312. Quick Thinks: Speak with Confidence, Clarity, and Power

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: Fundamental to effective communication is being heard. I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this Quick Thinks episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. I'm often asked, "How can I make sure my voice is heard?" People aren't wondering how do they insert it into a conversation. They literally want to understand, how can my volume go up? So today, I'd like to have a conversation about volume, and you can't have a conversation about volume without talking about breath. Then we'll talk about how to expand your volume, build vocal stamina, and finally, we'll conclude to talk about how microphones can help you communicate better.

[00:00:58] Your voice is a wind instrument. The more you do with it, the more your volume and voice can be affected by it. We need to think about how we breathe to help us project our voice. Many of us, when we get nervous or are uncertain, we breathe shallow and tight in the upper chest. We also breathe very quickly. This changes our ability to project our voice. You have to be able to fill your lower abdomen to support your voice fully. Something you can do in the privacy of your own space to figure out where you're breathing from is to put one palm on your upper chest and one on your lower abdomen.

[00:01:45] If I'm speaking from my upper chest as I'm doing now, I feel vibration and a little movement here and nothing in my lower abdomen. But when I take a deeper breath and speak lower and sometimes slower, I actually feel a lot of movement here and a little vibration in my upper chest. So to help build that awareness of where your breath is coming from, give yourself a sensory experience of it. Another way to help you learn about your breathing is to read out loud. Reading out loud is a proxy for speaking out loud. And the benefit of reading out loud is you can focus on your breathing because the words are presented right in front of you.

[00:02:29] I don't care what you read. It can be something for work, for pleasure. It can be email, a magazine. Does not matter. By reading out loud and really paying attention to where the breath is coming from, you can gain more control of it. And the more control you have over it, the better able you are to project. So lower, slower breathing gives you more vocal support, so you can project your voice. Now, there's a really interesting technique that I learned from a acting professional. While I'm not an actor myself, I really like this technique. Rather than just thinking about projecting your voice forward, actually pick a place where you want to put your voice. So imagine you're in a conference room sitting around a large table.

[00:03:18] You're at one end, and there are people far away from you. Instead of just broadcasting out, focus your voice in front of the person who's sitting farthest from you. In doing so, it changes the structure of your body. You'll tend to open up more, you'll breathe more deeply, and you'll be able to position your voice so it'll be louder. So it's not about broadcasting it out. It's about focusing on placing your voice in a certain space. I alluded to body posture just a moment ago, and this is really important. You want to open your body as much as possible. Many of us, especially when we're on virtual calls, we hunch over and close our body off. That reduces the oxygen.

[00:04:05] In fact, many actors and actresses or professional speakers, before they go out on stage and project, they'll work on stretching their body and opening it up. That's a great place for us to start. Once we have the mechanics and the breath, we have to work on stamina. Very few of you would wake up one morning and say, "I'm gonna go run a marathon," and just start running. If you wanted to run a marathon, you'd train first. And the same thing is true with your voice and vocal projection. If you're going to speak for 5, 10, 30, 60 minutes, you should build vocal stamina. Because most of us can start out strong, but can we sustain it so we can continue to project our voice? Best way to do this, again, is reading out loud.

[00:04:54] Reading out loud to build vocal stamina is like running on a treadmill to build your stamina for running a road race. So if you know you have a 30 minute presentation that you have to give in a week or two, you should start reading out loud for 5 or 10 minutes a day to build that stamina, so you can project your voice all the way through. And you wanna make sure that you have the energy at the end of your communication as well as at the beginning. Many of us start energetic and excited, and because we're speaking for so long, we lose our wind. We lose that energy. By building vocal stamina, you'll continue to have the energy and be able to project your voice. Now, fortunately, we live in a world where there's technology that can help us project our voice.

[00:05:41] Microphones are very useful for helping you not just record what you're saying, but to make sure your voice is projected. Now, we have to use microphones appropriately. The first type of mic I wanna talk about is a lavalier mic, a lav. This is a little microphone that usually gets clipped right under your chin. Now, it tends to have a cord and a battery pack. You have to be careful and make sure that you're prepared for that, 'cause often you'll drop the cord through your shirt, and you need to have a place to clip the battery pack or a pocket to put it in. I've worked with some speakers who came dressed in a way that did not allow for those to easily be done.

[00:06:20] When it comes to a lavalier, you want to make sure it's about 6 inches away from your mouth. And because it is fixed, you wanna make sure that your head stays in the same position. So if the lavalier is here and I turn over here, notice I've increased the distance. And unless you have somebody working the soundboard that is controlling the volume, your voice will get quieter. So if you have a lavalier mic, you simply turn your whole body, so you keep the orientation the same. So make sure you have something to clip it to, both the mic and the pack, and try to keep your head in relationship to the mic the same, so your volume stays the same. Now, sometimes when you're speaking, you actually have a microphone.

[00:07:07] Handheld mic needs to be kept at the same distance from your mouth so that the volume stays the same and you make the life of the soundboard operator much easier. So lightly hold the mic. Some people clutch it because they're so nervous. Lightly hold the mic. Put your elbow against your body. This is the only time I ever encourage people to connect the elbow to the body. Usually when gesturing, we want it away. And I gesture with the other hand. Notice I'm keeping the distance about 6 inches the same. Now, if I wanna switch hands, which is a good thing 'cause this arm might get tired, I come to the mic, keep the mic in the same place, and gesture with the other hand.

[00:07:47] Some mics have cables, and you need to be careful with where the cable is. I saw a speaker once trip over the cable, embarrassing for them and dangerous. So if you're using a handheld mic, hold it in place, gesture with the other hand, and again, come back to it. These are all techniques that will help you project your voice and make sure your point is heard. We want to think about body posture and breathing. We wanna think about placing our voice. We wanna make sure we build that vocal stamina to support our energy and volume throughout what we say. And finally, we wanna leverage microphones appropriately to help us make sure we're heard.

[00:08:29] Thank you for joining me for this Quick Thinks episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about voice, please listen to episode 262 with Patsy Rodenburg. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Alex McCarthy, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder, with special thanks to the Stanford GSB video crew. Thanks also to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider joining our Think Fast, Talk Smart Learning Community at fastersmarter.io/learning. You'll find video lessons, learning quests, discussion boards, an AI coach, and book club opportunities. Again, that's fastersmarter.io/learning to become part of our Think Fast, Talk Smart Learning Community.