Set Your Voice Free: How to Get the Singing or Speaking Voice You Want

by Roger Love

I want to improve my voice because ____________________

I find myself speaking in front of more and more people

The easiest way to ensure that you’re getting the same benefit from this material as the students who come into my offices is to do what they do: set up a regular weekly voice lesson. When you’re through reading this chapter, I’d like you to get out your calendar and block out some time for your private sessions with me. Plan one session of at least half an hour or forty-five minutes during the week for reading and listening to each chapter. Consider that to be lesson time, during which you’ll learn about and experience different parts of your voice. I suggest that you take the lessons a week at a time to give yourself a chance to assimilate the material and let it “soak in.” I may ask you to practice simple exercises between the weekly sessions. Practice sets in motion a physical training process that reshapes the way you make sound. You’re learning to control the voice-production muscles, and even a little regular practice will go a long way toward building the physical strength that will make your voice more powerful.

The quality of your voice depends primarily on the way you position the cords and the amount of air you move through them, and great singing or speaking happens when the right amount of air meets the right amount of cord. Remember that phrase because it’s the basis of just about everything we’ll be doing together.

Did you hear anything else that sticks out or bothers you?

Gravely and monotonous

The more forceful the stream of air coming at the vocal cords, the harder it is for them to regulate the sounds they produce. Power, range, and consistency depend on smooth, even airflow, not bursts of supercharged breath.

The middle voice is the bridge between the familiar low voice most of us speak with (called chest voice) and the voice nestled way above our speaking voice (called head voice). This incredible, little-recognized part of the voice, which I specialize in helping people strengthen, is responsible for bringing a new kind of power and ease to both speaking and singing. Once you find it, you can sing without tiring your voice, relieve the pressure that builds in your throat and jaw, and, as you’ll see, almost miraculously gain smooth access to the entire range of your voice.

To understand where the ease comes from when you find middle, you need to know a little about how your voice works. Remember, there are three different parts of the voice—chest, middle, and head—and each works in a slightly different way, as illustrated in the diagram below. When you’re in chest voice, the vocal cords are supposed to be vibrating along their full length, like the long, thick strings of a piano. Chest voice—as you would guess—feels like it resonates in the top part of your chest. If you put your hand just below the seam where your neck meets the top of your chest and say, “I can speak in chest,” you should feel a slight vibration in your hand.

In middle voice, you should feel the vibration partially leave the chest area and move closer to the area just behind your nose and eyes. This area has been given many names over the years, but it’s most commonly called the mask. The air and tone bouncing around the sinus area can feel as gentle as a minor flutter or buzz. Close your lips and say mmmmmmmm. You should feel your lips vibrating as sound hits them from the inside of your mouth.

What you’re looking for is a voice that sounds almost as thick as chest voice but feels like it is vibrating both behind your nose and at the top of your chest.

The middle voice

An important note about diction: Because these sounds are designed to place air in precise places, pronunciation counts. As you practice with them, be sure that your goog is a goog and not a good or a goo. It’s easy to get careless as you’re concentrating on where your voice is going and how it feels, so remind yourself to check in once in a while and go through an exercise focusing on quality control and keeping the syllables exact. It’ll make a big difference. As you go higher, the corners of your mouth may start to widen. You need to be very careful to maintain the same mouth and lip position whether you’re high or low. It’s possible to drop your jaw to get more space, openness, and resonance for the higher notes without going wide with the corners of your mouth and losing the pureness of the syllable.

