The Human Voice

The Human Voice. 
Many people say they don't like to sound of their own voice. They wish it was stronger, deeper and had more impact. We all can learn to develop our voice in just one week. Here Robin gives us some simple tips to make a real difference to our voice. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Art of Communication Podcast with me, Robin Kermode. Have you ever wished you could become a confident speaker or presenter? Then why not join my online masterclass? Speak so your audience will listen. In 10 easy to follow modules, you can become a confident and authentic speaker. For more information, visit robinkermode.com.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Hello, this is Siane Hansen, and welcome to the Art of Communication podcast. I'm here with Robin Kermode.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Hello.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

This podcast is about voice. I'd like to know what is voice, Robin?

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Of all the forms of communication, I think voice is the most important. And it's the most important because when the voice is authentic, when it is your own voice as opposed to a put-on voice, then it lands with the other person and they feel the authenticity of it and they will connect with it better.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Why do you think it is that most people find it difficult to use their own natural voice?

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Well, to start with, most people say they don't like their voices. When I'm coaching people, the most common thing people say is, I don't like hearing my voice back on the answer phone, or my voice is too light. I wish it was heavier, I wish it was stronger, I wish it was louder. A lot of these things. So I think it starts off, first of all, with a sense of not actually liking their own voice, and that's not a good start.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

I wonder why people feel that way. I mean they listen to themselves, I assume, every day. Do you hear yourself differently on a recorded device?

SPEAKER_01 1:31

That's one thing. You hear yourself differently, but also other people hear you differently to how you sound. The only way to hear yourself sound actually how other people hear it is to cup your hands and hold them about an inch from your mouth. Yeah. And you count from one to ten. You'll hear yourself being bounced back off your hands towards your ears. And that is the truest way of hearing what your voice actually sounds like. And in fact, it's normally a better sound than most people hear, because most people hear themselves back on rather tinny phones. They don't hear them back through amazing PA systems.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

So what are you aiming at when you're beginning to coach people about their voice? Are you aiming for them to have a natural, authentic, distinctive voice, a voice of their own? Or are you teaching people to speak in a certain way to reach their audience?

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Definitely not to speak in a certain way. Everybody has their own voice. We can listen to the radio. There are certain people, we know their voice. Their voice is so distinctive. Can you think of somebody give us an example? Well, almost any radio presenter that we hear, we know these people, we know their voices, we've grown up with them, we've heard them for years. But the same is also true with our family. And interestingly enough, if you have a phone call from one of your family members, you often know who it is before they even speak. It's the way they breathe. And it's quite interesting because you can pick up the telephone and you can just hear before they say hello or whatever it is, in the particular way they breathe, you know it's your family member or whoever it is. So even breathing is distinctive.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

So somebody comes to you for voice coaching. What are the first steps you take with them?

SPEAKER_01 3:04

Well, we discuss together their own attitude to their voice, because that's important. We have to get to a point where they like their voice. There is no such thing as a perfect voice, because everybody's voice is different. Everyone has their own authentic voice. When somebody says something to you that is true, you believe it. Not just you believe it, but I mean you get it. When someone says something like when they're lying, for example, you know it's not quite true. And one of the easiest ways, if you speak to a friend on the telephone and you ask them how they are, and they say, Yeah, I'm fine, it's all good, life's great. I mean I'm exaggerating there, but you can tell through the voice on the telephone how they are. It's very difficult to disguise the voice if you're just listening to the voice. If you cut all the other senses out, like on the telephone, where you close your eyes and listen to somebody, you know whether they're being truthful. I don't mean truthful as in not lying, but truthful as in really meaning what they say. So the first thing is to get people to understand that when they speak authentically, when they're speaking from a place that is real and natural, then actually everybody has a great voice. So that's the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

And where does that voice come from? Where's that wellspring of authenticity when we speak?

SPEAKER_01 4:10

It's interesting because most people would say, I assume it's in the throat, but actually it's before that. The throat is like a reed instrument. So if you're playing a clarinet or a saxophone and you have a read, the air comes through the voice box, vibrates, and that creates the sound. There's something before the creating of the sound, and that's the thought. It's the intention behind it. So it starts with a thought, there's an intake of breath, and then you speak. It has to be in that order. And when we were training to be actors, we were taught that you have to start with the thought first. The thought, the breath, and then you speak. If you breathe into your emotional center, then you're more likely to sound real. So you're now going to ask me where you're.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

Yeah, I was gonna say, this is sounding quite complicated.

