Breathing and vocal control

The sound and quality of your voice relies on your ability to control your breathing. The best kind of breathing for producing volume and good vocal control is passive breathing.

Passive breathing starts with the exhale. Hold your fist below your navel. Exactly at the spot where your fist is located, isolate and flex only those lower abdominal muscles and squeeze out a little puff of air. Make sure it is not from your waist but below your waist down by your fist and that it is only a little air. Imagine squeezing the air out as if it is a bubble of air from a turkey baster.

Let the air back in again as if you are hollow below the waist. Let your lower abdominal muscles relax as you loosen your jaw and open your throat, as if you were yawning. Keep your throat relaxed and open so that the air can flow in. Visualise about a fistful of air falling directly down to the bottom of your torso.

Now squeeze the air back out again with a light grip from your lower abdominal muscles.

Keep the process going and you are now breathing passively.

Practice breathing this way and you will notice an improvement in your vocal control.

For more detail on other aspects of speaking and presenting see www.youcanspeakwithconfidence.com

People don't listen

Do you get frustrated because people don't seem to listen to you - even in everyday conversation?

Do other people talk over you or interrupt before you've finished talking?

This can be very frustrating and demoralising if it happens to you all the time. People can be so rude sometimes even if it is unintentional. So why does this happen and how can you make yourself heard?

There can be many reasons why this happens:
* the listener could be over-excited about what THEY have to say on the topic
* perhaps you aren't confident about the subject
* you might be rambling and taking too long to get to the point
* or maybe your voice is too soft and uncertain

Today I'd like to pick up on just the last point there. If your voice is too difficult to hear or understand then your listener can become frustrated and even embarrassed if they have to keep asking you to repeat yourself.

If you're not sure about how you sound to other people then make a recording of your voice and listen back to it. Think about how it might sound to other people and list 3 things that are good about the way you speak and 3 things you'd like to improve.

This is a good starting point as it highlights areas where you need to do some work and also sets in place the foundations of what you already do well.

Energy affects performance

I was talking to my neighbour's son at the weekend about hunting for work. He described exactly what happened to me when I finished my last corporate project.

After several weeks of job hunting he felt drained. There were no opportunities for being put forward for jobs let alone getting to an interview. It got to the stage where he thought "what's the point of even getting out of bed?".

I know from experience that it is difficult to get out of such a low point. The trouble is that if he did suddenly get a called to interview he wouldn't perform at his best because his energy would be low. What impression do you think that would make on an employer?

The same thing happens if you are pitching for business. Your prospective customer is not going to be very impressed if you don't sound convinced about making a sale.

So what can you do about it? The simple answer is to change your thoughts. That is not always easy to do in practice without some help. If you are in need of a boost in this area you might like to join my free teleconference on the Power of Attraction. The first one is on Monday 22nd June 2009 at 20:00 GMT. Contact me at admin@hartspring.com if you want details of how to join in.

Speaking & Network Marketing

Having done some network marketing myself I know that it comes as something of a shock to people that they have to do speaking in order to promote their business. Sometimes even the most confident speakers find certain aspects of it are challenging. It seems that we are quite happy to promote other people's products and services but then find it difficult to tell people about our own business.

This is not restricted to network marketers. I saw a TV programme this week where a woman had been made redundant and then decided to start her own cake making business. She said she couldn't understand why she found it so daunting to talk about her own business when she'd been doing it for years for her previous employer.

I think the difference is that your own business is personal. You are putting your head above the parapet and asking people to look at you. If you have not been used to the limelight it can be very nerve racking.

This reminds me, the general public are often surprised that actors and other performers are nervous about making speeches. You only have to watch award ceremonies to see how bad some of them are. My theory is that they are comfortable with saying other people's words (e.g. from a script) but have trouble expressing themselves on their own behalf.

I'd be interested to know what you do to overcome nerves in these situations.

A Fit of the Giggles

At the weekend I ran one of my courses on Developing Powerful Presentations. They were a great group and we had a lot of fun. By the end of the day they had become comfortable enough to be challenged to talk for one minute on any topic I gave them. None of them knew what their topic would be so it certainly set their hearts pounding.

One of the speakers stood up and launched into a speech that used some of the material from an earlier presentation. His sense of fun was very infectious and it made one of the people in the front row smile. Well that just set him off with such a fit of the giggles that he couldn't speak.


Every time he thought he had it under control he would take a deep breath to speak, catch the eye of the same person in the front row and it would set him off again. I think it's called 'corpsing' by actors. The rest of the group were quite amused by it all and it raised the question of how to cope with this situation if it happens to you.