Here’s the foundation I’d like you to aim for if you’re serious about improving your voice: a vocal warm-up of just ten to twelve minutes, as many days a week as you can. You can squeeze in this little practice session sometime in the morning before you head out to a day filled with speaking or singing. If morning slips away, or you’ve got an evening gig, warm up then. I’ve made it easy for you to do that by creating a set of complete warm-up tracks for this edition of the book. For singers, audio 48 is the daily warm-up for women, and audio 49 is the warm-up for men. Those two have the most range. The two tracks for speakers are audio 50, for women, and audio 51, for men. It’s fine for you to use any of the warm-ups that feel good to you. If you want to build your confidence by mastering the speakers’ warm-ups before you try the singers’, go for

My voice is just going to get better and better, right? Well, I wish I could just say yes and move on, but actually, it will save you a lot of worry and concern if I let you know that there are a few curves on the road to vocal mastery. Typically, students’ progress unfolds like this: Stage one. In our first vocal exercises, you learned the basics of connecting with all the parts of your voice. In short order, you should be able to move up and down your range smoothly and without strain. Discovering that you can do this is the first breakthrough. You may go through a stretch of finding the new places in your voice—and then lose them again, but the exercises will keep leading you back. Stage two. You’ll probably stay at your new level of accomplishment for one to three weeks without sensing anything like the first breakthrough. You may feel that you’re on a plateau, but remember that your speaking and singing have already improved markedly. Keep doing the exercises, and as you do, feel how natural it becomes to use your voice in this way. Stage three, the setback. Almost inevitably, you’ll go to do your exercises one day, after happily and comfortably doing them for days or weeks, and you’ll feel as though your voice doesn’t know what to do anymore. You may feel you’re lost, or sliding backward. This is completely normal. Sometimes the learning process slows down when you come to new material, and you struggle to put it together with what you’ve already learned. Incorporati...

Let me reassure you that you’ll know middle when you hit it. It’s thick and edgy, and higher than chest voice. When you notice that you are high in the range, past where your break used to be, and that you are not straining to produce a large sound—you’re there.

Use flip-flopping to build on the sounds that are most comfortable for you. What’s flip-flopping? It’s a technique of substituting sounds that are easy for you in the vocal exercises for sounds that are difficult. There are a couple of ways to do this, and I suggest that you try them and see which way works for you, listening to the demonstrations on audio 25 on the website. 1. Substitute the sound you like for the syllable I’m singing on the audio example when you get to the high notes. In the one-octave set, we do a pattern of sounds that ends with a high note repeated four times. In a gug exercise, my student Ryan would sing gugs until he reached the repeated high notes. He’d sing the high notes as mums, which were easier for him.

You’ll also get a lot of benefit from using the throaty sounds in the exercises—nay and nah. These two sounds are exceptionally good at making the vocal cords vibrate in a long, thick position.

Smoothing Out the Gravel There’s no mystery about what it takes to keep your sentences from ending on a rough, gravelly note. The cause and cure, as we’ve seen, is air. When you run out of air and keep on talking, your voice simply runs out of gas. Many of you have probably found that your voices become much smoother and much less likely to run aground on gravelly sounds when you’re working with diaphragmatic breathing. But it can be so easy to lose the connection between breathing and speaking that I’d like to reinforce some basics. You know that as you breathe, if you put your hand over your stomach just above your belly button, your hand should move in smoothly as you exhale. If you keep your hand there when you’re talking to someone, the same smooth movement should be happening the entire time you speak. If your stomach is always making that inward motion when words are leaving your mouth, it’s very hard for airflow to be restricted.

It’s interesting to me that the same level of energy that makes a voice command attention and gives it the most interesting and appealing qualities is the level that’s required for superior sound production. It’s as though our voices are designed to be compelling, and listened to—if only we let them. Try speaking more loudly for even a day and see what happens to the way people respond to you. People who are used to turning down the radio and leaning in to hear you may need a little time to adjust to the new, sculpted voice you’ve built, but I know they’ll be energized by your new vocal energy. Many of us are in the habit of letting our volume drop at the end of every sentence, and it’s no coincidence that this loud-to-soft pattern is so common. We’re getting soft not because we want to but because we’re running out of air. But with just a little practice and attention, you can easily build the strength and skill to set the volume and energy level of your sentences where you want it—and keep it there.

