What is vocal charisma? How can I be more charismatic? There’s no one right way to be charismatic. This is what you should do:
- Use a wide pitch range. Practice using the lower end and higher end of your voice.
Power your presentation.
- Use variations in pitch as you speak: manipulate your vocal range.
- Use pausing for effect and emphasis.
- Use variations in speech rate.
- Use lower, middle, and higher vocal volume.
This is what you should not do: Do not speak with a narrow and flat pitch range. Do not speak too fast. Speech that is flat and monotonous will bore your audience and cause them to only listen to you because they have to listen to you, not because they want to listen to you. It might even be annoying. Speech that is too fast sounds hurried and impatient. Speech that is too quick and inexpressive diminishes people’s perception of how confident you are. Speech that is both too fast and flat will be difficult for your audience to understand.
Vocal Range
Your vocal range is higher than others and lower than others. That does not matter. The idea is to practice using the full pitch range of your voice, not someone else’s.
Use the lower end of your pitch range to sound more dominant. Lower tones are more serious. You can sound more authoritative and serious with the lower end of your pitch range, not the lower end of someone else’s pitch range. The higher end of your pitch range can make you sound more enthusiastic or energetic. Higher tones can sound more easygoing or more deferential.
Vocal Strength
You need vocal strength. Take deep breaths to gain more vocal power. Let the air fill your lungs and stomach. Let your breath out as you speak. When you pause, or finish a phrase, take another breath. Monitor how much you are able to say in one breath. Do not try to say more than your breath allows you to say. Be sure you have enough breath, or air, to maintain vocal strength. Practice taking deep breaths. Use the air to power your voice as you speak.
Personalize Speech
Adjust your speaking style to your audience. Personalize vocal qualities and build expressive speech patterns to captivate, convince, and hold your listeners’ “involuntary attention”. Use vocal nuance: experiment with intonation contours.
Use a much wider pitch range and a more emotive voice for larger audiences or larger groups. Use a voice that is less emotive, still maintaining a wider pitch range, when speaking one-to-one or with just a few people. Pay attention to your audience and how they take in what you say. Adjust your delivery to your audience.
Involuntary Attention Vocal Charisma
Charismatic professional communication means people listen and pay attention because they want to listen and pay attention, not because they have to. If you can hold your audience’s “voluntary attention”, that’s good. If you can hold your audience’s “involuntary attention”, that’s great. When business communication is strong and appealing, people do not know that they are paying attention, and this means you have their “involuntary attention”. That means you are a charismatic speaker.
Here is the Impact four-point big picture concept for vocal presentation.
- Neutral or Unmarked Intonation
- Non-neutral or Marked Intonation
- Expressiveness and Tone of Voice
- Vocal Charisma
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Foreign language learning is much more than learning words, phrases and being able to build sentences. With the language you learn the culture too and that’s what will make you more versatile and your skills more sellable. When we learned Russian in high school, we also learned and practiced how a Russian family communicates when sitting down for a meal, or how a Russian boy courts ( yes, those days there was courting which was a prelude to dating) a Russian girl, and how the Russian girl responds to the boy. In English class our beloved (she was really beloved by all of us) teacher once told one of the boys in the class to take away another student’s school bag and dump its content into the street from the third-floor window and do their argument in English and their gathering of the stuff on the street together while talking in English. The entire class followed them to the street and listened how they continue arguing and making peace at the end. With this dramatization she helped us to get into and out of conflict situations in a foreign environment.
To conclude my comment foreign language requirement is not a waste of time if the foreign language teaching is appropriate and prepares the student for real life.
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