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.

Related posts:

The case for expressive speaking…even on earnings calls

The Storyteller’s Voice is Everyone’s Business

I am a vocal practitioner.  I have observed and worked with voices for years and have developed theories about the way the voice works and how it affects listeners.  One of my conclusions is that I like expressive voices, and so do you.  But don’t take my word for it.

In a guest post on this blog, Sue Gaulke gave us the results of a survey she conducted, wherein she learned that the most “terrible turnoff” for audiences is a speaker’s monotonous voice.  Through scientific studies, T. Johnstone and others have shown that emotions in the voice do elicit a response in the brains of listeners.   Research by UCI professor and scientist, James McGaugh has shown that expressive voices are  more memorable.  In fact, evoking an emotional response may actually create memory.  And for those who wonder if you CAN evoke an emotional response (as if that isn’t obvious!), research now shows that “emotional information is represented by distinct spatial patterns that can be decoded from brain activity in modality-specific cortical areas. ”

The takeaway for you as a voice user should be that expression is important, even when you are discussing profit and loss via PowerPoint. As Dale Carnegie said, “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.”  Specifically, if you want to be interesting AND memorable , you must be emotional.

Emotional Recall: The key to an expressive voice:
Actors use a technique called “emotional recall” to bring up their personal experience and help create emotion in their voices.  Here’s how it might work for you as a public speaker.  Your company sold a lot of widgets.  You have to speak about your huge profits while showing a graph.  You are tempted to simply talk us through the report.  However, your report is good news so I suggest that to make it memorable and to keep our attention, you need to make it sound like good news by including “good news” emotions in your voice.   When you practice, do this:

• Think back to a time when you experienced good news personally.  Imagine the moment. How did you feel?  Bring back that feeling and now, when you talk about success, your mind brings up happy faces and the thrill of winning instead of just a report. We can hear it in your voice.

It may be that the strength of your emotional recall is linked to the intensity of your original emotion.  However, emotional recall may actually be linked to a gene.  Some people only recall extreme emotional memory while others recall even mild emotions intensely.

Try it:

To see how emotional recall works for you, recall how you felt in both big and small situations, negative and positive, and across the spectrum of emotional vocabulary.  For example, good news might feel like one of the following:

• Winning a swim meet
• Hearing your dog’s “hello” bark
• The feeling when you held your newborn child
• Playing Guitar Hero
• Winning the lottery

How does bad news feel?  Sadness? Anxiety?  Frustration? Determination? Dedication?  Find the emotion or emotions appropriate for your topic. Now speak through your presentation aloud,  using the emotions you have recalled.

Summary:
The trick is to remember a time you felt the emotion you want to convey, remember the physical sensations and recreate them so you feel them again.  If you had an emotional response originally, your brain will remember the emotion and the physical response along with the situation, so you can feel it again.  That recalled feeling has the ability to change the way you sound to others AND evoke an emotional response in them that they will remember. They will also be more likely to remember you and your message.

Related posts:

The Storyteller’s Voice is Everyone’s Business

Pause: Create a Powerful Presence through Silence

When You Must Read Aloud:  The Voice in Business

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