I’d also like you to use a small hand mirror to check the position of your mouth as you speak. Recite the alphabet and watch what the corners of your mouth are doing. When you reach letters like e and g, do you feel your mouth becoming wide, the corners flaring apart? Some people say e with a very wide smile, their eyes nearly closed and their cheeks high. I appreciate the energy and enthusiasm of that mouth position, but it doesn’t serve you well at all for speaking. When you let the corners of your mouth go wide, you restrict the amount of resonating space inside your cheeks, which changes the way your voice sounds. Ideally, air is supposed to bounce around inside your mouth and cheeks, picking up resonances that make it sound rich and full. It’s a bit like what happens inside a big bass drum after you strike the top: the sound bounces around the interior space and is shaped by it. When you widen the corners of your mouth, it’s as though you’ve taken the sides of the drum away. The sound is flat, brassy, and tinny. To correct the too-wide habit, try this: Put an index finger on either side of your mouth. Push your lips in just a bit, so they’re just slightly pursed. Now, start the alphabet again, or tell me about what you’re doing for dinner tonight, and as you speak, don’t let your lips go any wider than their starting position. Keep the corners of your mouth in. I know you may believe that you have to stretch your lips wide to say e, but that’s not true. To prove that ...

As you reach middle, pay close attention to the position of your mouth. In singing, even more than in speaking, the corners of your mouth should never widen into a smile, especially as you go higher. When you sing “no” at a comfortable place in your range, your lips purse slightly, but you may notice that when you try to sing it higher in the range, the pouty lip position disappears, and the o sounds more like an ah. It’s a natural tendency to slide into a smiley face when you go higher than chest voice, but if you let it happen, you’ll hear strange things happening to your lyrics. “Go” becomes “gah,” and the sound of ah becomes aaa, as in splat. In fact, you’ll find your lyrics splatting all around you. Not too attractive. Worse than that, you can trap yourself in chest voice, with no possibility of getting to middle. When you let your mouth widen, the air that was going to bounce around in the cheeks and travel above the soft palate to the nasal cavity has no room to move, and it goes straight out the corners of your lips.

That said, there is one specific change I’d like you to make in the position of your mouth as you go higher: I want you to drop your jaw without tilting your head down. As you ascend the scale, the back part of your throat tends to close a bit, making the sounds coming out of your mouth seem smaller. Dropping your jaw compensates for that change by creating a large resonating cavity in your mouth that amplifies the higher notes. Be careful not to throw your jaw down in a spasmodic movement. Let it slide up and down in a gentle fluid motion that creates no pressure in the muscles of the jaw.

You do too. So when you sing, accentuate the important words, do something special with them. Don’t sing all the words with the same flat emotion you get when you send out a monotone: “I love my dog I hate my dog.” If you say or sing all of those words with the same sounds and volume, it’s hard to tell whether you love your dog or you don’t. Choose key words and emphasize them. Make exaggerated acting choices that help you take your place alongside all of the other instruments that are producing noise while you are singing. Be a big, bold actor/singer and your audiences will love you for it.

Listen to a favorite song and then record yourself singing it with the emotion turned up to 10. When the line seems sad, go way over-the-top and see if you can showcase that. Anger, same way. And if there’s hope, joy, or pleading, make that as huge as you can. If you’re a speaker and want to try this, go way, way past what you think you need in volume, speaking from loud to soft, really fast and really slowly to absurdity, and pumping in melody. Listen back, then cut the emotion and variations in half as you record again. What you hear is probably not that absurd at this point. The idea is to overact until you are believable. No one ever steps onstage or in front of a camera to underwhelm the viewer. Relaxed and casual doesn’t work. Give your audience more energy, more excitement, more emotion, more entertainment than they bargained for. The other key piece is matching your physiology to your song and, once more, doing it in a big way. When you’re singing about something happy, it has to show on your face. Your eyes have to smile, your cheeks rise. If you’re sad, the, eyebrows come down. If you’re Eminem angry, the movements of your hands will be faster and stronger and end with something hard, like a karate chop. And if you’re singing about sweetness and beauty, the motion of hands and body should be more fluid, flowing from one gesture to another and using the whole body.

TRUE ARTISTRY in speaking comes from creating a convincing blend of three elements: what you say, the way you say it, and who you are. When these pieces come together, you’ll find that your voice becomes a vehicle that moves people to listen and take you and your words seriously, whether you’re in the office, at home, or onstage.

