How to silence a room with your voice

You know those people who speak up in a meeting and everyone listens? It's a voice that not only commands attention, it demands attention! You can unlock a voice like this too - and this article shows you how. Hint: Resonance helps you resonate.

A story I hear all too often from my clients is that they’ve had an experience, where they’ve spoken up in a meeting, either in person and online, to share an opinion or voice an idea and it’s like they were on mute. No one seems to have even heard them. Then someone else in the room mentions exactly the same thing and it’s, "oh what a great idea, what an interesting way to look at it!" and you’re sitting there being like...

It’s such a common story from women at all levels! I was at a breakfast where Australia’s former foreign minister Julie Bishop was speaking and SHE shared a similar experience.

So, how do we silence the room?

How do we have vocal presence?

How do we command attention when we speak, not just hope people are polite and listen in?

You need to focus on your tone. Your vocal tone sets the tone.

You need to have kick ass resonance to resonate.

I believe one of the main reasons voices don’t have cut through or influence is because the pitch is too high, the voice is too small, the tone is nasal and annoying or the overall vibe of the voice is weak. Alternatively, if we can produce a warm, strong, full, attractive, resonant voice of honey – people are going to pay attention to you.

I’m going to get a little technical here – if it’s too quick, remember this is the stuff we go through in detail in My Six Week Voice Makeover.

The buzz of those vocal cords is where is starts. When you’re speaking the air is travelling up from the lungs, up the windpipe, it slides through the vocal cords making those bad boys vibrate.

Put your hand on your throat and start talking – you’ll feel the buzz.

When the vocal cords vibrate this sets up a chain reaction of vibrations throughout your body. In spaces called the resonators, I like to call them the caves of the body. And depending which cave those vibrations sit and how strong they are, determines the quality of our voice – and is one of the reasons we all sound different, because we all have different shaped bodies.

So starting from the top. We can get vibrations in the hollows of the cheeks and head. Which is fine from time to time, you don’t want to get stuck up there. If we get stuck up in the stratosphere, it’s often a result of having too much tension and not enough breath flow – and it’s not a voice that will silence a room. I would not recommend entering an important conversation where you want to have influence while you're in the stratosphere.

So coming down we have our nasal cavity – a great space for the voice to vibrate-helps to give it that full sound. Of course if we have too much nasal resonance, we’re not going to produce the most attractive voice.

This is the same if we push all those vibrations to the back of our throat. Yes we sound deep but we sound fake, we sound try hard, a voice like that flies in the face of what we’re trying to achieve which is an honest trustworthy voice.

Learning how to use these vibrations is what will transform your voice.

The final resonator is the walls of the chest, and literally speaking from the heart.

Put your palm on your chest, take a deep breath down in your belly and say "haaa"

As you do that you want to feel vibrations on your palm.

You want to focus your vibrations forward.

This is that room silencing tone.

So as you enter the conversation, you’re going to pair this with:

• an intentional statement (no filler words!)
• eye contact with the camera lens or the people in the room
• And if the content demands it – smile!

Now we’re getting into room silencing territory.

Accessing that beautiful heart space for your voice and being able to control your resonance, means undoubtedly you will be able to make people’s ears prick up and listen, you’ll get your message across the first time, you’ll have the influence to silence that room.

And if you want to really make it happen, then join My Six Week Voice Makeover.