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Triple Take #5

Voice Confident's Triple Take - your fortnightly trio of tips!


VOICE: find a resonant tone

When warming up to speak, a great sound to help you find a resonant tone is NUNG.

N - nasal resonance

U - neutral vowel, helps to loosen the jaw

NG - pharyngeal resonance (back of the throat)

Just repeating "nunga nunga nunga" will help warm up your voice effectively.


Even better - sing along to something, substituting "nunga nunga" for the words of the song, as this will warm you up through your pitch range.



Making eye contact with the audience
Making eye contact with the audience

PRESENCE: eye contact when addressing a group

When we speak to a big group of people, all those eyes on us can make us feel nervous.


We can be tempted to

  • Look over people's heads and address the back of the room

  • Scan quickly round the room, trying to look at everyone and no-one

  • Just make and hold eye contact with people we know


Best thing is to break up what you are saying into thoughts/sentences and deliver one thought to one person, making eye contact; then the next thought to another person; etc..


In a big room, you might not make eye contact with everyone. But as an audience member, we identify with other members of the audience, meaning that if the speaker is making eye contact with someone near us, we feel almost as though we were that person.


Benefits of one thought, one person:

  • You look in control and not scatty or uncomfortable

  • You will make eye contact with a good number of different people in the room and if you vary whereabouts in the room you choose your people, everyone in the room will feel like you were speaking to them

  • You naturally communicate more clearly when speaking to one person

  • You will naturally use more expression and gesture when speaking to one person

And, the big one:

  • Looking out at lots of eyes makes us (for evolutionary reasons) nervous. Communicating with one person, eye to eye, especially when that person gives you some non-verbal listening cues back, makes us (for evolutionary reasons) calmer and happier. So by employing 'one thought, one person', you are helping to regulate your nervous system and feel more confident in that situation.


And if communicating one thought to one person feels long - it's been proven in studies that the person speaking starts to feel uncomfortable with the length of eye contact with one other person much more quickly than the person listening to them does. So while it might seem long to you, it doesn't to them.


Finding your confidence in front of an audience
Finding your confidence in front of an audience

CONFIDENCE: is it a lack of confidence, or something else?

A lot of the time, when I say I'm a voice coach, the first thing people say is:


Oh, I get really nervous speaking, I don't like it, I'm just not confident in public.


And usually, when we talk about it a bit, it isn't that they lack confidence.


I know this, because they tell me how much they enjoy working with their clients or collaborating with their teams, how they have loads of experience doing what they do, are often highly qualified, and are passionate about helping other people.


And they say:


It's funny, I'm fine 1:1, I'm just not confident with an audience there.


And I say, if you're fine 1:1, you don't lack confidence.


You lack the skillset to show up authentically as yourself, with all your knowledge and experience and passion, in a situation where your evolutionary stress response turns you physiologically into a gibbering wreck.


That's not a lack of confidence. That's just you losing access to it.


Some people do lack confidence in themselves. Some people have low self-esteem or trauma responses or other things that affect the way they feel about and see themselves. My work around nervous system regulation can help these people, but there are a number of professionals in other areas who would also be needed, and I would always seek to refer.


But if you are:

  • confident that you produce great work

  • certain of your skills when you're working on your own

  • self-assured when you're speaking 1:1

  • eager to share your skills when writing content

  • passionate to help the people you can help

then your problem when you try to speak in public isn't a lack of confidence.


IT'S A STRESS RESPONSE ISSUE.


As someone who suffered from debilitating stage fright twenty years ago, I know exactly what this is like. And I can tell you, you can work with and mitigate your stress response. You can learn techniques to get you speaking up and speaking out no matter the size of the room or the nature of the audience.


Please don't think, I'm not confident.


Maybe think, I'm going to learn some skills that allow me to speak up with my confidence on show!


All to play for.

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