This blogpost contains one of the video lessons from my online video vocal training course ‘Speaking Voice Technique’. This lesson lists errors that may surprise you that can steal the health of your voice and the impact of your messages. Watch it and you may identify some important changes you should make in the way you talk, for IMMEDIATE improvement!
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Why change your speaking voice?
Speaking with great vocal technique can make all the difference in the sound and health of your voice, and in the responses you get to what you say. Speaking without good technique can cost you – from vocal fatigue, vocal strain (or even loss of voice), lack of listener attention. Bad vocal technique can even affect the success of your job or career. And singers… your speaking voice can get you into more vocal trouble than singing! So check out this lesson ‘Speaking Voice Mistakes’, and see how you may be limiting or wearing out your voice when you talk.
Get all 13 video lessons with the full course ‘Speaking Voice Technique‘!
Transcript of this video:
Lesson 2. SPEAKING VOICE MISTAKES
You can’t change anything until you become aware, aware of what you’re doing, aware of what happens when you do it differently, and aware of what you decide you want to make habit. So, before I teach you how to overcome these mistakes, and trust me, I will, I’m going to help you become aware of them. I’ll use the three cornerstones of my vocal training method Power, Path and Performance to talk about some common speaking voice mistakes.
So let’s start with the Power of Breath issues.
First breath mistake: You Don’t Take In a Good Inhale. You don’t pause long enough when talking to take a breath for your voice to operate well and for your listener to digest what you just said. The lack of a good inhale will keep your throat and rib cage collapsed and tight. Taking a low inhale matters a lot more than taking a big one. If you have a clear intention to say something, that usually triggers the amount of breath you need to take in for that phrase. The biggest part of your lungs are in your back.
If your inhale is high and shallow, or you tend to inhale with quick gulps, or so called chest breathing, you may have trouble getting enough air to support your voice, which is actually our second breath mistake: Not Enough Breath Support. You may have taken in a good inhale and have plenty of air, but not quite enough to support your voice if you leak breath inefficiently, using breath like a flashlight beam instead of a laser beam when you speak.
This can be caused by inefficient vocal fold closure, which can be corrected by certain vocal exercises. I find staccato exercises very helpful in retraining this issue, and we’ll be doing some. It can also be a posture issue, which we’ll also get into later.
Or it can be caused by the belief that you should relax and speak. Actually, you do need to activate, meaning tense, certain muscles. Without enough breath support, your voice will sound tense, weak, uninteresting, and you’ll have trouble getting and holding people’s attention. With the flashlight exhale, you use your breath too quickly, dehydrating your vocal folds and dropping the ends of your sentences unintelligibly. Or you may constantly fall into the dreaded vocal fry, which is hard on your voice and not very pleasant to hear for your listener. Think about it. If your message is important, then the ends of your sentences are, too.
One more thing, when you’re running out of breath all the time, you’ll find yourself with a tight throat and ribcage from the effort.
Okay, let’s move on to breath mistake number three: Not Enough Breath Control. To control your voice well, you have to control the breath that you’re powering it with.
A very common saboteur for breath control is an incorrect understanding of how the diaphragm works. If you believe that you should speak from your diaphragm, you tend to power your voice from the bottom of your ribcage. This will tighten and collapse your ribcage, causing your diaphragm, which is connected to the bottom of it, to lose its stretch. And then it can move too much uncontrolled air, causing all kinds of problems.
Another breath control saboteur is when you try to project your voice by pushing, powering your voice from the wrong place in your body. When you want to capture attention or speak above the noise, You push your voice from the middle of your chest – or from your throat – to raise your volume.
But without using good technique, you can even unknowingly push when you’re quietly speaking. And then you may wonder why that tires your voice out. But not to worry, I’m going to give you techniques and exercises to correct all these breath mistakes.
For now, I want to help you become aware of the next group of speaking voice mistakes, and these concern your throat.
First, I’d like to explain a couple of things. You want a free, open, flexible throat channel so all your tone colors are available to be used and modified according to the sound that you want to produce. Picture this channel opening in three directions, up, down, and back. In my Power Path and Performance Vocal Training Method, Path is the route your voice takes as it moves through your throat.
The ‘Pull Path’ that I’ll teach you to use opens your throat in those three directions. The push path tightens and constricts it, limits your resonance, and wears your voice out.
Okay, now here are some throat channel path mistakes that you can make.
Our first mistake is: The Frozen Ceiling. Instead of actively moving, your eyes and mask area look frozen, poker-faced, and expressionless. This limits the movement of your soft palate. and your upper nasal membrane, leaving your voice sounding monotone with a flat vocal delivery lacking passion or emotion.
Our second throat channel mistake is: The Frozen Floor. Instead of dropping, your jaw stays still and tight, causing you to articulate with more of the base of your tongue, a bit like a ventriloquist. This results in mumbling, muddy articulation, and limited resonance. You tend to glue your words together, which makes your speech hard to understand.
The third throat channel mistake is: The Forward Head, which tightens the throat channel from the back. This gives your voice kind of a hooty, dark sound, and it’s vocally tiring.
The fourth throat channel mistake is: Skipping Your Resonators. When you push, you project your voice before it can reach its resonation zones. It may be loud, but it will also be tight, thin, uncontrolled, and it will definitely get tired. Just remember that pushing is the enemy of breath control.
Okay, now here’s our last collection of speaking voice mistakes, and these are Performance Issues.
First performance mistake: Lack of Preparation. You don’t necessarily have to memorize what you’re going to say, but you should know the gist of it, like the back of your hand.
Second mistake: Failing to Consider Your Listener’s Response and Engagement as you speak. Your tone, pacing, phrasing, pauses, and word choices should depend on your audience’s response in real-time — or in your imagination if you can’t see it.
Next mistake: Getting Your Tempo Wrong. If you talk too slow, you’ll lose your audience. If you talk too fast, you won’t enunciate your words and they can’t understand you. That’s a tongue-tangler right there. Plus, you’ll have trouble with breath. If you speak everything at the same pace without changing tempo or pausing, you’ll be delivering boring, run-on sentences instead of messages. And I don’t even want to demonstrate that.
Next mistake: Body Language Errors. Moving around too much can distract you and your listener’s focus. But not moving at all doesn’t work either. Your listeners need to see your message in your facial language and in the appropriate movements of your hands and arms. Getting body language wrong can keep people from hearing or believing your message.
Next mistake: Mumbling. Articulating to strangers or the public like you do with family and close friends who can finish your sentences. Don’t do it.
Next is a mindset mistake: Thinking About Communicating Instead of Actually Doing it.
Next mistake: speaking with Inappropriate Vocal Tone… such as sounding too friendly when the message is serious. Or too serious when the message is friendly. Or talking to an adult like a child. Or addressing a room full of children with a colorless, monotone voice.
And the next mistake is: Speaking To More Than One Heart. Even in a big venue, you should zero in your address to the one heart of the room. You can move the heart around, but always make it one that you’re talking to.
Now, let’s change all this and get to what works. In Video 3, I’m going to teach you how to connect your body and face to your voice…
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Get all 13 video lessons with the full course ‘Speaking Voice Technique‘!
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