The first thing to remember is that it is a physical reaction and it can sometimes happen as a result of nerves. The first thing is to do something to interrupt this physical reaction. This could be something as simple as taking a deep breath or moving yourself into a different position.

Once you've managed to stop the giggling you then need to prevent it coming back. Here are a few tips to help you do this:

• Avoid repeating whatever started you giggling in the beginning. If it is a particular person in the audience then don't look at them! If it is a particular word or phrase then say it in a different way!
• As soon as you feel the start of the giggles notice where it starts and where it goes as it moves through your body. You can prevent the giggles happening by reversing the movement!
• Think about something serious that is guaranteed to bring you back down to earth.

Just remember - laughter is great medicine so use it effectively in your speeches to leave your audience feeling uplifted.

Taking the fear out of networking

Along with speaking in public, the greatest fear for many people is entering a room full of strangers. The odd thing is that someone with this fear thinks they are the only one who feels that way. It comes as quite a revelation to them when they realise that all those other, seemingly confident, people are also nervous.


It doesn't seem to matter how often someone does networking this fear can hit in the strangest circumstances. A friend was telling me recently about a group of senior managers who attend a regular forum with him. One of the managers regularly networks within his region and is quite comfortable with it. However, he attended an event in London and admitted to my friend that he had spent the whole time sitting in a corner sending texts.

What a waste!

If only he had realised that there were probably several other people in the room feeling the same way, he could have had a much more productive evening.

I remember going to my first breakfast meeting with the Institute of Directors. I stood at the signing in desk feeling very insecure because I felt that these people were 'real' directors of large companies and that I was a fraud. Then a lady spoke to me nervously saying she was new and would I show her the ropes. It was at that point that a lightbulb went on for me! I wasn't alone!

Funnily enough, as soon as I started thinking about helping other people my nerves disappeared. I now make it a policy to look for someone standing nervously in a corner and I go up and introduce myself. This has developed my network to a huge extent as well as my standing with my colleagues.
With this in mind - go out and have fun networking!

Learn about Strategic Networking https://betterlifestyle.litupp.com/course/people-strategic-networking/

Knowing how to negotiate

If you want to know how to negotiate well just observe a child who wants something. Even if they’ve been told ‘No’ they will try again … and again … and again. As they get more sophisticated they won’t just ask out right for it, they will find different ways to get their point across. They may even say something like “If I wash the car for a month can I have ….”. The main thing you will notice is that they DON’T GIVE UP.

In life everybody negotiates about almost everything. It’s just we don’t always realise it and that’s the problem. We often think that negotiating happens at specific times, such as between customers and suppliers, but that’s not the whole story. What happens when you and your friends want to go out for the evening? There is a lot of negotiating that goes on around when and where you are going and with whom.

Negotiations in practice are a messy, almost chaotic, experience. Human beings are given to wandering attention, digressions, circular arguments, repetition, interruptions, cross-talk, irrelevancies, and a whole range of emotional responses from the passive sulk to the violent outburst.

What’s the worst thing you can do to a negotiator? Be rude? No … accept his or her first offer. Why is that? Well if someone accepts your first offer you start to wonder how high they would have been willing to go. On the other side you start to wonder if you really got a bargain.

What’s the negotiator’s most useful question? If you put the words “What if…” in the front of every question.

Can you believe it?

I was at a networking lunch recently and one of the ladies is a mortgage advisor. We had the normal networking conversation around what we do and how we find business. The whole thing took an unexpected turn when I explained how I was finding more people asking me for help because they were being asked to do a presentation as part of the interview process.

She suddenly became excited and said “Oh I wish you’d been able to help my son because he had to do one for a part-time job last week”. Imagining that he was going to be speaking to groups of people on behalf of a charity or as part of a youth training scheme I was shocked when she told me what he had actually applied to do.

He’s a university student and he dropped his CV in to a local company on the off-chance that they might want some part-time staff. They called him a week later and asked him to go in to see them. As part of the interview he had to ‘sell them an ashtray’ and then do a formal presentation.

The job he was applying for…

… was at the checkout in Blockbuster!

So, if you know ANYONE who is going for an interview in the near future tell them to brush up on their presentation skills

Getting Your Timing Right

Is your timing right?

Recently I've been contacted by people needing some urgent help with presentations. They've found themselves in a situation where their future prospects hinge on the success of a presentation.

It's bad enough having to make a presentation if it's not something you do regularly. When your whole future is riding on the outcome it puts you under additional pressure.

Fortunately they came to me with enough time to be able to do something about it. I was able to help by giving them some tools to control their nerves and tips on how to improve their performance.

