A Practical Guide to Confident Speaking E-Book

Alan Woodhouse

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Serie: Practical Guide Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 220

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Introducing Confident Speaking, by voice, acting, communication and public speaking coach Alan Woodhouse, teaches you to express yourself more clearly, persuasively and confidently. Whether you want to ask your boss for a pay rise, chair meetings better, or deliver a faultless best-man speech, this book will teach you how to plan what to say, manage your anxieties and project your best self on the big day. TAILOR YOUR SPEECHES and find the perfect words for every occasion PROJECT YOUR VOICE and make sure you can be heard OVERCOME STAGE FRIGHT and get your point across

Leseprobe

Published in the UK and USA in 2014 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District, 41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Distributed in Canada by Penguin Books Canada, 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3

Distributed to the trade in the USA by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution The Keg House, 34 Thirteenth Avenue NE, Suite 101, Minneapolis, MN 55413-1007

ISBN: 978-184831-679-9

Text copyright © 2014 Alan Woodhouse

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Avenir by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

About the author

Alan Woodhouse is a voice, acting, communication and public speaking coach. He trained at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Central School of Speech & Drama. He now runs a private consultancy in London, training everyone from actors to business executives to media professionals. His business clients come from major financial institutions, government departments and international corporations.

Alan’s work in theatre has taken him to Paris, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, and Aix-en-Provence. He has also worked at the Royal Court Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe and the Young Vic in London.

Contents

Introduction

PART ONE: The basics

1. Breathing

2. Diction

3. Rhythm

4. Gravitas

PART TWO: Presentations – preparation and planning

5. What is the message I want (or need) to deliver to my audience?

6. How do I choose the best words to tell my story?

7. Scripting the presentation

8. Delivery

9. Be prepared

PART THREE: Speeches for specific events

10. The wedding speech

11. Doing a reading

PART FOUR: Speeches for all occasions

12. The leaving speech

13. The interview

14. Meetings and conversations

Conclusion

Appendix: Speaker’s Toolkit

Index

Notes

Other titles in the Practical Guides series

Introduction

Who are you and who am I?

You are an everyman, or woman. You are someone who thinks about their voice, and is aware that it doesn’t always behave the way you would like it to. Maybe you hate hearing yourself on a voicemail message. Or maybe you’ve spoken in a meeting or at a wedding and felt that the passion in your voice didn’t match the passion in your heart. Maybe you’ve asked for a pay rise, only to have your voice quaver and betray your lack of self-confidence. This book is for you.

We can all listen to someone else and think that in some way or other they make a better job of it than we would. They choose the right words, make the right sounds, smile the right smile. And this negative attitude can be vicious. Other people may take the wind out of our sails, but self-criticism is lethal to confident speaking.

This book is full of practical exercises and ideas that you can start to use straight away. Some techniques will need a little time and energy and patience to master, but it might surprise you how quickly you pick up some useful skills. Just five minutes of good preparation can transform tragedy into triumph. The key to confident speaking is rekindling a belief in yourself. Your voice is just as good as anyone else’s. It just needs bringing out.

First, I’m going to introduce you to some breathing exercises, to help you relax and find your most confident voice. You’ll then learn how to explore what you want to say and how to find the best way to say it. I’ll advise you on how to write speeches and presentations, and even talk a little bit about how to deal with the dreaded PowerPoint. You may be considering a new work position or role, one where you will be in front of an audience more often, needing to project and display total confidence and ease. You may be just out of university and expecting a whole raft of interviews that need your full attention. Or you may already be in a position where you have to speak publicly, but just want to learn to do it better. Either way, you need to prepare yourself, and this book will help you make best use of every opportunity.

Some situations allow us to plan quite precisely the words we have to speak, so we can make notes and rehearse. Other situations are more open-ended and need us to react as the moment demands. Together, we will go through ideas and exercises to help you face all of these eventualities, and you will learn how to build structures that can underpin these most stress-inducing events. Finally, at the end of the book you’ll find a Speaker’s Toolkit. This contains a range of ideas and exercises – many of them only taking a minute or two – that you can pick and choose to use to build up your strength and give you more skills, and call on whenever you need them.

So who am I? I am a voice, acting, communication and public speaking coach. My job, essentially, is to get either myself or the people I coach to the right place at the right time, and in the right frame of mind. (And in some cases, in the right costume, and having learnt the script.) The venue can be anything from a theatre to a TV studio to a church to an office meeting room to your favourite bar.

My job is to advise, suggest, encourage, support and educate. And anything else you can think of that might help you get to your confident speaking moment in the best shape and spirits. The only thing I can’t do is do it for you.

Right from the beginning, my best advice is to start to talk, out loud, about the plans you need to make. Speaking needs all of our energies: mental, emotional, and physical.

