Kate's Voice

This is a guest post by fellow blogger, Denise Graveline.  Denise stepped forward with this post after learning of a medical crisis in my family.  In what can be viewed as the Web 2.0 version of  bringing a casserole to a friend,  she shares her thoughts on the importance of the voice in storytelling.  This is a lovely story, indeed,  and a powerful example of the impact of vocal expression.  Enjoy the post, and, Denise, thanks!!  I owe you!

You know telling stories is a good tactic to use when you’re doing a presentation or a speech.  Stories can expand on data points or add a personal touch, certainly. But more than that, telling stories can help speakers find meaning–tying up the threads of our experience neatly–and help our audiences get perspective on their own lives. And the sound of your voice matters in putting those personal stories across.

This week, NPR did a two-party story (here’s part one and part two, with audio and transcripts) centered on Shaun Parker, who told his story as part of a speaking competition called Get Mortified.  It’s edgier than Ignite! or TED: Participants get up in front of a live audience to share a wince-worthy tale of their own. Producers work with the speakers to polish their presentations for Get Mortified events in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Portland, Austin, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Malmo, Sweden. (The video above is a promo of Shaun’s story, and there’s full video of it in the NPR story.)

Shaun’s story moves from an unrequited high school love, for whom he utterly embarrassed himself with a lip-synched love song video…to almost moving to Hollywood to pursue a dream of working in films…to putting that aside when his father became deathly ill…to using his time polishing his editing skills until he was able to finish that high school video, perfecting the synchronization…to moving, finally, to Hollywood.  It’s a quest, a story of lost love, a tale of family honor, making a lot of lemonade out of lemons. The parameters are all things we can relate to: falling in love, caring for someone who’s terribly ill, persisting at a personal dream.

What holds it–and many stories told by speakers–together is his voice and where it goes along with his story. That’s why I’m so glad you can listen to the story, as well as watch the video. Because he’s willing to “get mortified” and tell the most embarrassing part (and that video is wince-worthy), with the wry vocal tone of an older and wiser adult, the audience groans, knowing it’s okay to do so. And when he builds up to finally getting ready to move to Hollywood, only to put it aside to be with his ailing father, the audience loses its voice and goes silent–because it can hear the emotion in Shaun’s voice.Then he brings it full circle, using the video as a metaphor for his experience, making it a lesson; in his voice, you can hear satisfaction, hard-fought and won…just not the way he imagined it would be.

I think speakers’ voices change in quality almost reflexively when they tell personal stories, and that’s what draws audiences in.  It’s a mix of emotion, authenticity and intimacy that comes close to conversation with a crowd. Listening to Shaun’s story, a well-rehearsed one, I felt carried along right to the end. And here’s what that ending felt like, from the NPR story:

“The crowd just started cheering so loudly that you could feel the cheers sort of just shaking the whole room,” Katcher says. And Parker says that moment — when he became a storyteller — changed his life. “I remember distinctly feeling if nothing else ever happens for me out here, I have that moment that I stood in front of 250 strangers and I moved them,” he says.

So your voice is a force for power, and it works both ways when you tell a story: on you and on the audience. If you do it right, your audience will reward you with some vocalizing of its own.

Denise Graveline is a writer and communicator whose Washington, DC-based consulting firm, Don’t Get Caught, helps organizations with strategic communications plans; coaching, training, workshops and facilitation; and editorial and creative services. A former journalist and communications director for several major nonprofits and a federal agency, she is the 2002 Washington Women in Public Relations “PR Woman of the Year” and a former member of the White House Council on Women.

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The Storyteller’s Voice is Everyone’s Business

As we have become more and more inundated with data and information, we have grown more and more hungry for stories.  Stories help us find the human elements in the information.  They remind us of why we care about the data in the first place.  Presentations skills coach, Jerry Weissman, prevents scientists and doctors from getting mired in the data by asking them a simple question: “Do you have any patients?”

There are  some basic delivery techniques that will make the story come alive.   Although everyone has a story to tell,  not everyone is good at telling them.  Stories can certainly be told by anyone even if they don’t use these techniques because the very nature of the story is that it is engaging in its own right.  However, as Seth Godin says, “Making pastries the way they do at a fancy restaurant is a lot more work than making brownies at home.”

So here are three elements that will add zip and vigor to your storytelling and set you apart from the every day story cook.  They are: emphasis, pause, and contrast.

Emphasis. Stimulate the senses. Find color words Find emotion. Get others involved.  Pull them in with an emotional phrase  and sound like you mean it.  n order to do this, write down your story and then highlight all of the emotional words.  If you don’t have any, add some!  Then practice telling your story with an emphasis on those highlighted words.  In addition, it is important that you stimulate your own senses but using emotional memory, an actor’s trick for triggering an emotional response today based on a memory of a similar response.

If you think this is just for actors and traditional storytellers, think again.  The brilliant Julian Treasure has created an entire business around “sensory marketing,” showing us that “better sounding brands achieve better results.” And what makes it sound better?  For starters, sound that appeals to the senses.

Pause: Give the listener time to take in what you’ve said.  Give them time to catch up with you.  Run-on sentences and ideas are prevalent in speakers today.  Maybe it’s the same problem of  too much information.  And the challenge with this is that people need silence in order to process what they have heard.  Enter, the pause.

In an essay about how to tell a story, Mark Twain said, “The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a frequently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length–no more and no less–or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble.”

To practice the pause, tell your story aloud and consciously stop to breathe each time you present a new idea or a new part of the story.  Take a good breath, and then move on.  Then, when actually telling the story to an audience, let yourself take a breath and hear the silence before moving on.  Sometimes, silence elicits an emotional response all its own that you can feel.  That’s ok.  Let it be there.  And then move on.

Contrast: Keep audience attention by contrasting loud with soft, long with short, fast with slow, and dark(sad or angry) with light (hopeful, joyful). Contrast catches a listener’s attention.  It keeps us hooked.  When there is contrast we pay attention. It’s a surprise for the ear.  And audiences like surprises.  However, Mark Twain also cautioned  that if the audience knows a surprise is being set up, you can’t surprise them at all.

To practice contrast, try the following:

• Speak in a normal tone of voice, and suddenly speak softly on the next change in the story.
• Speak at your normal pace, and then slow down a description of someone, or an important element of the story.  Then do the opposite.
• Draw out an important story element by elongating the vowels of your words, followed by a quickly-spoken descriptive word.