Your Voice – Asset or Embarrassment? 3 Best Voice Care Tips
The correct care of your voice is probably the most frequently overlooked aspect of speaking in public.
If you imagine that all you need to do is open your mouth, take a deep breath and speak, then you are a very long way from becoming a successful public speaker. But you certainly are not alone in ignoring the most vital tool in your speech-making arsenal. Very few speakers actually spend time in developing the correct speaking techniques – and even less time in caring for the single most important asset they possess.
After all, no voice, no speech!
So what should you be doing to make sure that your voice is in tip top condition for speech-making? Here are the three most important things you can do to ensure gold medal standard presentations:
1. Make sure that you don’t strain your voice in any way and that means no shouting at your favourite sporting event! If you simply have to make a loud noise to help your team score the winning point, invest in a whistle or air horn. Your voice is important – let others do the yelling and shouting.
2. Have plenty of water to drink. Get into the habit of continually sipping water throughout the day and you’ll find that you will soon feel the benefit all round – not just in your voice. When delivering a speech, make sure that you have a glass of water easily to hand so that you never feel the need to struggle with a throat that is becoming dry.
Avoid excessive alcohol intake in the days preceding a speaking engagement and leave the stuff alone completely in the 48 hours immediately prior to making your speech.
And for all sorts of good reasons, strictly no alcohol on the day of your speech – however nervous you might be feeling!
3. Do some gentle warm-up exercises for your vocal chords shortly before making your speech. If you are only an occasional speaker, you may feel a little silly humming and singing to yourself but just remind yourself that professional actors, speakers and singers run through warm-up exercises in exactly the same way as professional sportsmen do. If you really are serious about delivering the best speech that you can, these preparations will make a real difference to how you perform.
And the better you perform, the better you will feel. And the better you feel, the more relaxed you will become. And by virtue of this fact alone, your audience will find themselves sharing in your confident manner and enthusiastically offer you rapturous applause having enjoyed every word that you have spoken.
Your voice will have been your greatest asset – and you won’t have suffered the embarrassment of delivering your speech sounding like a frog with a sore throat!