You could use your mobile phone to record your voice, a voice recorder on your computer, a digital recorder or even an old cassette-player. Use what is most portable and easiest to handle. Holding something in your hand, or at least having something there in front of you, will give you a focal point. You may feel less self-conscious than just talking into mid-air. You’ll have a dual experience: you’ll hear your voice in real-time, as you speak, and you’ll get the recorded version. So I strongly recommend that when you’re doing the exercises in this book you always record and listen back to them.

The recorded version of our voice can take a bit of time to adjust to, as it’s not the version we are used to hearing. Our ears are on the outside of our body so we do hear the sounds we make. But, at the same time, we also experience sensations inside our throat and head and elsewhere in our body – breath is moving, our vocal cords vibrate, our lips and tongue shape the words we speak. So when we listen to a recorded version of our voice it can sound quite different to how we thought it sounded.

There are important points for us to notice here. Most of us are prone to being self-critical of our own voice, which is usually less than helpful and potentially destructive. When we are overwhelmed with strong emotions – especially negative ones, like self-criticism – our breathing muscles tend to tighten. If our breathing is tight and tense, then our voice will be tight and tense. To find our best, most confident voice, we need to find relaxation and deep breathing. There really is no such thing as a ‘good’ voice or a ‘bad’ voice. Just as we get fit by exercising other parts of our body you can get vocally fit if you do some of the training outlined in this book.

When you record your thoughts and ideas you can try out different ways of saying the same thing. As you listen back you’ll like some options better than others. You could begin scripting your material by using the options you like. It can be hard to know if we’ve chosen the right words until we hear those words spoken. Just reading them in our head will not give us the same experience. Spoken language can be quite different to written language, and what looks quite perfect on the page may well sound less than ideal. As you use your voice, and choose what you want to say, you’ll fight any fears you might have. You are about to begin your journey towards achieving your own best confident speaking. I think we should get started.

PART ONE

The basics

In this section we are going to work through the fundamentals of confident speaking: mastering your breath and articulation, teaching you how to get rhythmic energy in your speech and helping you relax. By the time we’re done, you should feel confident that the words you speak will trip off your tongue easily and clearly.

1. Breathing

The first and most important tool to harness in terms of confident speaking is your breath. Just because you decide in your head that you want to say something, doesn’t mean your body will fall into line. Bodies can be very stubborn! So we have to train them to do what we want.

Think what you would do if there was a food shortage: you’d go to the shops, grab as much food as possible, lock it away in your store cupboard and save it for the rainy day you hope will never come. Speaking is the same. When you want your voice to be on its best behaviour – that important meeting, presentation, wedding speech or interview – your body will want to store up some extra supplies of breath. Your body understands that you need a good supply of breath to speak with confidence.

We’re all full of good intentions, aren’t we? Your body is trying to do right by you, to help you prepare for that important moment. Let’s go back to the food stocking-up scenario. Instinctively, you don’t want to start using the precious food too soon, not until it’s really necessary. In the same way, your body gets a bit too keen on hanging on to all that breath it has taken in. Why give it all away without a bit of a fight? And this is the problem. We need the breath to flow – it’s the basic energy that gives life to your voice.

We have a tendency to hold our breath when we are thinking, when we are listening and when we are waiting, especially if we’re busy and lots of things need our attention. When you feel the stress levels rising, remind yourself to multi-task. Tell yourself, ‘I can breathe as I think, and as I listen, and as I wait.’

First, gently but firmly tighten the muscles in your stomach, but not too strongly; you shouldn’t feel ill. Now speak out loud the numbers one to ten. Remember what it feels like, and what it sounds like to speak with this tension in your stomach. Now release those poor old muscles. You should be able to feel that they can freely move again and speak the numbers again, with your stomach relaxed. It sounds different, doesn’t it? And I hope it feels better too!

Breathing exercises

We’re going to do some breathing exercises to get you relaxed, confident and with enough breath to project your voice. You need to make sure that two areas in particular can move freely – the stomach and the ribs.

STOMACH EXERCISE 1

Place one hand on your stomach – the centre of the palm around your belly button – so you can feel your stomach move as you breathe. Imagine there is a tiny bit of fluff on the hand that’s resting on your stomach, and you want to gently blow it off. The sound you’ll make is ‘pppphhhhh’. Your lips will be softly together and you’ll feel your stomach move a bit.

Next, focus on an object about an arms length away from you. There’s a bit of fluff on it too. Gently but firmly, blow away the fluff: ‘pppphhhhhh’. You’ll feel your stomach move a bit more energetically. Because the distance is larger, you automatically generate more energy.

Why am I doing this?

You are waking up the breathing muscles in the stomach so that you can breathe more deeply. Picture your lungs as roughly pear-shaped, so the biggest bits are near the bottom. If we breathe using mostly the upper part of the chest – nearer to the smallest parts of the ‘pear’ – we only get a shallow and short-lived breath. This is not good for projecting a confident voice.

