How to avoid one of the most common flaws in voice projection – transcript
Watch the video. It’s a whisker under 3 minutes…
Dribbling is one of the most common presentation foibles. Now when talking about dribbling what I’m actually referring to is the way some speakers sort of lose projection at the end of the phrase or a sentence. So it could sound like this: “Our new marketing strategy is entirely driven by data. It is data driven analysis that is governing how we carry out campaigns.” [voice tails off at the end].
Did you hear that ‘Campaigns’: it’s just dribbled right down the front of my top. Now, in order to avoid doing that, we need to press on the last key syllable of a phrase. For example, if I’m talking about data-driven campaigns, instead of it having this effect and landing down here in my belly button, I’m actually going to say ‘data-driven campAIGNS’. Just pressing slightly on campaigns will stop my voice from falling down and will help me to project.
The way you can practice this is simply by using a mobile device such as a telephone and – we don’t say taping anymore – it would be mp3ing your voice or maybe even mp4ing your voice into your voice recorder and making sure that you can read off the back of the cereal packet or absolutely anything that you have at hand recording and seeing if you can carry your voice to the end of
the room that you’re in.
So if I’m standing in my lounge, can I get to the other end of the lounge. I’m not gonna shout. All I’m doing is projecting and making sure that I don’t dribble by holding on to the key stressed syllable at the end of every phrase.
This becomes so automatic that you don’t have to continue doing this ad infinitum. If you were to do this exercise a couple of times for a week, it will completely rid you of your habit of dribbling at the end of phrases and that’s basically how they keep your projection strong and help keep people listening to you.