The main key to their success was getting their timing right. We completely rewrote their presentations so that they were able to get their points across within the allotted time. This was crucial as one of them had not even made her main point before she ran out of time using her original script!

The trick is to decide what message you want to get across to your audience. You then structure your presentation so you have a clear beginning and ending with 3 key supporting points in the middle. You MUST practice saying it so that you can time how long it takes and if it is too long remove some of the material.

Someone told me recently that 200 words take about 5 minutes to deliver. This is probably a good rule of thumb, although it does depend on how quickly you speak!

Remember - good timing shows professionalism and courtesy towards your audience and other speakers, if there are any, so it is a critical part of your preparation. Don't leave anything to chance - rehearse it.

Your voice says a lot

When people find out that I help with presentation skills I often get the comment "You couldn't help our diector/chairman/boss could you? He speaks in such a monotone it's boring". This is a common problem. Our voices rise and fall naturally when we speak with passion but something seems to happen when we have to make a presentation.

I don't know if it’s nerves or the formality of the occasion that causes the stilted style of a lot of speakers. Admittedly there are some people who do have a limited range to their vocal variety, even in everyday conversation, but even these people are able to enrich their vocal abilities with a bit of practice.

I think that some people believe that serious topics require a serious voice and that they will lose credibility if they put a bit of emotion into it. This is not the case - your audience wants to know you feel strongly about the topic you’re presenting. It helps them form an emotional bond with you that makes them more likely to listen to what you’re saying even if they don’t necessarily agree with it. They also want to be informed, stimulated and, yes let’s admit it, entertained!

So what can you do about your vocal style?

You obviously need to practice, but your colleagues would find it a bit strange if you suddenly started putting on silly voices or speaking like Laurence Olivier, particularly if that's the complete opposite to your normal style. I’ve found that children make a good audience to choose for practice as they expect to be entertained and they love anything that is silly and makes them laugh.

An ideal time to try out new ways of speaking is the bedtime story for your children or grandchildren. You can afford to be as wild and whacky as possible with the different voices you use for the characters. There is usually a variety of emotions involved in a story so you can also practice how these will sound. This helps you to expand your vocal comfort zone and you get instant feedback!

If you don’t have access to any children you could perhaps find a ‘speaking buddy’. This is someone who also wants to improve their vocal skills. When there are two or more of you in the same boat it is easier to be supportive and to get feedback. You need to agree to support each other in being as outrageous and silly as you can so that you can expand your comfort zone.

A good exercise when working with other adults is ‘emotional expression’. Take a couple of words such as “I’m fine” and take it in turns to say them. Before each person speaks the other one must state the emotion that the speaker is attempting to use and then feed back if they achieved the goal after the words have been spoken. The aim is to use as many different emotions as possible and to work towards fine graduations of emotion so that you can differentiate between angry and annoyed for example.

Another exercise is to stand at opposite ends of a long room and practice shouting at each other and then whispering so that you can still be heard. The trick here is to use your breath control. You actually speak on the out breath so you will need to take in a lot of air to increase volume. Remember to use your stomach to produce volume not your vocal chords.

If you can do all this in a ‘safe’ environment it will seem a lot easier to do more toned down versions when you are in a ‘scary’ environment making a speech.

The Art of Persuasion

How often have you wished you could persuade anyone to do anything? There are some people who seem to be able to do this naturally and they seem super-human to the rest of us mere mortals. How can they do it and we can't?

The simple answer is that you can if you know what motivates someone. My brother recently sent pictures of his one year-old daughter having her hair cut for the first time. The first picture showed her throwing a major crying tantrum because she didn't want to sit still. The second picture showed the hairdresser holding a chocolate biscuit in front of the toddler who had a surprised and interested look on her face. The final picture showed a happy baby with a chocolate-covered face smiling and showing off her new haircut. The hairdresser obviously knew what would motivate a one year-old to sit still quietly.

Obviously that's a simple example of motivation at work and it's much more complicated than that, particularly with adults. Although everyone reacts differently to specific information there are patterns to the way they choose to react. These are called meta-programs and there are six of them that involve motivational traits. For each trait there are specific words that will influence someone's reaction to what you say because the words hold an emotional charge for that person. We often call these their 'hot buttons'. If you can work out a person's motivational traits then you can use words that will have the most impact on them.

The six motivational traits are:

1. Level - whether a person is proactive or reactive
2. Criteria - the things that are important to the person so they can judge whether they have got what they want
3. Direction - whether a person moves away from pain or towards gain
4. Source - how someone knows when they've done a good job (internal or external)
5. Reason - why they do something (lots of options or follow procedures)
6. Decision factors - this is basically how they handle change

If you told someone whose decision factor was 'sameness' that what you had to offer was 'new and cutting-edge' they would feel very uncomfortable because they like things to stay the same.