Our breathing muscles are no different to any other muscles, in that they get lazy and out of condition. If the breathing muscles in the stomach and the ribcage area are not able to move flexibly and energetically then our voices will tend to sound flat and uninteresting, which will not help us to be confident speakers.

In the second exercise you will explore how long you can sustain your outgoing breath. You’ll find that the secret to breathing in well is to breathe out in a strong and forthright way. Putting it simply, the better you breathe out, the better you’ll breathe in!

STOMACH EXERCISE 2

Place one hand on your stomach and silently count eight beats as you breathe out. Your stomach will get smaller and your hand will move inwards. As you breathe in your stomach will expand and your hand will move outwards. Never rush when you are breathing in, take as long as your body needs.

Try breathing out for ten beats, breathe in again, then out for twelve beats. Remember, you control the speed of the beats, but I’d recommend about two beats per second. The longer you can breathe out, without making yourself panic or feel ill, the more you will be aware of your stomach moving energetically as you breathe in. Try adding another two beats to your out-breath, but don’t rush, take it gently. As you continue to practise this exercise you should be able to increase the number of beats that you can comfortably breathe out.

Breathing more deeply will also help you to relax the upper chest and your vocal and articulation muscles. This means that they can move more freely and flexibly and your confident voice will not get locked away in a tense throat. That’s a major reason why the breathing exercises are so important.

RIBS EXERCISE 1

Your ribs should join with your stomach to free up a stronger and more sustained flow of breath energy. This breath will help you to make a confident and healthy sound.

Prop this book up on a table so you have both hands free, and lift both arms in the air, stretching them towards the ceiling. With your right hand, grab hold of your left wrist. Your right hand will begin to gently pull and stretch your left arm upwards, until you feel the left side of your ribcage and back begin to stretch out. Stay stretched as you silently breathe out to the count of eight, and stay stretched as you take time to breathe in. Don’t rush.

Stay stretched as you breathe out again to the count of ten, and as you breathe in. Keep adding two beats to your out-breath. See if you can get to twenty, but don’t worry if at first you can’t. Your body will need time to get used to these new exercises.

When you’ve completed your stretches on your left side, repeat the exercise on your right side. Start by holding your right wrist with your left hand.

RIBS EXERCISE 2

Put your hands on your ribcage so that you can feel both sides moving. Breathe out to the count of eight: notice your ribcage getting smaller. Visualize the movements as being like an umbrella opening and closing. The umbrella opens up as you breathe in and closes as you breathe out.

Breathe out to the count of ten, then take time to breathe in. Continue doing this, adding two beats to your out-breath each time. See if you can get to twenty, but don’t worry if you can’t. With practice you will improve.

Don’t worry if you feel a little breathless after doing these exercises, as long as you don’t feel ill, and as long as the breathless feeling doesn’t last for more than a few moments. If you’re struggling you can choose to build up your stamina bit by bit. Twelve beats today, fourteen tomorrow.

Remember that it’s virtually impossible to breathe really badly if you are lying flat-out: on the floor, on a bed, wherever feels comfortable. You are being supported literally from head to toe. You might as well relax and let the floor take the weight of your body. Let the floor do all the hard work. You’ll breathe more freely if you do.

2. Diction

Tension is a bit like hot air: it tends to rise. Starting around the belly button, it can move into the chest and up into the throat itself. When that happens we can feel as if we are frozen in the moment and unable to move. Good breathing will help us to relax the tension that can cripple our confidence, but to achieve good diction we need to exercise our articulation muscles and learn how to control them.

We’ve all suffered from the nerves that can leave us not even able to speak our own name without tripping over the words, or trying to speak faster than our mouths can go, and ending up mumbling and being asked to repeat ourselves. You may recognize some comments from my clients:

I need to improve my diction; I need to stop being so lazy and open my mouth more when I speak.

I speak clearly but too fast because I want to get everything out at the same time.

I speak with a lot of passion: I get excited and the audience gets confused.

I actually don’t feel that nervous, but I do tend to mumble.

You can skim-read but you can’t ‘skim-speak’. The physical act of speaking takes time and energy; it takes place in real time not ‘thinking’ time. We think much faster than we can speak. When we rush in our heads our bodies tend to move more slowly. Our muscles tense up. We want to go faster and end up going slower.

The heat of the moment can cause us to lose control – or fear that we are losing control – and the pacing of our speech becomes erratic. Telling ourselves to ‘slow down’ has little effect. It’s not that we’re not listening, just that somehow the instruction doesn’t reach the control centre.

Going to the gym

To speak clearly we need to look at some articulation exercises, which I usually refer to as ‘taking your mouth to the gym’. We know the rest of our body needs exercise, and for clarity and control of diction we need to exercise our mouths.

