Using Your Voice as a Storyteller
Are you a storyteller on stage? Do you want to engage and inspire your audience in a comfortable and natural way? The great news is that you have one of the essential tools to accomplish this already!
Your voice.
But how? Ah, there are a variety of ways you can use your voice to tell your stories in an appealing and impactful way. Let's explore these in this series.
When Your Presentation Lands Well
When you're "on", your presentation is a story that flows along a melody. The audience is responding and receiving your main message. You feel great because you connected with them. They feel great because they connected with you.
There are a lot of ways to help improve a presentation, but like learning anything, I like to reduce the concept count to focus on one area at a time. Reducing the concept to one thing, such as voice, allows me to improve in that area for each upcoming presentation with being distracted with 100 things to ponder.
Let's focus on your voice. This series of posts that I'm sharing will explain some of the ways I have learned from various coaches and training that have helped me improve how well my presentations land.
What's Coming in This Series?
Are you dramatically pausing like Captain Kirk or are you speaking as fast as a legal disclaimer in a radio commercial? How high or low do you talk when presenting Do you have a whispering or a booming voice? Do you accentuate critical words and phrases?
If any of these intrigue you, I hope you'll enjoy the upcoming posts (in no particular order):
1 - Using Your Voice
2 - Pace of your voice
3 - Pitch of your voice
4 - Volume of your voice
5 - Emphasis of words in your speech
6 - Clarity of your speech
I'll update these links as I publish them.
I hope you find value in these!
Top comments (12)
Oh boy I got a big presentation comin up in a month and my nerves are trembling like a tuning fork. I am looking forward to your posts.
Good luck!
good luck!
Thanks John for starting this series.
👍
I'm looking forward to the series.
Great series coming! I'm looking forward for it!
Thanks for sharing knowledge and experience :)
Thanks - hopefully you find these tips to be useful
Thanks! I believe also knowing what is happening inside your throat could help you to be more confident when you are on stage. I have been taking singing lessons for a while now, and sometimes in this path you learn that in order to create an atmosphere o a concrete sensation, you might be using a wrong technique, and you need to use something else to create that thing you were looking for. Lowering your larynx, nasality, mask and pharyngeal resonance, twang... there's a lot to learn! youtube.com/watch?v=9FX49_AbcyY
I hope this helps too!
Giving my first conference talk at the end of May. Looking forward to your insight!
People often concentrate so much on the content of their presentation that they forget the delivery.
👍🏽You're spot on with focusing on one aspect at a time. I started my public speaking journey a few years ago and still need to focus on just one thing at a time. :)