If your natural speed is medium to fast. Nerves or excitement can easily push the pedal to the metal and accelerate your speech to a pounding pace. You might be fine one-on-one or in familiar situations, but when you step in front of an audience or prepare to confront a spouse with some bad news, adrenaline kicks in, increasing your pulse rate and releasing energy to prepare for the coming stress. If you don’t tune in to your body at this point, a number of things start to happen. Your voice, mirroring your body’s “tempo change,” rushes out. As your mouth, throat, and tongue work feverishly to articulate the words, you can fall into a dronelike monotone because there’s simply not enough time or breath to allow the voice to move around freely and produce varied pitches. In all likelihood, your breathing rate has increased and you’ve lost touch with diaphragmatic breathing altogether, which means the resonances of middle and head voice are less available to you, and chest voice is thin instead of thick. This is not the voice you want to use to tell your employees that layoffs are coming, or your spouse that there’s a huge new dent in the car—yet it may seem to be the only one available. Worse for the listener at times like this, your words and breath are probably not connected in any meaningful way. Pauses are important in speech because when they’re used effectively, they break information into units based on sense. They’re aural punctuation. If you give in to the tendency ...

you’re like most people, and nerves are the big problem that throws you into unwanted overdrive, the first thing I’d like you to do is go back to the basics of diaphragmatic breathing, which will slow your body down with its gentle, regular pattern. Focusing on your breath is a well-known and effective technique for pulling you back to the present and grounding you in your body when you’ve been caught up in racing, worried thoughts. If you establish correct breathing, you lay the foundation for proper sound production and allow your body to remember and make the sounds it’s learned in your singing exercises. I’d also like you to play with your pacing when you talk. You might start by recording yourself as you read the newspaper or a book aloud. Read a sentence or two at your normal speed, then change the pace. Slow down for a sentence or two, then speed up. What speed gives you the best sound? What makes you sound energetic or authoritative or loving? You might notice that different content seems to be more effective at different speeds. Play with this. If you’re a fast talker normally, try slowing your pace on every other phone call at work. How do people respond to you? When you’re face-to-face with a friend, watch for cues. Are you connecting better when you slow down? Or does a certain amount of speed buff up your message? If you’re delivering a speech, you might want to play with speed for emphasis. Slowing down at difficult or key points might draw attention to place...

There’s no magic pill for fixing the pace of your speech, just listening and adjusting, listening and adjusting. Record yourself for feedback. Keep in mind that different situations require different paces. If you’re a therapist, for example, you want to provide lots of space in your speech to encourage the other person to respond.

The work we’ve done to this point has given you dozens of vocal tones and shadings to use, but like Coach Ed, you may not yet be incorporating them into the way you speak every day. I’d like you to tune in now to how much variation you’re putting into your speaking voice. Pick up a book or paper and record your voice reading any passage you like. As you play back the recording, listen specifically for how high and low you go. Does your voice swoop and soar all over the keyboard, or does it remind you of my son’s PE coach? You have almost three octaves of range to play with, so I encourage you to move the notes around.

It might be easier for you to get an idea of how to do this if you try the following exercise: Write down ten or twelve lines of the next conversation you’ll probably have. Maybe you’ll be talking to your kids or asking someone for a date. Now take those lines and pretend they’re the lines of a song. Forget that you’re not a composer, and without worrying too much about your melody, go back and sing the whole conversation, everything from the “How’s it going?” to the “Now can you take out the trash?” I know that you’re probably muttering “No way,” but I challenge you to try this. No matter how strange the “song,” I know you’ll hear more thickness, more energy, and more pitch variation than you generally put into your regular speech. Once you’ve sung the words of your planned conversation, go back and speak them and see if you can keep some of the same resonances and variations in your speech.

