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How Can You Make The Phone Work For You, Not Against You?

When we are on the stage giving a speech, even if this is not easy for us to do, at least we know what we need to do. We can learn how to keep the audience’s attention, we know how to communicate information effectively, and basically we understand the importance of public speaking. We also understand how to interpret all of the signals that the audience is sending our way. All of this knowledge may be contributing to why so many speakers do such a poor job of communicating with groups when a telephone is involved…

Why A Telephone Is A Scary Thing

So why do we speakers have such trouble when we have to participate in a teleconference? I think that it all stems from one simple thing: we don’t know what to do. We’re used to being the star of the show and having everyone stare at us and that’s awfully hard to do when you are on the other sides of a telephone. No presentation tips are going to help you here!

Got Notes?

The first thing that you can do to make your next teleconference go better is to learn to take notes. Look, you’re not standing up on a stage and so nobody’s know that you’ve got a pad of paper and a pencil on the table in front of your phone.

If you take the time to jot down some notes about what’s been said on the teleconference, then when it comes your time to speak, you’re going to sound like the smartest person in the room – even if you’re the only person in the room! You don’t have to take detailed notes. Just note down enough to trigger your memory when you glance at the paper and that should do the trick.

No Robots Allowed!

If there’s one thing that we all hate is when we have to listen to one of those “robot” answering machines when we call companies. What you need to realize is that since the other people on a teleconference can’t see you, the sound of your voice is all that they have to go off of. The last thing the world that you want to be doing is to be trying their listening skills!

This means is that you need to be careful to not talk in a monotone. The use of vocal variety (changing your voice’s pitch and rate) becomes very important when that’s the only way that you have for a teleconference audience to “see” you.

Let Your Telephone Audience “See” What You Mean

Although we don’t quite live in the era of Dick Tracy’s video conferencing wristwatch, that doesn’t mean that you can’t make visuals part of your next teleconference. The easiest way to go about doing this is to distribute your slides or other visuals before the call starts. Then while you are talking, you can reference your visuals and the audience on the line can follow along.

Know When To End The Show

One of the basic rules to giving a good speech also applies to hosting a successful teleconference: wrap it up on time. Nobody will think kindly of you if you run over the time that you scheduled for the call (in fact, they might just hang up); however, they’ll all love you if you can wrap things up a bit early and give them some of their precious time back.

Wrap It Up So That They Remember What You Said

You can make sure that the teleconference was worth everyone’s time by wrapping it up correctly. You do this by taking a moment at the end of the call to review what was covered and to make sure that everyone knows what the important points were. By doing this you’ll be assured that everyone leaves the call with the same view of what was discussed.

What All Of This Means For You

When you place a speaker on one end of a telephone and his or her audience on the other end, all of the rules that we’ve learned as speakers seem to go flying out the door. We need to learn how to do a better job.

It turns out one of the benefits of public speaking is that it’s not that hard to conduct an effective teleconference if you go about it in the correct manner. This means that you’re going to have to take notes so that you don’t get lost, you’re going to have to use as much vocal variety as you can in order to retain interest, and you’ll have to review what you’ve said before you wrap things up on time.

In the world of the 21st Century in which we find ourselves living, more and more often we’re going to have to communicate with groups of people using the telephone. What this means for us speakers is that we’re going to have to adjust how we talk. We can still be effective, but only if we are the ones who change in order to meet the needs of our audiences.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: How long do you think that a teleconference should run – how long is too long?

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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As public speakers, because we know the importance of public speaking, we try very hard to be as comfortable as we can be on a stage in front of an audience. If we try hard enough and get enough chances to speak to an audience (whom we hope have good listening skills), then we have an opportunity to get good at doing this. However, this can all fly out the door if we find ourselves in a TV studio someday staring at a teleprompter. What is this thing and how do we use it?

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When Speakers Hear Their Own Voice, They Need To Make A Decision...