Words have a mixture of vowel and consonant sounds, but it is usually the articulation of the consonants that gives us the precise meaning.

ARTICULATION EXERCISE 1

Say ‘one two three four five’. Do it smoothly, as if the five numbers were part of the same phrase. Say it again, but looking in a mirror. Be honest: what do you see? Here’s what you should be looking out for:

Do your lips come together at all? They should do, when you say the first sound of the first word, the ‘www’ of ‘one’. (I’m writing some of these consonants with three letters rather than just one because I wwwant to encourage you to rrreally give them time to sssound, and not to rush them.)

Can you see the tip of your tongue pointing up towards the roof of your mouth as you make the ‘nnn’ at the end of the first word? You might see it touching the back of your upper teeth. The tip of your tongue should also touch the back of your upper teeth at the beginning of the next word – the ‘tuh’ of ‘two’. If you can do this you’ll get a good, clear sound.

Do your upper teeth touch the upper side of your tongue? They should as you say the ‘th’ of ‘three’.

Does the tip of thetongue bend backwards for the ‘rrr’ in ‘three’?

Do your upper teeth touch your lower lip? This should happen three times, when you say the ‘fff’s’ and ‘vvv’s’ in ‘four’ and ‘five’.

What a lot of action for just five little words. That’s a lot of movement for the tongue and the lips, as well as the teeth. Each movement takes time and energy, and everyone will have their own variations as to just how each move is made. But if you don’t see much movement at all when you look in your mirror, then odds are your articulation will not be as clear as you would like it to be. You need to practise, so let’s move on to the second exercise.

ARTICULATION EXERCISE 2

Mouth ‘one two three four five’ silently. Move your tongue and your lips but do it as silently as possible. Not even whispering. You will hear a little clicking sounds when you make any plosive sound, like the ‘tuh’ at the beginning of ‘two’. Take time to shape the consonants.

This little exercise can work wonders on your pronunciation. By articulating silently we can focus on the movements of the tongue and lips that will give us good clarity. And it reminds us just how long it takes for our mouth to move from one sound to another.

No one really needs to know you’re doing this exercise. You could even try it sitting on the bus – silently shaping the words of the newspaper or book you’re reading – or listening to someone on the car radio and silently articulating what they say. Think about what you will say at the beginning of your meeting or interview and silently articulate your first words. Try using different words to say the same thing. Which do you like best? One version might roll off the tongue more easily.

When convenient, end this second articulation exercise by moving from silence to speaking out loud. First, shape the words silently, and then immediately speak the same words out loud. Practise for five minutes every day and you will soon hear some new clarity in your speech.

ARTICULATION EXERCISE 3

Silently mouth the words one to five reeeeeally sloooooowly, and then the words six to ten really quickly. Alternate mouthing five slowly and five quickly all the way up to 30.

In the first two articulation exercises you are tuning-up your articulation muscles, like tuning an instrument. Here you are beginning to control the pacing – a key factor in being an engaging speaker.

Take care – it is all too easy to start off with a clear difference between the slow and the quick and then to settle into a medium pace.

You can use this next exercise on the actual words and ideas you need to deliver, whether that’s a pre-written speech, a poem or a presentation. Clients often find it useful to break down the text into manageable phrases. The three things you’ll want to focus on are:

Getting the words into your mouth and into your body. They are not just an intellectual idea; you are physically committing yourself to them.Remembering that this is a real time experience of speaking: it will take you longer to speak with clarity and confidence than it would if you were reading the words in your head.Remembering that you control the speed at which you speak.

ARTICULATION EXERCISE 4

For this exercise you will speak out loud: the first phrase will be slow and the second will be quick, the third phrase slow, and the fourth quick, and so on. You might decide you’d like to speak at different speeds when you are actually doing the speech. That’s not a problem at all. The purpose of this exercise is to practise controlling your speed. Having mastered that you can speak in whatever way suits the occasion.

You could use the text below (Prime Minister William Gladstone’s 1853 budget speech) as a practice text, or work straight away with your own ideas.

SLOW

QUICK

I scarcely dare to look at the clock

reminding me, as it must

how long, how shamelessly

I have trespassed on the time of the Committee.

All I can say in apology is

that I have endeavoured to keep

closely to the topics

which I had before me.

These are the proposals of the government.

They may be approved, or they may be condemned.

As soon as you have spoken your slow-quick version, speak the whole text again. This time concentrate on what you want to say, rather than the pace. Expect to hear a variety of speed and to feel in control of your message.

As always with these exercises, you must be prepared to practise.

Is my accent holding me back?

The quotes below come from people who have contacted me wanting advice and help:

My CV is judged as good, but my spoken English is not making an impact in interviews.

Improving my accent would improve my business performance.

My career progression is restricted because of my voice and accent.

English is not my first language and even after having studied and lived in the UK for years, I still feel my accent is much too ‘foreign’.