I know that those of you who make a lot of presentations or speak often in public are wary of the singsongy cadences of the “professional speakers’ voice,” or a stagey kind of broadcasters’ voice in which inconsequential words get emphasized and every sentence is molded into the same roller-coaster format, whether it fits or not. Don’t worry—I don’t want you to wind up with a voice that’s varied just for the sake of novelty. I’ve noticed that when speakers begin to sound that way, it’s usually because they seem to be completely disconnected from their meaning. But you can begin to address that problem by focusing on phrasing.

Return to the speak-singing exercise we did earlier, your ten to twelve lines of written conversation, and this time break the sentences into phrases that each convey important parts of your message. For instance, if your thought is “Helen, I want to go out with you…,” you might break it into “Helen / I want to go out with you / we’ll talk / we’ll get to know each other / after all / it’s you / you’re the only one / the only one I want.” Before you can speak-sing it, you need to know what kind of song this is. If it’s a love song, you’ll deliver it differently than a children’s song, emphasizing different words, and of course adding very different emotions. Often we don’t stop to consider the emotional weight we want our words to carry because we’re so focused on the words themselves. It’s helpful to ask: If this speech/talk/conversation were a song, what kind of song would it be? That’s the same as asking, “What kind of energy do I want this communication to have?” Is it a stirring inspirational hymn? Rousing march? If you liken your speech to the Michigan fight song instead of a folksy country tune, you’ll help yourself produce a very specific effect.

It’s the pauses that make the phrase, so use them consciously, not arbitrarily. Stay right in the moment. You don’t have to pause a long time, but if you’re delivering complicated information or asking people to visualize something new, give them a moment to digest what you’ve said. Break your message down subtly, by offering your listeners space to think or laugh.

Practice phrasing by singing your written conversation. Sing the same words as a children’s teaching song, a torch song, and a dance tune, keeping in mind that your purpose changes each time: you’re trying to teach something simply, tell a love story, or get your audience to get up and move. The rhythms, phrasings, and sounds that produce those effects can be part of your repertoire when you speak, if you’re willing to try them. When you hit on a sound you like, repeat

Pauses are, not incidentally, your chance to breathe. Many singers mark their music to indicate exactly where they want to breathe, and especially if you’re giving a talk, I encourage you to do the same thing. Some very basic guidelines to keep in mind: Don’t keep talking when you run out of breath! Allow yourself to talk to the end of a complete phrase. Let yourself be silent, instead of producing a filler sound, when you are thinking. If you concentrate on speaking in phrases and using pauses thoughtfully, you’ll automatically shift your focus, and your listeners’, to the meaning of what you’re saying. Filling in your pauses with ums and ers and “you know”s essentially erases your phrases, so if you’ve noticed that you tend to make sounds like this, spend time breaking the habit. Record yourself often and practice filtering out the filler.

Every time I’ve ever worked with a speaker who’s trapped behind a small, closed-off voice and asked for more volume, the standard response has been: “No, no—I’m shouting.” But the crowd listening inevitably goes wild as the decibel level increases. We can all hear that the speaker sounds a hundred times better with the thick, strong voice that proper volume makes possible. I know I’ve encouraged you more than once to stop rationing your voice and to let the sound and energy out. Please go with me on this. Phrasing, pitch variation, and singing your way into speech aren’t going to help if people can’t hear you! Volume, volume, volume!

What would I have suggested instead? You guessed it—singing. If the scientist were my client, I’d have advised him to take his notes and sing his way through them. When you do, you’ll find yourself discovering interesting ways to emphasize words, you’ll hear them a different way, and you’ll begin to hear the real message shining through. The scientist might have discovered that the essential thing he wanted to communicate was his excitement about ways we can all live longer by eating differently.

Singing gives you new perspective on your material because it’s one of the only times both sides of your brain—the creative, imaginative side and the orderly, logical side—operate together. When you practice by singing a few phrases, then going back to speak them, you tap into the power of your whole brain, and when you’re connected to both your logical mind and your imagination, you can’t help but express yourself in a way that feels whole. You might even surprise yourself. Your delivery feels fresh, and people can’t help but listen.

Don’t change your voice for the microphone. Allow yourself to make the musical sounds you’ve worked so hard to develop, and look on the mike as a potential helper, not a reason for changing all the rules.