How does this help you with a presentation? Well, you need to use language that will influence the majority of the audience. So if we continue to use the decision factor example you would say it is something 'new and improved'.

Think about how you react to certain words and you will begin to understand how powerful this can be if you want to influence someone.

How to get the most out of networking

networking

Theresa Truscott wrote:

Getting the most from face to face contact

What do you say when someone asks you what you do? When you answer that question do they instantly want to know more or do their eyes glaze over as they change the subject rapidly?

In this time of economic uncertainty it is even more important than ever that you are able to engage the attention of the people you interact with in business. So many people miss out on opportunities because they haven’t prepared well enough, make sure you aren’t one of them.

Design and learn an interesting response to the question “what do you do?” so that people really want to know more. Make sure that it’s easy for them to ask you some follow-up questions. Think about the questions they are likely to ask and prepare for those too.

Show an active interest in the other person. Think about how you can help them, they are then more likely to help you in return.

Answering Difficult Questions

People often ask me how they should handle difficult questions. This is probably one of the areas that creates the greatest fear around making presentations. If you know your subject well you can probably make a presentation quite confidently. However, your confidence can be undermind by the fear that someone may ask you something you can't answer and you think that it will make you look stupid or unprofessional. The good news is that there a few things you can do to make the situation easier to handle.

• Take a deep breath.
• Repeat the question to verify you have understood it. This also gives you thinking time.
• If you don't know how to respond say "That's a good question, I haven't hear that one before" or "I hadn't really thought about it until you asked that question" and then respond with an initial reaction. People will realise that you are thinking on your feet and won't expect an 'expert' answer. It is even permissable to ask them what they think the answer might be.
• Explain that your answer may be your opinion rather than fact.
• Be prepared for the fact that you can’t please everybody and that your answer may not be well received.
• Stall – I can’t answer that at this time because…. I don’t have all the facts/It is confidential/The final decision hasn’t been made/It’s subject to legal constraints/I don’t know, I’ll get back to you on that.
• Be careful that you don’t appear weak if you stall, maybe give a time and date when you can answer it or a way you can get the answer to them (such as via email).
• Answer it using positive language.
• If it is difficult or unpalatable then explain why the decision was made or what the different options are and what their implications are.

If you respond with conviction and aplomb you will appear to be professional and people will respect you - even if your answer is "I don't know". They would rather that you were honest with them than feel you are hiding something.

Elizabeth the Golden Age

Last week I went to see the Cate Blanchett film "Elizabeth the Golden Age". It is a well-photographed and well-acted film that was spoiled for me by the butchering of the Tilbury speech.

Throughout the film I was anticipating hearing one of hte most pivotal speeches in history. Imagine my excitement when the moment actually arrived. Only to be followed swiftly by the disappointment when I realised that the only rousing words were to be "I will be with you on the battlefield". What happened to the famous "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too..."?

Is it just me or did other people find this disappointing too?

What is confidence?

To become confident at doing something you need to practice it over and over again. This means that you will probably feel nervous the first time you make a presentation. The good news is that even experienced speakers feel nervous when presenting something new. They just know how to overcome that nervousness and make it work to their advantage.

How can you get the confidence you need for your first few presentations so that you can become unconsciously competent without your audience knowing the difference? Basically you fake it! You may be surprised to know that if you act confidently, even though you don't feel it, your audience will think that you are confident.

Confidence is ….

• Doing what you want to do, when and how you want to do it
• Being relaxed, comfortable and secure
• Believing in yourself
• Not believing someone else is always better
• Doing as well as you can so that doors open in the future
• Setting goals that stretch you but are not too high so that you can achieve
• Not having a huge gap when comparing yourself to others
• Not compensating for being insecure by acting brashly or aggressively
• Having the ability to act confident, even though you don’t feel it
• Having the self-esteem to fail and make mistakes
• Being comfortable with yourself, and not worrying what other people think
• Having the guts to achieve what you want

Confident people feel secure in the knowledge of their talents and so are relaxed and keen to listen and learn from others.

how to overcome fear of speaking in public

Most people lack confidence when speaking in front of others beacause they are too worried about what other people think about them. I've found that if I want to increase my confidence when I have to speak in a group situation, whether it is a meeting or a presentation/speech, I just think about my audience and how important my information could be to them rather than trying to be a mind-reader. As soon as I switched my thoughts to other people's needs rather than my own insecurities it became much easier to speak in these situations. In fact there are times when I positively enjoy it, especially when I get a bit of banter going with the audience - then everyone has some fun.