Posts Tagged ‘vocal variety’

Is The Telephone Really A Stage For A Speaker?

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
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How Can You Make The Phone Work For You, Not Against You?

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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3 Secrets To Telling A Great Story

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011
Image Credit When you tell a story, you need to know how to bring the pages to life

When you tell a story, you need to know how to bring the pages to life

Babe Ruth was great at baseball. Michael Jordan was fantastic at basketball. Joe Namath was a master of the game of U.S. football. As public speakers we’d like to be known as being the best at what we do. All of these sports stars had talents that made them better than everyone else. Guess what – there’s a speaking skill that can make you better than every other speaker out there!

Why Storytelling Matters

When you are giving a speech, you know that one of the benefits of public speaking is that you are in a position to both entertain and motivate your audience. The trick is finding a way to do both of these tasks effectively.

Speakers have a number of different skills that allow them to understand what their audience both wants and needs: listening skills, a presentation tip or two, and storytelling. Of these, storytelling is the most powerful.

The reason that spending your time developing your storytelling skills is well worth the investment is because stories are the way that mankind has been exchanging information since the beginning of time. As humans, we are hardwired to listen when someone tells us a story. This is exactly what you want your audience to be doing when you are speaking.

The importance of public speaking is that you can connect with your audience and, with a little luck, change their lives. If you have the ability to do a good job of telling them stories that make your point, then making that connection just got a whole lot easier to do.

3 Secrets To Telling A Story Well

Saying that you want to develop your storytelling skills is one thing, finding out exactly how to go about doing it is something else. Craig Harrison is a professional storyteller who has studied what it takes to tell a good story. He has three suggestions for how we can become better at this critical speaking skill:

  1. Use Your Voice: When we are telling a story, one of our most powerful tools is our voice. When a story has multiple people in it (and what story doesn’t?), if you take the time to make each person’s part of your story sound different, then your audience will be able to follow along much easier. No, we may not be professional voice actors, but it doesn’t take that much of a change to create a unique “voice” for each character in your story.

  2. Take Over The Stage: Your body is another important tool that can really help your audience get into the story that you are telling. In order to use this tool most effectively, you need to use the entire area that you’ve been given to speak in. Different parts of your story can take place in different parts of your stage. Moving from one location to another can show your audience that a change is happening in your story.

  3. Don’t Say Anything: As speakers we often spend a great deal of time thinking about what we’ll say next. When you are telling your audience a story, you need to spend your time thinking about the next time that you are going to stop talking and pause. The silence that comes along with a pause is a powerful tool that allows your story to sink into your audience’s heads before you move on to the next part of your story.

What All Of This Means For You

In order to become a speaker that everyone wants to hear, you need to develop the skills that will make you want to be heard. One of the most important of these skills is the ability to tell stories well.

It turns out that storytelling is an art that can be learned. Three of the most important skills that you’ll need to develop include using vocal variety when telling your story, using your entire stage to support your story, and discovering how to use pauses to draw your audience into your story.

It’s not impossible to become a great storyteller, it just takes practice. By focusing your practice time on developing these three skills you can transform your next speech. You’ll become the storyteller that everyone wants to hear from so that they’ll be able to find out how the story turns out in the end!

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

Question For You: Do you think that it is possible to use too much vocal variety while giving a speech?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here!
 
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

A quick question for you: are you afraid to fail? Would you be willing to get up and give a speech if you knew that it was going to turn out badly? Even though we all know the importance of public speaking, I’m willing to bet that a lot of us would say “no” – speakers who do a good job get asked to speak again, those who don’t are never asked back. However, I’m going to tell you that you’re wrong – get ready to fail if you want to succeed.

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Why Public Speakers Should Always Use Notes

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011
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Sometimes Notes Are A Good Thing

Sometimes Notes Are A Good Thing

Do you use notes when you give a speech? As public speakers, we are always told by the “gurus” and self-help guides out there that we need to break ourselves of the habit of using notes. When we see highly polished public speakers deliver the speech that they’ve given a hundred times, we notice that they do it all from memory – no notes needed. Does this mean that notes should not play any role in our speaking lives?

Don’t Throw Away Your Notes!

Bill Matthews, an accomplished public speaker, points out that no matter what skill level your speaking is at, notes can always play an important role. The one fear that we all have is that at some point in time while we are giving a speech, our mind will go blank. We’ll have absolutely no idea what we want to say next. Having your speech laid out for you in some fashion before you is the safety device that every speaker should always have.

Yes, you can overuse notes. I’m sure that we’ve all had to sit through speeches during which the presenter basically read the speech from his or her notes. It was excruciating – we got to see the top of the presenter’s head as they spent the entire speech looking down and reading from their notes.