It’s a great opportunity, and you can grab it and use it if you reach out of yourself by using eye contact. You don’t need to stare, but look. Be curious about how your message is being received. Open yourself up to others’ feelings and the nonverbal messages they’re sending. You’ll gain valuable information.

When nerves enter the equation, however, it’s as though you’re standing outside your body and watching yourself, or choreographing your every movement. And the second you disconnect your body and your mind, you’re in trouble. You begin to orchestrate your gestures, and instantly you create a barrier between yourself and your listeners. If you tend to use parallel gestures, try this exercise. Stand in front of a mirror that allows you to see yourself from the waist up. Sing your favorite song or speak any passage of text you’ve memorized. Watch what your hands do. Are they mirroring each other? Make a mental note of what you see. Now go back and sing or say the same thing. Stop the moment you find yourself making a parallel gesture, and let one hand drop, or move one of them up or down. Change something. Continue speaking or singing until you find yourself making another parallel gesture. Stop again, reposition, and continue. This simple mirror work will increase your awareness and let your body know that you’re onto its unconscious habit. Notice the gestures, then stop using them. It’s really that simple and possible.

Record your voice as you talk about your passion in life. When you listen to your own words, do you hear the enthusiasm, the clarity, the emotion that you feel for your subject? We spend a lot of time developing the expertise to be great parents or professionals or entrepreneurs or artists, and the fact is that if we want to put our talents into the world, we have to spend time developing the voices that will communicate what we know, instead of shortchanging our talents. I don’t have any problem persuading singers to sing or to practice imitating sounds they admire. Singing is what they love. I hope you’ll begin to look on speaking with that kind of passion.

When you begin to put yourself and your ideas clearly and thoughtfully into the world, with all the energy you feel, people will notice. Their new attention and interest may make you feel self-conscious, but keep using the techniques you’ve learned. You’ll be a more active, influential player in your life, instead of being pushed to the sidelines. Use the exercises in this chapter to experiment with the way you sound. Especially, use the speak-singing technique. Speak the way you sing. I can’t stress strongly enough just how much that will transform the way you talk—and your total way of thinking and communicating. And don’t be afraid to play. Talk like a broadcaster. Exaggerate the highs and lows in your voice. Spend some time carefully phrasing a snippet of conversation. Shut the door and try on voices until you arrive at something you like. I hope you’ll let yourself get carried away with this project of refining your voice—and finding the precise sounds that express who you are. When you do, every conversation you have will be an opportunity to express the energy of your ideas.

But to be a master influencer, you need access to every part of your voice, because the sound waves you create enter the bodies of your listeners, triggering memories, feelings, and physical changes that determine how receptive they’ll be to you and your message. Just as the melody of a song creates the emotional soundscape that determines whether an “I love you” is an excited discovery or a longing goodbye, the melodies of your speaking voice, shaped and supported by your breath and the other elements that create your sound, send an instant emotional message.

To generalize in a very broad way: Chest voice is thick, strong, weighty, powerful, commanding. It puts across the feeling: I’m in control. Middle voice has an energetic quality that makes people pay attention and might just get them up and cheering you. Head voice is full of sounds that people experience as kind, loving, and compassionate.

1. Start with Happy So the first emotion you want to master is Happy, because happiness is magnetic, and we tend to equate happiness with success. When people pick up the literal vibrations of happiness from your voice, and see that your physiology matches, they wonder what you’re happy about. It might be because you’re healthy, have money, or offer a cure for the problems of the world—and they’re curious to find out more. This is a lightning-quick impression: We hear and see Happy, Happy feeds and radiates confidence, and confidence signals, “My life is great!” The brain of the listener decides, in that instant, to pay attention. The basic elements of Happy are increased volume, wide-ranging melody, and a brisk pace.

