tellingpeople

We’ve just run one of our public voice & presentation skills training days. I love these days but they do leave me absolutely wiped out. So there I am on the Metro (think like London’s tube but clean and friendly! ) coming home, and getting annoyed at the tish-ta-t-tish-ta-t-tish of some oik’s headphones, with the cymbals leaking out and into the carriage when I had to fight the urge to strangle said oik with the wire to his headphones….

But it did remind me of something important about how you sound when you’re presenting. You see, the reason I could hear the cymbals only (not the vocal line, the drums or the bass etc) is that lower sound tend to lose focus and disappait faster – which means that they don’t carry as far.

In short, when you’re presenting, the lower your voice, the harder it is to get your voice to carry to the back of the room. I’m not suggesting that you raise the pitch of our voice as that will put undo strain on it, making it more likely that you’ll develop a sore throat (not to mention sounding horrid!) but it might be worthwhile considering some simple tricks and skills that will help your next presentation…

• Go for the shortest ‘throw’ you can. You might be able to stand in amongst the audience, so you don’t have to get your voice to go so far, or you may be able to turn the room around to wide and shallow rather than thin and long.
• Check for any background noises – particularly those which are similar in pitch to your voice; typical examples might be a air conditioning or fan etc.
• Learn to breathe with your diaphragm (easier said than done but not hard) so that your voice carries further and is ‘projected’ not shouted.
• Don’t shout – no matter how hard it is to make yourself heard. If you do, you’ll damage your voice; you’ll sound harsh and un-credible; and you’ll have to be so loud at the front (to be heard at the back) that the front rows will hate you even more than the back rows would have if they couldn’t hear you!

Some of those are easier presentation skills to master than other, I know, but whatever you do will help!