Voice Confident's Triple Take - your fortnightly trio of tips!
Voice: face warmup
A quick warm-up that will make your articulation clearer – ‘big face, small face’.
Big face: Open your eyes wide, lift your eyebrows, drop your jaw and open your mouth wide – really stretch.
Small face: Close your eyes, pout and scrunch you face in towards your nose.
Repeat three times.
For an additional stretch for the tongue root, tuck your chin back a little and do the exercise again, sticking out your tongue and curling it down towards your chin on ‘big face’.
Presence: smile!
Smiling triggers powerful changes in your brain chemistry.
When you smile, your brain releases a cocktail of feel-good chemicals. These natural mood boosters include dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin.
To make your smile look and feel genuine, engage your whole face - eyes, cheeks, and mouth.
Smiles are catching and smiles connect…
Do more smiling generally and see how much better you feel and how people smile back and talk to you more!
(Bonus: A genuine smile helps to naturally lower the stress hormone cortisol! Laughter really is the best medicine!)
Confidence: visualisation to calm anxiety
One of the key reasons we panic when speaking in front of a large group of people is that our evolutionary brain doesn’t like to be outnumbered – when the brain was first developing, if you were outnumbered, you probably wouldn’t stay alive very long!
But this isn’t applicable to public speaking and we need to train our brains to be excited to have a lot of eyes on us, to relish the potential and privilege of those people listening to us and feel able to give our energy in performance and respond to the energy coming back to us from the audience.
A great way of prepping our brains for this is – VISUALISATION.
Visualisation is a powerful tool that works because it stimulates the same parts of the brain as real experiences. When we vividly imagine a scenario, our brain processes it similarly to actually experiencing it, making visualisation particularly effective for building confidence and reducing anxiety.
There are two key approaches to visualisation for public speaking:
External visualisation: Watching yourself from the audience perspective, seeing yourself confidently walking on stage, delivering your message effectively, and receiving positive audience response
Internal visualisation: Experiencing the presentation from your own viewpoint – walking on feeling calm, looking out at expectant faces, feeling confident in your delivery
The power of visualisation lies in creating familiarity. When you actually give your talk, if you've visualised all those eyes on you and felt that energy exchange, your brain recognises those elements from your mental rehearsal. This familiarity helps reduce the stress response.
For best results, visualisation should be practised regularly in the weeks leading up to a speaking engagement, ideally combining both internal and external perspectives.