2. Immediately Move to Grateful Happiness is a good start, but it’s not enough. People know that you can be happy and still be a jerk. So you can reinforce your identity as a good person by using sounds in a way that communicates that you are honored your audience is listening to you, and lets them know that you sense their attention and appreciate it. Grateful, because it is a response to the audience, is slower and softer than Happy. It’s a pause to say, “I noticed you, and I’m savoring our contact.” Slightly drawing out the syllables of your words creates a subtle reason for the audience to lean in and feel the appreciation you’re sending it. Grateful is gracious—it doesn’t rush. Grateful is softer because it comes from a place of honor, a place that is noncompetitive. Too many conversations are like a boxing match—you punch, they punch. By lowering your volume you are saying, “I do not wish to overpower you, only hear you and show you how much I respect your presence.”

3. Master Passionate Presentation is an energy exchange, and audiences tend to match the level and flavor of the emotion you send out. Your passion for your ideas, your cause, or your product can be infectious when it’s carried on the back of frequencies that say your belief in and enthusiasm for your message is genuine. Genuine passion is big enough to fill a room. Yet it’s not bullying or coercive. This type of passion is not the same as romantic passion. I am specifically talking about passion as it relates to sharing your enthusiasm and excitement about someone or something. To sound Passionate, start with consistent volume. When I mentioned Happy earlier, I told you to be louder, but Happy showcases a variable volume that rises with your building level of enthusiasm. Passionate needs a solid level of volume that’s carried through most of the words in each sentence. It does not let up. It stays strong and consistent, giving people the subconscious feeling that you are not going to back down, that you are a force of good to be reckoned with and you cannot be silenced. Melody also changes when you’re Passionate. I often say that you should go up in melody when you get to a comma or a period, especially if you are demonstrating Happy. Now, for Passionate, I want you to work on staying higher in the range most of the time. Then, when you get to that comma or period, I want you to stay on the same note. I don’t want the last note before a comma or a period to go up so much....

4. Let Them Know You’re Confident Confidence is currency for a presenter. When it flows through your voice, listeners experience your belief in yourself and your message, and give credibility to you and what you’re saying. At the same time, they experience your belief that they can take your message and put it into action, your confidence in them. Confidence is built on the bedrock of your hard work and expertise, and it doesn’t jump up and down begging for attention or respect. It walks into the room assuming both are there, and it returns both to the audience. So to sound Confident, you can have solid volume but never feel like you’re raising your voice. Confident doesn’t go loud like anger or soft like timidity. It functions like the lead violin in the orchestra, happy and vibrant alone, but ready to play with others when the occasion arises. You should extend the syllables of your words to their longest possible lengths for a Confident sound. To create the sound of Grateful, you sustained syllables a small amount. As you hold out the vowels in Confident mode, you are saying: “Listen to me. Every word counts. Every thought matters. Each word is crafted to share a long-lasting bond that we are creating together.” The Confident sound profile tells your audience: “My words are long and strong, and I am confident that you will be stronger by listening to and communicating with me.”

You don’t have to learn to be a good actor to be a powerful presenter. You don’t have to be an actor at all, because you’re not acting—you’re guiding listeners through a landscape full of ideas and emotions. Your job is to decide what you want your audience to know and feel, and to use your voice to help them experience it in the present.

I remind men to talk UP to women, letting their voices rise into middle, which mirrors a part of women’s range, and adding melody and the sound of Happy to neutralize the sometimes threatening tones of the deeper male voice. They can also limit sudden loud volume bursts. Men: Women do not like it when they perceive that you are trying to overpower them in conversations. By getting suddenly louder you not only scare them at a deep level, you also put them on the defensive, making them feel less than equal in the communication.

So the best way of trying out all you’ve learned, and all the sounds and emotions you want to play with, is to take them out for a test drive in front of strangers or people who don’t see you every day. Communicate in a way that emphasizes the sounds of Happy and Passionate, and look for people to come back at you with the same qualities in their voices and communication. You may think this is way too risky to try. But if you’ve been doing the exercises I’ve taught you, you already have a strong voice filled with melody and volume. You’ve weeded out the nasality, the squeaky hinge sound, and the airy sounds in your voice. You’re entirely ready to present the new you to one new person—because you’re already polished.