SPEAKER_01 4:52

It's not actually that complicated. The emotional center of every human being is in the gut. So what we need to do is to learn how to breathe into the gut. What I would ask you to do now, and anyone listening to do the same thing, if you sit on a chair, put your hand on your lower stomach below your belly button, and you breathe into your hand for a count of three and out for a count of three. And as you do this, try to make your lower stomach move and not your upper chest. You're trying to breathe into your lower stomach, your emotional center. If you do that three times and then you start speaking, your voice will change because it's emotionally connected. That's the first thing.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

So how do you reassure people that the way they speak is okay, that where they come from, their natural accent, their natural way of speaking is the best way?

SPEAKER_01 5:35

It's the best way for them. Right. That's the important thing, is the best way for them because that's who they are. And I work with so many people who say, Oh, you know, my voice gives me away. And I said, in what sense does it give you away? They said, Well, my accent, you know, belies where I am now, because it says I come from somewhere else. I said, but where you come from is who you are. And actually, certainly nowadays, the idea of having regional accents and varied accents from all over the world is fantastic because that's exactly what the world is. It's an enormous melting pot of cultures, and we should cherish all the different sounds. What we should do though is to make sure that when we do speak, we speak from our emotional center, but then we also speak in a way that is trying to have the right effect on the people we're speaking to.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

What about clarity? Because I'm someone who says if I go to a play and everybody's speaking in very thick regional dialects, I might miss some of the nuance of the play. So when you're coaching somebody, and perhaps they do have an accent from any part of the world, do you ever try and flatten out the accent in order to bring clarity to their speech?

SPEAKER_01 6:42

We never try to flatten anyone's accent. Sometimes people speak too fast. And if it's a combination of speed and a difficult accent to understand, then we work on one or the other. But we don't try to flatten the accent out. We can make an accent more easily understood to somebody else. But it's interesting what you say about clarity because when people say to me, I wish my voice was louder, actually, if we work on their clarity, and that's very simple things like the tongue twisting exercises like you know, Humpty Dumpty Sat on a wall, or round the ragged rock the ragged rascal ran, or red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather, these kind of things. Oh, let's have more of those. These kind of things. Betty bought a bit of butter, but she found the butter, but so she bought a bit of better butter to make the bitter butter better, that kind of thing. If you get your tongue working hard, actually you can be really quiet. And if I'm running a course, often I go into a company and I run a day's course, I will get people to stand one end of the room and I'll get them to speak quieter and quieter and quieter. But as they get quieter, their tongue works harder and harder, and you can still hear every single word they say. So this idea that you need to be loud is actually not true. It's about clarity.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

So moving on from clarity, could you tell me a little bit more about intonation? Where you place the emphasis on a phrase.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

Well, if you have a sentence like, I like your new suit, you could emphasize new and you could say, I like your new suit, implying I don't like your old one. Or you could say, I like your new suit, but the tie is clearly a disaster, right? So I mean you could go on and on and on. There's always nuances to be found in language. I think the interesting thing about tone is that people often say to me, when I present, I feel a bit flat, I feel a bit even. So one of the ways to lift that is not necessarily to turn into a formal presenter like a disc jockey or you know, radio presenter where there's high energy. It's about having very clear sections. So there are ways of lifting the energy of the voice without sounding false.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

I'm curious about a modern phenomenon where I've noticed that people are going up at the end of their sentences. Can you can you tell me about that? What what is that?

SPEAKER_01 8:43

Well, it's one of those things I really can't stand.

SPEAKER_00 8:46

Can you give us an example?

