so that your audience can easily picture what you are talking about.

  • Tell ‘em What You’re Talking About: make sure that you tell your audience what your point is – don’t make them guess based on the material that you’ve presented.
  • Make It Memorable: Be sure to lay in rich details and interesting examples so that your audience can remember what you talked about.
  • Tie It Up!: Make sure that you have ideas that run throughout your entire speech that you can use to tie various sections together and to make a seamless whole.

After you have that taken care of, Dr. Reagles suggests that you practice, practice, practice. He makes the good point that it’s through practice that we are able to lift the words that we write in an outline up and turn them into a verbal performance.

Have you ever lost your way when you were giving a speech? What did you do – were you able to recover? Have you ever seen someone use too many notes? How did they take away from the speaker’s impact? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Posted in communication skills, notes, public speaking, speaker | 2 Comments »