E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten
Apps Voice of Influence
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-84590-386-2
Verlag: Crown House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
How to Get People to Love to Listen to You
E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-84590-386-2
Verlag: Crown House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Judy Apps has spent many years unravelling the secrets of how great leaders inspire others, and now runs open creative programs and coaches leaders in major corporations in voice and communication.
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Chapter Three
Your voice tells a story
I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.
attributed to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V
Are you happy with your voice? Or maybe that seems the wrong question, a bit like asking if you’re happy with the size of your eyes. You may want to respond that whether you are or not isn’t the point as there’s not much you can do about it: your voice is your voice. You’ve got what you were born with. In fact, some people have one voice for all occasions, while others have voices that change all the time.
How is it for you? Does your voice stay broadly the same or does it change with different circumstances? In our house, I can always tell if my daughter is speaking to one of her friends or to her grandfather. The tone, pitch, speed and volume all change. She almost sounds like a different person on different occasions. The comedian Harry Enfield built a convincing comic character, the “super cool” teenager Kevin, on his observation of this phenomenon. When Kevin is speaking to his mates, his voice is rough and low. When, however, he meets a grown-up and feels less comfortable, his voice transforms into a tight, high-pitched squeak, “Yes, Mrs Jones, no, Mrs Jones.”
Many people pick up traces of another person’s accent when they converse. If your imitation is quite pronounced it can even be embarrassing! You might find that when you are speaking to someone who speaks slowly, you decrease your own speed or that when someone speaks to you in business-like tones you respond in a more clipped style. Listen to a mother turn from an adult conversation to respond to a child. The voice frequently becomes higher and lighter, and matches the child’s tone beautifully, creating the warm link between them. When you are speaking the other person is likely to feel understood if your voice approaches the character and quality of theirs.
You might think it difficult to learn a different way of speaking but it can happen very naturally. My mother, from Lancashire, moved to Surrey before I was born and had a Surrey accent for the rest of her life. Her friend from the south moved up north to Cumbria and always seemed like a northerner to me. Was their change of accent connected with their willingness and desire to fit in to the local community, or did it happen subconsciously as their ear attuned to the new sounds? A bit of both, maybe.
Another family moved to the north of England from the Home Counties. The parents were very keen for their seven-year-old son to continue to “speak well”, so they corrected his pronunciation frequently and he instinctively understood that only a certain kind of talking was acceptable at home. But at his new primary school the local children teased him on the very first day for his “posh” accent. So in no time at all he picked up the local pronunciation and began to match the other children perfectly while continuing to speak in his southern accent at home. In learning another accent for school, in a way he became “bilingual”, with the two “languages” clearly demarcated in his mind. What is interesting is that he achieved this overnight. It is amazing what fears for selfsurvival can do!
You will know of other people whose accent remains strongly rooted in the place where they grew up. They can live a lifetime surrounded by people with a different accent and it doesn’t affect how they speak one bit. There is the British person who goes abroad and has no concept of how to imitate the sounds of another language, while another traveller in no time at all begins to sound like a native.
We talk about one person having a good ear for languages and it is true that some of us have an enhanced auditory acuity that helps us to distinguish the more subtle variations in sound. It is also true that, through greater flexibility, less self-consciousness, or both, some people are more successful in adapting lips, tongue, teeth, palate and jaw to form unaccustomed sounds.
But these differences also have another story to tell, as we shall discover later. The way we speak, the way we change or do not change our accent and tone of voice when we speak to different people, the way our voice resonates and so on, have a reason and a purpose. There is nothing random about it. It all tells an important story. In fact, it tells our story.
My story – A tale of two voices
When I was about twelve, school came to an end for the summer, and I brought home my yearly report as usual. I handed it over without trepidation, as I enjoyed learning and liked competing in exams. On this occasion, my mother reacted with surprise when she reached the final general statement by the class teacher. It read, “Judy is sometimes very noisy and has a tendency to dominate her classmates by shouting over them.” She stared, utterly astounded. At home, or around adults, I was the quietest person you could imagine. When adults were talking, I would often sit quietly in the room just listening without interrupting and would respond quietly when spoken to. Was this really her daughter? Well, yes, it was. With my friends, I was noisy and ebullient, and felt a wonderful sense of freedom every morning when I arrived at school. At home I was very quiet, usually with my head in a book.
By that time, though I didn’t realise it then, I had acquired two distinct voices. The voice I used with my friends was loud and full of energy and laughter. The voice I reserved for those in authority was high and childish, gentle and biddable. These two distinct voices persisted side by side into adulthood.
It seems strange now that I was not aware of it for a long time. Yet, most of us are not very aware of the sounds we make when we speak unless our voice creates physical problems for us. We are too busy dealing with the content of our lives and the business of relating to others to take time to hear the actual sounds we are making, quite apart from the difficulty of actually hearing what we sound like to others.
I wasn’t much aware of my voice again till in my twenties a musician boyfriend told me that I sounded different with different people. “It’s strange,” he said, “you have a strong voice when we are chatting together. But when we visit your family, it goes much higher and lighter.”
That was another piece of the jigsaw but there was more to learn. I was studying singing and the spoken voice didn’t seem to have much to do with that. Yet I was struggling with singing performance. Almost every time I had a public singing engagement, I caught a cold just beforehand and felt tight and congested. When I sang on big occasions, my voice often narrowed so that I found the high notes challenging but equally struggled to get the lowest notes powerfully.
I had various teachers. One emphasised high and bright, and got me to sing more in “the mask”, so that I could feel my voice resonate in my face. Another encouraged a rounder fuller sound, using lots of air. A third got me yodelling to “move the voice around”. A fourth, who was a friend and helped me for free, encouraged me to make lots of different sounds and to compare the internal feelings of each—that was the most useful. Through a couple of sessions with him, having almost abandoned singing altogether, I began to observe and feel for myself. It was then that I finally had an “aha” moment, and made the connection between my spoken voice and my singing voice.
I suddenly realised that the voice I produced at auditions was the equivalent of my “biddable little girl” voice. No wonder it failed to move the audition panel: I was leaving half of myself behind, just as I did when I became the dutiful young person speaking to parents and other authority figures. The joyful, boisterous, fun and energetic self only came out when I chatted enthusiastically with my friends and felt entirely at my ease.
Through studying neurolinguistic programming I discovered the power of states of mind and how it was possible to change my state at will. I found that I didn’t have to get stuck in an unhelpful state of mind. I could instead recall a positive state in all its colour and detail and feeling, and use that recalled feeling in the present whenever I needed it. All I had to do was to re-experience vividly those times when I was fully engaged with my friends and thus enter into that state and take on its physiology: relaxed shoulders, easy full breath and a feeling of energy. In that state, my voice was relaxed and resonant. This was a revelation, not only about voice but about myself as well. As you read this book, changing your state will be one of the ways that you can develop your voice too.
So my own journey continued. At that point I had made an important discovery: that the voice is a beautiful, blessed instrument for expressing who we are to the world, and that it can be a powerful instrument too, once we tune in to our full energy and being.
But let us go to the beginning and look back to the voice we were born with.
Your voice and your history
Listen to his sound if you want to know a person.
Dr Alexander Lowen, from Bioenergetics
The first of the five senses to develop in the unborn child is the sense of sound, many months before she4 is born and begins to see. The foetus is aware of the sound of her mother’s heart and voice at about six months and a bond is forged before they even meet. Sound is also the last sense we lose. We know that a dying person is aware of sound even after sight, touch, taste and smell have gone.
We have a life history of sound from cradle to grave and we carry through life our own vocal...
