Just as with the rest of your body, some people naturally have more vocal strength, while others need to pump up theirs just to keep up with their daily vocal requirements. Which category you fall in is for you to decide.
If you quiver, I won’t be able to tell you the exact cause of your quivers without speaking with you, but it is likely that the cause of your quivering voice is either nerves, or lack of vocal strength, or both. Regardless of the case, voice training using proper vocal exercises can make a world of difference in both control and endurance in the voice.
Training the voice to sound better doesn’t need to be a complicated or lengthy process. It’s easy to develop some simple but key vocal skills to help you sound more confident and interesting. You can apply this technique straight away to make an immediate difference.
Voice Therapy Uses Individualized Exercises and Techniques to:
•Optimize the voice.
•Assist in pre-operative and post-operative voice use.
•Eliminate harmful vocal use habits.
•Strengthen and coordinate the vocal folds.
•Educate about healthy voice use.
•Adjust behaviors or lifestyles that caused the voice injury.
Almost anyone who relies on their voice for their living can benefit from voice practice. Even without a distinct disease or injury, most people don’t use their voices optimally to minimize fatigue and maximize comfort.
Some Voice Practice Exercises You Can Do
A good voice comes from two major components: healthy vocal folds and proper voice use. It’s not uncommon for a singer or professional voice user to have vocal complaints but have normal appearing vocal folds.
In these instances, vocal technique is often the source of the problem. Voice practice helps overcome part of this problem. This applies to the speaking and singing voice. Because we use the same instrument to speak and to sing, either task can injure the voice and make the other task more difficult. Often, singers are excellent technicians with their singing voice, but speak incorrectly, thereby setting themselves up to sing with a tired and misused instrument.
Voice practice is the practice of treating the voice non-surgically by emphasizing healthy voice use. It’s essentially physical therapy for the voice and is a highly effective method to reduce the need for surgery.
Voice practice is also a critical component in optimizing surgical outcome by minimizing vocal strain. However, voice practice is only as effective as the skill of the person practicing it.
Using Pause to Control Your Voice
Nerves play a very important factor in influencing your voice. When you’re nervous, your natural tendency is to speed up. The effects of this can be that you:
•Lose your thought track and start to waffle on.
•Mumble and become unclear.
•Sound monotone and uninspiring.
You therefore need to control the speed of your delivery so that you avoid falling into these bad habits. There’s one key way to do this. This is to use a pause, which acts like a brake pedal to help you slow down.
When you first start to speak, aim to pause for about 2 – 3 seconds after your first sentence. This may seem like a lifetime, but it'll actually help you to control your speed and avoid racing ahead of yourself. It’ll also seem very natural to your audience as the pause allows them time to adjust to your voice and take in what you have just said.
A good way to practice getting use to pausing is to read out aloud a piece of text. This can be from a newspaper, magazine, etc.
When you get to a full stop, make sure that you pause for 2-3 seconds before moving on to the next sentence. This will help you to train yourself to pause at the end of your sentences and maintain a steady pace.
If you practice this exercise, the next time you have to speak to a group of people, the effect will be quite noticeable. You will come across with greater:
•Focus.
•Clarity.
•Confidence.
Using Emphasis to Help Make Your Voice More Interesting
So now that you have learnt how to develop greater control over your voice, the next thing is to learn how to sound more interesting.
Some of the most common turn-offs to an audience when listening to a dull and uninspiring speaker are:
•A monotone voice.
•A voice that is too quiet.
•A voice that lacks emphasis.
You need to speak with energy and enthusiasm if you want your audience to want to hang on to your every word. If the audience can’t hear you they’ll switch off very quickly. To avoid this you don’t need to shout but you do need to learn how to project your voice.
To help project energy and power into your voice, emphasize the key words in your sentences, which will catch the attention of the audience. For example, take the sentence: ‘I encourage everyone to work together as a team so that we all achieve greater success.’
You could pull out the key words in this sentence such as Everyone, Together, Team, and Greater Success.
By emphasizing these words, you’ll automatically project energy and passion into your voice and your voice will sound stronger and more confident. Emphasizing words also tends to lift the pitch in your voice – so that it’s no longer monotone but more varied and interesting to listen to.
This voice practice workout will help you to strengthen your voice. To go to the next level, I also recommend that you do the following:
•Practice your speeches out loud.
•Warm up your voice every day, but especially before public speaking. Ideally, spend as much time practicing as you will in front of an audience.
•Learn to breathe properly and apply that technique to your public speaking
•Hum a lot. Explore and develop mask resonance.
•Take a singing class or private singing lessons. This is true strength training for your voice.
There are many more easy-to-practice exercises that help bring out the best qualities in your voice. If you attend a voice-training workshop or have some personal coaching with a voice coach, you can learn how to unlock the power of your voice.
You’ll learn to develop a much greater awareness of your vocal potential and how to use your vocal qualities to help influence others in a positive way in all speaking situations.
Voices are not fixed at birth. Like athletic or mental skills, they can be greatly enhanced by concentration and training. Following are the steps necessary to enhance your voice – and your business production.
First, determine what to be changed. The best way to do this is to record telephone conversations for later review. Reading into a recorder is not adequate. Record several hours of calls and listen to 15 minutes in the middle for several days in a row.
Grade Yourself in the Following Areas
•Rate – The speed with which we speak. Many people speak too rapidly. Very few speak too slowly. A slower pace is particularly important in telephone sales, as our attention-focusing skills – body language, eye contact, clothes, observation of the other person’s attention level – which have been developed in face-to-face conversations,