How To Use Notes Effectively

Notes can play a powerful and useful role in any speech that we give. Matthews believes that there is one situation in which they are invaluable: when we are called on to read a prepared speech.

In this situation, we have no choice but to use the notes that we are provided because for whatever reason, we need to speak the words that have been written out for us. The one thing that we don’t want to do in a situation like this is to become one of those heads-down droning monotones that we see all too often.

Instead, we’re going to have to use our speaking skills to minimize the appearance that we’re using notes. Sound tricky? It is, but it can be done and here’s how:

  • Make Sure You Can Read Your Notes Easily: no matter if you are reading off of a computer printout or from a book, you need to make sure that you can easily read the words on the page. If you are reading from notes that you prepared, then take the time to print out your notes using a nice big font – something like a 36 size. If you have to read from a book, place something under it so that it rises up and is closer to your eyes so that it’s easier for you to read.

  • Learn To Read Fast: everyone reads at a different speed, it’s just the way that we’re wired. However, you are going to want to pick up the pace and make sure that you can take in whole sentences of text at a quick glance. By learning to do this you will be able to spend more time looking at your audience and less time looking down at your notes.

  • Use Your Voice: since you won’t be able to walk around on the stage when you are reading from your notes, you are going to have to learn to compensate for this in different ways. One fantastic tool that you have available to you is your voice. Taking the time to make sure that your delivery of the words that you are reading is both clear and compelling will win your audience over to the message that you are delivering.

What All Of This Means For You

When we give a speech, we want our words to have the maximum impact on our audience. The last thing that we want to do is to have our use of notes take away from our delivery. However, perhaps we’ve been too hard on our notes.

Notes can play a role in every speech. At the very least, they can provide a backup in case we somehow forget what we want to say next. In the case that we are handed a speech to deliver, the notes form what we are going to say. This requires us to use the techniques presented to make use of our notes without looking like we’re using notes.

As with any powerful tool, notes can both help us to give a better speech and they can harm the speech that we’re giving. Learn to use them correctly and you’ll become a speaker who will never lose your spot and who can make a prepared speech look like it’s being given off-the-cuff…!

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

Question For You: If you are going to use notes, what’s the best way to flip them without drawing attention to them?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

One of the questions that public speakers have been debating since the beginning of time is “what is the most important part of a speech?” There are really only three possibilities: the beginning, the middle, or the end. I’m here to solve this question once and for all: it’s the beginning and I’m going to tell you why…

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It’s TV Time: What A Speaker Should NOT Do On The Air

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010
Image Credit
Forget Candid Camera, This Time It's For Real!

Forget Candid Camera, This Time It's For Real!

Giving a speech in front of an audience can be one of the toughest things that you’ll ever do. Unless of course you are invited to be on television. Having watched 1,000′s of hours of television you might naturally assume that you are the perfect TV guest. That’s where you’d be wrong…

Why TV Is NOT Your Friend

Think about it for a moment, when you are giving a speech in front of an audience, you actually are in charge. You determine when things start, how they flow, and when your speech wraps up. None of that is true when you are on TV.

Instead, when you are on television you are at the mercy of the person who will be interviewing you. They get to pick when things start, just exactly what questions you’ll have to answer, and they also control when your time is up.

If you are starting to feel just a bit helpless, then you are starting to get the point. Don’t despair: you can prepare for a TV interview and turn it into a success.

5 Things You Should NOT Do On Television

Patricia Corrigan is an author and a speaker who has appeared on many TV shows. Based on her experience, she’s been able to identify what speakers should not do when they find themselves facing a TV camera:

  • Clam Up: Long before you ever make it on air, you’ll find yourself talking with the production assistants. You had better start asking some questions so that you will have the information that you are going to need to do a good job of preparing. How long will it last? What time do you have to show up? Etc.

  • Don’t Prioritize: your time on TV will be short. Although you may have 20 things that you’d like to say, you’re not going to have a chance to cover all of them. Before your big day, take the time to prioritize what you’d like to say. This is going to involve some painful pruning, but it will pay off in making it easier for you to get your point across.

  • Read From Your Notes: there’s nothing that a host or a TV audience enjoys more than watching you look down and read off of your note-cards – NOT! TV interviews are all about you interacting with the host. If you are constantly looking at your notes then this level of interaction won’t be happening. Memorize your facts before the interview starts and you won’t need your notes.

