Find and power your authentic voice – Lesson 7- Volume
Once you train and find your authentic voice you need to be sure that everyone in your audience can hear your authentic voice. Your volume needs to be loud enough to be heard by the people in the back row. If you are practicing lessons one through six — breath, pitch, pace, resonance and melody — you have all the tools you need to control your volume.
My mantra is “the only thing more powerful than a big idea is your ability to communicate/sell that idea to others.”
The key tools for volume, or vocal projection, are breath and resonance.
If you’ve heard the cry “speak up”, “louder”, and “I can’t hear you” ,then clearly you’re not projecting. One of my suggestions is to always speak in a one-on-one or a small group situation as if the person(s) you’re talking to are 10 feet away. I’m not talking about shouting or yelling I’m talking about building resonance for your voice. If you can accomplish that you are on your way to building your volume.
Good posture and clear articulation are an easy first step to bring your volume up considerably. The diaphragm is where volume comes from. Sitting or standing bent over even slightly scrunches the diaphragm and reduces the breath and, as a result, your volume. The further you want to project your voice the more breath you need. Your first clue that you are not reaching your audience is if the audience is restless. Don’t be afraid to ask the people in the back if they can hear you and understand you.
In a large room, hall or auditorium situation throw away the excuse that they didn’t provide a microphone or the sound system wasn’t projecting me loud enough. Remember a sound system cannot put out what you don’t put in to it.
SPEAK UP
My recommendation is – even with a microphone – always speak to the person in the back as if you didn’t have the microphone. It’s much easier for a technician to turn down the volume control than to push it to its topmost extreme for a soft voice, resulting in distortion and feedback.
PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE
As a coach, trainer and consultant, Larry Blumsack partners with people and organizations on the move and those already there to accelerate their communication, presentation and speaking skills to be on par with their ambition. Through one-on-one coaching and group training Larry helps leaders and aspiring leaders elevate their presence and communication skills to influence more people, sell more products-services-ideas and inspire others more successfully than they ever imagined.
Larry is the bestselling author of Face-to-Face is The Ultimate Social Media and founder of Zoka Institute and Zoka Training®. Zoka Training® — Mind/Voice/Body/Mindfulness in sync — is the result of Larry’s 45 years as a coach, acting teacher, actor, voice-over artist, theater and TV director/producer, radio & TV commentator and show host, speaker, trainer, serial entrepreneur, and syndicated columnist. Larry was a founding member of the theater department at Northeastern University.
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