We’ve all had that moment of disbelief – you know the one, when someone recorded you saying something and then played it back to you. You listened to the voice coming out of the speaker and you did what we all do – you winced and said “No way that’s me!” However, yes it was you – as you sound to everyone but yourself. Ouch!

From that moment on, you were forever changed. Just like in that move “The Matrix“, you had taken the red pill and now you couldn’t ever turn back – you now know how your voice sounds to others.

Nancy Meyer is a national speaker and author who has spent a lot of time looking into why we sound different to ourselves than we do to others. I think that she’s solved this mystery.

Nancy says that the reason that we sound so different to ourselves has three reasons: your inner ear, your outer ear, and where your voice comes from. Of course, that’s not quite enough info for you to do anything about it. So lets dive in just a bit deeper and find out what all of this means.

• Your Inner Ear: Your speaking voice originates in the middle of your neck. You expel air which then passes through your vocal cords, gets magnified in your voice box, resonates in the cavities in your head and then the sound exits out your nose and / or  mouth. Your inner ear (the part that actually “hears” sounds) is located quite close to all of this so only you get to hear your voice as it starts out.
• Your Outer Ear: So here’s something that you may not have thought of – you don’t actually hear the sounds coming out of your mouth. If you think about this, your ears are in the wrong place to hear what’s coming out of your mouth. Instead, what happens is that the sounds that come out of your mouth shoot out, bounce off of something, and then get picked up by your ears. This means that what you are actually hearing is really the sound of your voice plus a lot of extra noises.
• Where Your Voice Comes From: Since you are creating the sounds that you speak in your throat, these vibrations end up rattling your entire head. This means that the parts of your ear that pick up sound are getting bounced around just by the very fact that you are speaking. This changes what you hear.

So this all leads to the big question: what if you don’t like the voice that others are hearing coming out of your mouth? In all honesty, there’s not a lot that you can do.

The key recommendation is that you don’t change your voice drastically – small changes are the best. You can practice with a tape recorder making changes and then playing them back. If you still don’t like what you are hearing then it may be time to go out an invest in a vocal coach. You should hear what you’ve been missing!

Have you ever hear a recording of your voice? How did it sound to you? Do you wish that you sounded different? Have you ever tried to change how your voice sounds to other? Did it work? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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A Speaker's Voice Contains Many Tools Than Can Be Used During A Speech

When you find yourself giving a speech, you quickly realize that what you are missing is any sort of tools with which to give the speech. If you were a painter, you’d have a canvas, brushes, paints, thinners, etc. with which to make your creation. However, when you are giving a speech it’s just you and your audience. Make you feel sorta naked, doesn’t it?

It turns out that you actually do have a toolbox with which to create your speech – the words that you’ll be using. It turns out that not only the words that you choose to use, but the way in which you speak these words can cause a powerful reaction in your audience. Debra Johanyak is a professor of English at the University of Akron and she has come up with a list of different ways that we can use our voice to make our point during a speech.

Let’s take a look at the different verbal delivery “tools” that Dr. Johanyak has come up with:

• Words That You Accent: It turns out that not all words are created equal – you have the ability to emphasize certain words. As an example, consider the sentence “After cutting the green wire, a sudden silence descended over the entire bomb squad.” Simply by pronouncing the word “green” differently, you can draw your audience’s attention to it.
• Slow Pitch Speaking: The pitch of your voice controls how high and how low your voice goes. This is a powerful way to communicate emotion during your speech: “Once I saw that the cage was empty, I knew that the 6′ snake could be anywhere in the house.” The word “anywhere” can be said in a higher pitch than the other words in order to draw attention to it.
• Just Be Quiet: The most powerful speaking tool is also the simplest – just be quiet. When we add periods of silence to our speeches, it adds emphasis to the words that came before and sets the stage for the words that are to come next.

There you have it – now your speaking toolbox is actually looking rather full!

When you give a speech do you use your voice to its fullest? Have you ever ever accented words or varied your pitch to make a point? Are you able to remember to use quiet pauses to make a point? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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