Posts Tagged ‘recording’

The 100 Hour Secret To Creating Speeches Everyone Will Want To Hear

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
Image Credit Yes, I Do Have A Secret To Share With You

Yes, I Do Have A Secret To Share With You

Have you ever gone to hear someone speak and just been blown away by what they had to say? I mean their words just seemed to flow out of them and the stories that they told were right on the mark – a perfect complement to the point that they were trying to make? It turns out that you can deliver speeches like this too…

The Secret To Creating Great Speeches

If you want to be able to give a great speech, then you’ve got to be willing to invest the time to create a great speech. I’m not talking about shutting down for a couple of days and holing yourself up somewhere and banging out some fabulous bit of text – that never seems to happen when you need it to.
Nope, what I’m talking about is actually spending the time that it takes to really create a fantastic speech. How much time is that you ask? Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 hours. Oh, oh – now I’ve gone and done it. It looks like you don’t think that this is possible. Turns out that you’re wrong – spend the time keeping a journal and you’ll have all of the high quality content that you’ll need to quickly make a great speech.

How To Spend 100′s Of Hours Creating A Speech

I’ll grant that you are correct that the next time someone asks you to give a speech, the last thing that you want to have to tell them is “could you get back to me after I spend a 100 hours just whipping up a speech for you?” Maybe there’s another way to do the same thing.
Keeping a personal journal is something that all too few of us speakers do, and yet all of us probably should do more of it. Life comes at us fast and if we’re not careful, it will blow right by us and we won’t even remember what happened to us. That’s why a journal is so important.
If you take the time either once a day or perhaps for short times throughout the day to write down what you are doing, how you are feeling, what challenges you are facing, then you will be able to remember everything that has happened to you. This is the raw material that makes for a great speech.

Strong Words Make Strong Images

Anybody can jot a few words down on a piece of paper. It takes a truly skillful speaker to capture just exactly how you are feeling when you update your journal.
One of the keys is to record how you are feeling using all of your 5 senses. Yes, this means taking note of what you are smelling (perhaps your own fear?), tasting, hearing, seeing, and feeling. These are the small details that you will need to use when you use your journal entries to create a fantastic speech.

What All Of This Means For You

The truly great speakers are the ones who have taken the time to create a speech that will resonate with their audience. This means that they have crafted both the words and the stories that will not only allow them to get their points across, but that they have also found a way to get their message to stick with their audience.
You have the ability to create this kind of speech also. What you are going to have to do is to take the time that is needed to create such a speech: 100 hours or more. It turns out that you can do this by keeping a journal – the time that you spend working on the journal will pay rich dividends when it comes time to create your next speech.
By recording everything that you are experiencing at any given moment in your journal, you’ll be able to go back and relive those moments when you are in the process of creating your memorable speech. The secret is to not gloss over how you feel, but rather to record everything that is going on so that you can recapture it. Nobody said it was going to be easy, but it will be the best 100 hours that you’ve ever spent doing something…

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

Question For You: How often do you think that a speaker should update their journal? Once a day or more often?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

PowerPoint is a double edged sword when it comes to giving a speech: it can be both a powerful way to add a multimedia impact to your speech or it can end up distracting your audience and taking their attention away from what you have to say. The experts know how to use this tool correctly and here are three of the ways they tame the PowerPoint beast…

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Posted in speech writing | No Comments »

Your Presentation Voice: Is That Really Me?

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
When Speakers Hear Their Own Voice, They Need To Make A Decision...

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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Welcome To The Pod: Tips On Podcasting For Public Speakers

Monday, September 29th, 2008
A Podcast Is A Great Way To Record And Distribute Your Speech

A Podcast Is A Great Way To Record And Distribute Your Speech

So speaking in front of a real, live audience is a great way to communicate. However, we don’t always get to control the world that we live in and so sometimes it’s just not possible to have you (the speaker) in the same place as all of the people who need to hear your message (your audience). What’s a speaker to do? Back in the olden days, this would be the time that you’d whip out the cassette recorder, make a master tape, and then through the magic of high-speed dubbing you’d crank out as many copies as you needed and off they’d go in the mail. Thank goodness those days are behind us now.

Here in the 21st Century we’ve now gone all digital. When we want to record our voices to share with others, we no longer reach for the cassette, now we reach for our laptops and iPods to create podcasts. As easy as it is these days to capture and publish our spoken words, lately I’ve been running into a lot of really poorly done podcasts and it’s got me scratching my head. I mean, aren’t these people listening to what they are creating and, just like me, doesn’t it make them shudder?

To make sure that you don’t get off the beaten path, here are some tips that will help you create a great communication tool your first time at bat:

  • How Do I Record My Voice In The First Place? You’re going to need two things in order to capture your voice on your laptop: a microphone and some software. You can get wacky about microphones if you  are a real audiophile; however, just about any one will do. It turns out that the sound card built into your laptop actually does most of the work, so the physical microphone just has to be good enough – if you already have one, then use it. If you need a recommendation, the Labtec Verse 524 is a good one to go with and you can’t beat the price: ~$10.
  • What Software Should I Use?: Once you have your speech recorded, you are going to want to do at least a bit of editing on it – chop off the false starts at the beginning or trim off the run on bit at the end. Once again, I’m a big advocate for doing this on the cheap and so I’d recommend downloading and using the very popular free (as in beer), open source software that everyone else seems to be using called Audiocity.
  • How Long Should My Recording Be?: Ok, so this is where you can get yourself into some serious trouble. The longer you speak, the more damage you can do. You have no way of actually “seeing” the audience who will be listening to your podcast, so you need to be as brief as possible and keep to your main points. You want to speak long enough so that your listeners get value from what you are saying; however, you don’t want to speak so long that they start to look at their watches wondering if you are ever going to wrap this thing up. Remember, they are not sitting in an audience so if you lose them, they’ll just click you off. As a general rule of thumb, I’d say that you don’t want to talk for longer than 15 minutes on a single podcast.
  • What Should I Not Do?: This is an easy question to answer – get rid of any “umms” and “ahs” that show up when you are speaking. Since there is no live audience, there is a good chance that if you aren’t careful you’ll start to fill in the blank spots in your speech with these filler sounds and especially on a podcast, they are quite distracting and really take away from your message.
  • How Should I Change My Speaking Voice?: Stop – don’t! Sometimes your microphone, your laptop, or even Audiocity software will let you change how your recorded voice sounds. I’ve had women friends who have fooled with these settings so much that their recordings made them sound like James Earl Jones was speaking their parts. You are better off speaking using your normal voice. It can be quite a shock when you hear your recorded voice the first time; however, spend some time with it and become comfortable with it – everyone else is!

Have you had a chance to create a podcast yet? Why did you have to do it? Did you have any technical challenges making the actual digital recording? Were you happy with the final outcome? What did you think about how your recorded voice sounded? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in communication skills | 3 Comments »