Language Blog
Vocal Charisma Vocal Presentation 4 Big Points
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
Foreign Language Learning
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.
Nice and Easy Does It….Every Time!
Do you know that the best thing you can do to improve your verbal communication skills and increase your ability to be understood is FREE, EASY, and requires NO LESSONS? It’s simple in concept …..take it easy, speak slower, and pause slightly between phrases and sentences. People need time to process your words, and perhaps translate what you say in their heads before they really “hear” it. They need time to do that.Give it to them. Simple? Maybe not so much…. changing habits and adopting a slower rate of speed takes awareness and discipline. After all, you have been speaking a certain way your whole life. And, when you are nervous during a presentation or important conversation, your speaking speed will increase, which makes understanding even more difficult!
Remember…..It’s not a race to get to the end of the sentence. There are no prizes for finishing fast. It’s about improving communication and understanding. There are lots of prizes for that! Start today to slow down and relax your speech. You’ll see positive results soon. Fewer times that you are asked to repeat. Fewer misunderstandings. Fewer embarrassing moments. Here are some proactive steps you can take to be better understood:
- Ask your friends or trusted business relationships whether they think you speak very fast. Record yourself in conversation or presentation with your phone and listen to yourself. Is your speed making it hard to understand your individual words? Do your sentences tend to run together? Is it hard to hear where one word ends and the next one begins? Be TRUTHFUL with yourself and imagine yourself as your own audience.
- Keep aware of slowing down your speech. Use a reminder device. I always tell those I work with to find a yellow elastic band and put it on their wrist to serve as a visual and physical reminder (snap it when you are on the phone) to speak slower and pause often. Think of it as a yellow traffic signal to SLOW DOWN.
- Finish your words. Don’t slide them together so that your sentence sounds like one long word.
- Pause slightly between sentences and between complex phrases. Give them time to process what you are saying.
Does Learning Essential Spanish Make Sense for Manufacturing?
Wish you had paid more attention in Spanish class in high school or college? Because now you manage workers who speak mostly in Spanish. Your job is to keep them safe and productive and you’re not sure they understand important instructions and safety procedures. And even if you were an A+ Spanish student, vocabulary for safety, human resource issues, and other direct communications with Spanish speaking workers are not included in standard Spanish courses….even for those who major in Spanish in college!Consider these situations. Have you been there?
- You’ve just given instructions in simple English. You ask if everyone understands and everyone nods. But do they really understand?
- You need to set work and production schedules and run into the language barrier.
- You need to establish specific rules and guidelines and you sense you are not being well understood. When violations or accidents happen caused by poor understanding, it is costly in lost time, increases in workers compensation, litigation, remediation, and factors that affect the bottom line.
- You know you need to ask things during a medical emergency situation. It takes too long to find a worker to interpret AND can cause violations to HIPAA regulations to use a third party.
- You want to debrief a worker about something that happened on the floor. Involving a co-worker to “translate” will not produce the true facts you need.
- to communicate directly, easily, and effectively with your Spanish speaking employees.
- to better understand cultural differences to maximize productivity and build better working relationships.
- to highlight issues that are common to all supervisory situations by participating with managers from other companies or departments.
- to reference customized content and vocabulary which includes the specific words or phrases essential to your needs. Simple, enjoyable, and SHORT- as few as 4 sessions.
Contact us today to get more information or to enroll. Learning Spanish for the workplace makes sense.