Kate's Voice

In a non-stop world, we have become non-stop speakers.  For this reason alone, silence is a powerful tool.  Silence also allows you to breathe, and give your audience time to breathe as well.  In our crazy world, silence is not easy to find, and it’s just not that easy to use either.  Here are some recommendations for using silence to create a more powerful presence.

Jump-start your presentation with silence.

• Breathe before you go on.  Do a round of complete breaths while you are waiting back stage.  Center your thoughts, and focus on your intention. Breathe deeply as you walk on stage or up to the podium.
• Breathe deeply before you speak your first words, Once you are the focus of attention, look around and breathe deeply and slowly.  Take in the energy of the room and prepare just as if you were a diver getting ready to jump in the water.
• Breathe into your first words. Use your breath.  The voice needs air to work effectively and efficiently.  Move the air into your first sentence and listen to your voice speak out with power and clarity.

Give the audience time to take it in.

• Shape your message with pauses. When you practice, build pauses into your presentation.  Practice more silence between ideas, or parts of the talk.

• Finish your thoughts to enable understanding.  Even familiar topics are fresh when told from a new perspective.  Make a definitive statement and let it ring in your listeners’ ears.  Resist the urge to say “and” or “so” after an important point or after making a complete statement about your topic.  Practice explaining an idea or point and then giving it time to settle in with a pause.
• New ideas require time to settle in. Audiences need time to digest what you say.  They need time to catch up to you and create meaning out of all of your words.  Give that to them by pausing for a beat. Use that time to breathe.

Ground yourself by pausing.

• Oxygen is both calming and energizing.  I don’t need to tell you the importance of oxygen.  However, many people forget to breathe when they are speaking.  Practice breathing.  You will feel better.
• Breathe for better sound. Ever feel like you just have to swallow when you are presenting?  That’s a sign of a high larynx, and your voice is probably too high as well.  Breathe in through your nose and let the breath be deep. You’ll sound better, even if you never feel the swallow reflex kick in!
• Breathe for focus. The breath has been used by athletes and yogis alike for centuries as a way to focus away from the pain and strain of physical exertion.  Speaking and singing are more taxing than you might think.  We use three-quarters of our muscles when we say “hello.”  Use your breath to keep yourself grounded and focused on your presentation.

Practice breathing for better pauses
(The exercise below can also be listened to here   06-how-to-breathe.)
Start by sitting forward in a chair and letting your stomach muscles relax. Breathe in through your nose and imagine that you are a vessel filling up with air as you would pour water into a vase.  Fill up your abdomen first, then your lower ribs (you should feel them expand) and then all the way up to your chin.  Hold this breath now for a count of ten, and then exhale very slowly.  As you exhale, keep your ribs expanded and tighten your abdomen as you would if you were doing a “crunch.”  That is, the lower abdominal muscles should come in first as though you were rolling up a tube of toothpaste.  The unique part of breathing for performing as a singer is that once you have taken your initial breath, the ribs never really go in again unless you need a great deal of support or until you’ve finished the song.   Your back muscles, however, may need to be squeezed together for support of the air.  Never let the front of the rib cage drop as you use the air.  As speakers, people rarely have to push their breathing to those limits, but if you find that you are running out of air, try the same method.

Related articles:

On Six Minutes:  Breathing: The Seductive Key to Unlocking Your Vocal Variety

On Speak! by Craig Senior: Permit Audience to Use Silence Effectively (PAUSE!)

On The Eloquent Woman:  When the speaker needs to catch her breath

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.