Voice Is Changing

It is a myth that you are stuck with the voice you have.

No one wants to sound like Margaret Thatcher, but she is an outstanding example of one of millions of people who take/took the effort to make a change.

Think of Meryl Streep and the many actors who change their voices for various movie roles. Personally I only have to spend ten minutes in America and I have an American drawl. Margaret Thatcher did it for leadership influence. Meryl Streep does it to depict a character and I get an American drawl because we all imitate throat shapes and accents as a form of empathy and assimilation.

My particular fascination is presence and influence in leadership and it is interesting to note that, yes, you can change your voice, but what we are seeking in that change is itself changing.

I can tell you firstly what we do not want.

We do not want to pander to old schools of perception. Margaret Thatcher sought the voice of white-male-leadership of the 1960s – low, slow and loud. This can not be our goal today as we see more women enter the leadership fold with smaller larynxes and a higher pitch.

Of course deeper voices will always have a leadership edge. This was recognised by the many ancient cultures such as American Indian cultures, where Jedediah Smith of the Wild West ‘with his diplomatic and gentle tone, always seemed to win the friendship of natives, regardless of any language barrier’.  However, if you don’t have it, you can’t fake it.

And we are not seeking ‘theatrical’ sound in leadership.

Elocution, made popular in the 18th and 19th centuries is well and truly dead. Elocution declined rapidly during the twentieth century, apparently caused by ‘performers and teachers who stressed gestures, posture and vocal patterns that were recognised as artificial and incidental’ (Moore, 1981).

Why, oh why, Bill Shorten would have used some elocution techniques in his attempt to lead the nation is a mystery of the sphynx. His forces pitch, pace and volume variations are audible and palpable to us all and did nothing for the 35% trust level prior to the election.

A gorgeous story of the death of elocution in the 1930’s saw ‘the postures and poetic diction of the reciter provide(d) easy objects of satire ... By the time of the first Sydney Eisteddfod in 1933 the melodramatic gestures and artificiality of traditional elocution were already an anachronism. Judges complained of over-gesticulation and over-enunciation, and The  Daily Telegraph noted on one memorable rendition of James Elroy Flecker’s ‘War Song of the Saracens’ that ‘Little Nancye Turner of Lithgow screwed her eyes like a ferocious kitten and shouted, “We have marched from the Indus to Spain, and by God, we will go there again” as if she meant it’ (Hunting the Wild Reciter 2002, Radio National).

We no longer fake it to make it.

Instead, we are seeking our true fundamental sound unique to us. Basically, it is the ‘perfect you’.

The problem is that when it comes to voice we don’t know the first thing about it. Despite this being an area of study of thousands of years, today, perhaps because of the confusion of the objectives, it is stuck off the leadership education agenda.

So let’s start by learning a little about sound that could be critical for a business presentation.

Here are 5 tips:

1. You can’t feel your vocal folds. Therefore, if you think you voice is sore, it is actually your throat. Likewise, you voice may be swollen without any feeling.
2. You do not hear the sound you make as others hear you. This is because the ear drum is closer to the inside of the body and hears your own voice as far more resonant than it sounds to the outside world. Sorry!
3. If your vocal folds are damaged, or malfunctioning, you could be damaging your brand through detrimental psychological messages.
4. Water does not flow past the vocal folds. They are kept moist by body hydration from the inside. As a consequence it is better to drink water before, not during, a presentation.
5. Vocal folds shut as a response to emotional trauma. You can help by keeping the breath low in your body and lifting the muscles of the face, in particular the muscles under the eyes.