  • Speak Like A Robot: If ever there was a place where vocal variety counted, then it’s on television. If you speak in a dry monotone, then the at home viewers will be voting with their remote control channel changers and you won’t be asked back. Work some energy in your voice and come across as being animated and really caring about what you are talking about.

  • Be A Know-It-All: There will be times when you get asked something that you may not know the answer to. If this happens, then you need to just admit that you don’t know it. If you try to bluster your way through it, then you’ll just end up tripping yourself up and it’s not going to end well.

What All Of This Means For You

Ultimately what we all want to do as speakers is to have our words make the maximum impact on our audience. Television opens up a potentially huge audience to us. In order to make the most of any opportunity to appear on TV, we’ve got to be ready.

We’ve covered 5 things that as a speaker you’re not going to want to do the next time that you are invited to be on television. If you can avoid doing these things, then you’ll come across to the viewers as a knowledgeable expert in your area.

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

Question For You: What do you think the best way to make facts & stats available to you during a TV interview is?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Getting up in front of a bunch of strangers can be a challenge for even the best public speaker. The really good ones realize that there is something that they can do about this: change strangers into friends. The challenge is that they don’t have a lot of time to pull this off. This is when your ability to “work a room” can really come in handy…

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Charisma: What It Is, How To Get It, And Why You Want It

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
Image Credit
Speakers With Charisma Can Change The World

Speakers With Charisma Can Change The World

So here’s a quiz for you: who has been the best speaker in the past 100 years? Not an easy question to answer, eh? Even those of us who don’t spend a lot of time studying history can come up with an impressive list of names: John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Adolf Hitler (even mean people can be good speakers), Winston Churchill, etc. Clearly these are the best of the best when it comes to speaking in public. What made them so good and can we become as good as they were?

What Is Charisma?

It turns out that in addition to being in the right place at the right time, these fantastic speakers all shared one thing in common: they had charisma. In a nutshell, a speaker who has charisma has the ability to connect with their audience and cause their emotions to be induced into the audience.

Eva Kihlstrom has studied what it takes to obtain charisma and she’s discovered that 50% of our charisma is built into our genetic make-up – we’ve either got it or we don’t, the other 50% can be learned. Let’s see what we can do about the part that can be learned…

It’s All About Technique

We’ve all seen speakers who didn’t have charisma – they were no fun to either watch or listen to. The reason that we didn’t like being in their audience is because they spoke with a monotone voice and displayed almost no emotion. Clearly they weren’t connecting with us.

In order to work more of that powerful charisma stuff into your next speech, you need to start to vary your voice to match what you are talking about. If you are trying to convey fear, then you need to raise your voice. If you are trying to communicate wisdom, then take it down a few notches.

Your face needs to match the words that are coming out of your mouth. So much of our emotions are played out over our faces that if you can use your face to its fullest extent while you are delivering your speech, then you’ll be able to draw your audience into the emotions that go along with your story.

Have Your Body Tell The Right Story

Hopefully you are getting the point that charisma is so hard to do because it’s really the result of using everything that you’ve got to deliver your speech. This includes using your entire body: how you move on stage, the tone of your voice as you speak, in addition to the actual words that you use in speech that you deliver.

The difference between a speaker with charisma and one who doesn’t have it can be striking. A speaker who has charisma speaks with so much energy that the audience can’t help but get caught up in the topic. It’s this energy that can motivate an audience to go out and take action based on what was said.

Mental Images Rule

In order to connect with an audience, a charismatic speaker needs to be able to build vivid images in their audience’s minds. Having a shared mental image can do remarkable things in terms of bringing an audience closer to a speaker.

In order to create a clear image, a speaker needs to pick their words carefully. Using words that have easily pictured images makes this much easier to do. Take some time and listen to (or read) great speeches from charismatic speakers and you’ll see that this is exactly what they do.

What All Of This Means For You

Once you get over the nerves and jitters that come with speaking in public, we all start to wonder what comes next. The ultimate goal for any speaker is to start to work more charisma into your speaking style.

In order to do this, you need to find ways to make a stronger connection with your audiences. No new technology is needed to make this happen. What you need to do is to make better use of your voice, your facial expressions, and your body language.

The power of a charismatic speaker is impressive. If you take the time to work on developing your skills in this area, then you will have a skill that very few speakers can demonstrate and this will make you stand out from everyone else.

Question For You: Have you ever listened to a charismatic speaker and what to you most remember about their speech?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’m pretty sure that by now everyone has at least heard about the TV show “American Idol”. It’s the most popular show on television right now and everyone seems to be talking and gossiping about it all the time. Outside of being a great source of entertainment, is it possible that this show just might be able to teach us a few things about how to become a better speaker…?

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