SPEAKER_01 8:47

Well, the idea is that everything has a question mark at the end, and it's rather like saying, so I'm putting the coffee on the table, and I go, I know what a coffee is, and I know what a table is. But it it sounds to me very condescending. So if someone says, So we're going to raise taxes, no, you're going to raise taxes if you're a politician, or you're going to lower them, depending on what your policies are. But sometimes we just want to say something and it lands. We were taught when we were at drama school, if you want to say one of the big emotions in life, you know, I love you or I hate you, all you have to do is to say those words from your emotional center in a relaxed way. Just slightly rounded down at the end. So if you said, I love you or I hate you, I'm doing nothing with the difference in the inflections at all. The words have resonance, but it's about being centered and calm from the emotional center and just saying it. But I think this idea of going up at the end of the sentence, it's a modern phase. I don't think it will last forever, I hope.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

If we're standing on a stage and we're about to give a speech, or whether you're in a smaller room, how do you project your voice? We've heard from you a little bit about intonation and speaking from your emotional center, but we're faced with a large auditorium. How do we actually throw our voice? How do we make sure that people hear us?

SPEAKER_01 10:01

Well, if we're speaking in a large auditorium, then inevitably nowadays you'll have a microphone. Even the big theaters in the world now have microphones. You get up on stage and you see this audience drifting off into the distance and you think you have to fill it. But actually, of course, the microphone is on your lapel or on your cheek if you're doing a Madonna type microphone. So it's right there. What you can do is be incredibly intimate. But the temptation and what the brain tells you to do is to be loud. But if you're loud and you don't have a trained voice, what tends to happen is you shout. And if you shout at people, it sounds like the worst kind of teachers we had at school who just lectured us, and nobody likes to be lectured. So we want to have a sense of intimacy with the voice. Rather like when we were children, if we were lucky enough, we had stories read to us at bedtime. There's something about the relaxation of the human voice that is incredibly comforting and very honest. We learn to hear stories through the voice, and in all cultures, stories are passed down by the human voice. Hopefully it always will be.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

Tell me how you can warm up your voice.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

The first thing would be to free the voice. Breathing is very good, so we've done the breathing into the stomach. Then I would roll the shoulders forwards and backwards because that releases the upper chest. It gets rid of some of the tension in the neck. You can also get yourself level with a wall and push a wall, so you're pushing very hard against a wall, and that will also release the upper chest. Then what we want to do is to hum. And if you hum very gently, mmm, let your jaw drop down, your lips together. So you have an open mouth cavity, but the lips are together. You hum and you're trying to increase the resonance in your mouth area, in the nose area, and if you go in a slightly higher note up into the crown.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

That sounds like something you might do in yoga.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

It's not dissimilar to yoga. In fact, I mean the one thing about yoga pilatis and many of the meditative practices now, like mindfulness, all these things are about centering the body and actually centering the voice.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

Each and every day, I think our voice changes. It depends on if we're well or if we're tired or if we've had a coffee or if we're just feel under the weather we've got a cold. Can you give us any top tips on quick fixes if you're about to make a big speech but you've got a sore throat?

SPEAKER_01 12:14

There's one I always use if you have a rasping voice or a sore throat, is cider vinegar. It's a very old-fashioned remedy. And just like you might be making a gin and tonic, where you put two fingers worth of gin in the bottom, as it were, and then you fill it up with tonic, you're going to put two fingers worth of cider vinegar in the bottom of a glass, you're going to fill it up with water, swill it around, and you're going to sip it. You do swallow it, but you're going to sip it. So essentially you're trying to constantly coat the back of the throat. And if you do that, your voice will come back within about an hour. It's remarkable, actually.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

And so the old-fashioned method of having a glass of port, does that hold true anymore?

SPEAKER_01 12:49

Well, it's what actors used to call P for the V, port for the voice. The old actors when I started out. I think um P for the V, don't you? It's a very, very dated expression, port for the voice. I wouldn't recommend any alcohol before giving a talk or a presentation. Alcohol just makes you think you're better. I would have a port afterwards as a reward.

SPEAKER_00 13:10

Robin, thank you. It was illuminating and lots for us to think about. So it's goodbye from me.

SPEAKER_01 13:16

And goodbye from me. Have you ever wished you could become a confident speaker or presenter? Then why not join my online masterclass? Speak so your audience will listen. In ten easy to follow modules, you can become a confident and authentic speaker. For more information, visit robincomode.com.