You speak quietly, you are often asked questions. Your voice quickly gets tired after presentations, negotiations, and at the end of the day you feel heaviness in your throat, your voice becomes hoarse. Your voice is too high, you may be mistaken for a child. You speak monotonously, in a monotonous way, so that your listeners get bored. You speak indistinctly, eating the beginning or end of a word and therefore it is not clear what you wanted to say. You speak so fast that it’s hard to keep up with your train of thought. During stressful situations, your voice becomes uncontrollable, trembles, wheezes, breaks, the tonality may rise. You do not have enough breath, jaws, lips are stiff; tongue numb, mouth dry.
If all this is about you, then it’s time to start staging your voice! A few tips will help you with this.
1. Release the body from the clamps. Remember: in a free body there is a free sound. Exercise: stand up, and then slowly, vertebra by vertebra, lower your head, shoulders, back and limply hang down from the coccyx, then slowly rise in reverse order from the bottom up. Watch for muscle freedom. Repeat 3-5 times. Work on your posture. Correct posture contributes to the competent work of the respiratory muscles and the vocal apparatus.
2. Practice breathing. Breathing is the basis for the formation of natural voice. Practice breathing exercises that develop abdominal breathing. For example: lie comfortably on your back, put your hand on your stomach. Take a deep breath. Hands should feel how the stomach protruded (the lungs pushed the diaphragm, and she pressed on the stomach). On the exhale, count: 1, 2, 3, 4 … The count is free, unhurried, lingering vowels. It is not necessary to “squeeze out” the air to the end. By developing the abdominal type of breathing, you also strengthen your health.
3. Imagine a «Sound Source» deep within the body. Say “Hayaya”, “M”, “Lemons” from the depths of the body and feel the vibrations in the body. The presence of vibrations indicates the correct voice leading. A free and bright voice is full of vibrations, while a dull voice has almost no vibrations. The image of what you are saying from the depths of the body takes away tension from the ligaments and activates deep abdominal breathing. The whole body, like a musical instrument, participates in sound.
4. Release your jaw. Clamped jaw and throat deprive the voice of expressiveness and brightness, deprive diction of clarity. Massage the lower jaw, gently holding the jaw with your hands, lower it down and shake it. The mouth during the exercise should open as wide as possible — by 4 fingers.
5. Give way to the voice!! “Yawn” is the most wonderful exercise for opening the internal volume, relieving tension from the muscles of the pharynx. Yawn 9-10 times in a row. To free up inner space for your voice, think of a “yawn” and you will feel the space inside open up and expand. As a workout, you need to say the text while yawning, for example: “The sides hurt from the feather bed and down jacket!”.
6. Fill the space with your voice! Direct the sound towards your partners in an imaginary arc. Very often a person sounds unintelligible and quiet, because there is no skill to direct the voice to a partner. If it’s hard to imagine an imaginary arc, throw a ball at the wall. Fill the flight path with the sounds “Bao, Vao, Gao…” Then words and sentences can be superimposed on the flight path. When you feel that the voice is flying, you can use the image of an imaginary arc. Introducing the voice into space, together with it you introduce your ideas, thoughts and feelings into the minds of people.
7. Improve your diction. Do diction exercises for clarity of pronunciation. Then say your favorite tongue twister several times. For example: “King eagle. Eagle King”, “Proletarians flew over the parliament of parliamentarians”, “On Thursday Grigory Grigoryevich Ginzburg proudly strolled along Gogol Boulevard”. Avoid verbal sloppiness. Fuzzy diction can annoy your interlocutors.
7. Expand your voice range. As K.S. Stanislavsky: «The greater the range, the more they can express.» Use the velvety bottoms of your voice to inspire confidence and win over your audience. The audience is bored — then cheer it up with ringing notes and energy. You need to put your temperament into speech! To open the pitch range, do the following exercise. Tap your chest like «Tarzan», with the sound «Aaaa», this will awaken the low-frequency chest resonator. It will give the voice richness and velvety. Gently tap your fingers on your forehead, cheeks, nose, chin, directing the sound «Mmm» under your fingers, this way you will warm up the head resonator. He is responsible for the sonority and flight, the audibility of your voice.
8. Move away from the monotony of speech. Vary your speech speed to keep your audience’s attention. Slow down the pace to bring out the main idea and main points more vividly. Change the volume of your speech to influence the audience. Important accents can be placed by saying it quietly or, on the contrary, by speaking louder.
Use your voice to 100%! The delivered voice will give self-confidence and will give the opportunity to freely conduct negotiations, presentations, communications. A confident, well-placed voice characterizes you in the eyes of others as a strong-willed person who knows how to make decisions. If you constantly train your vocal apparatus, then the voice becomes hardy and after long speeches or negotiations the voice does not “sit down” and the throat does not hurt. With the help of a well-trained voice, you will always be successful with the opposite sex, even if you do not have an outstanding appearance.
Useful links
Where can I go to do voice acting? Recommended:
- School of natural voice — Kirill Pleshakov
We recommend Dmitry Ustinov’s trainings:
- THE ART OF SPEECH: rhetoric and public speaking
- WINNERS: The Psychology of Influence and Charisma
- BATTLE RHETORIC: The Word as a Weapon
- Storytelling in Russian. How to create and tell stories
Details by phone:
+7 (499) 705-5695
+7 (925) 602-4430