CHAPTER 2
Resolving Specific Problems

Focusing attention on specific issues works! A vague wish about a generalized outcome doesn’t. In this section, I will give you steps to resolve specific problems. Select one communication goal that you are the most motivated to achieve. If there are more than one, you can always go back after you’ve made reasonable progress on your first goal.

Consider the feedback you’ve gotten from others. How does it match up with your own listening? Many people are quick to defend themselves against critical description by attacking the source. “Oh, he just says I’m too loud because he really doesn’t want me in the office anyway!” I have seen people discredit some excellent feedback this way.

On the other hand, now that you’ve heard a recording of your own voice, some of your biggest problems may seem clear to you. It is not unusual to have a listener in my office who is flabbergasted by his or her own recorded speech. “Good heavens! I can’t even understand me! That’s what they’ve been trying to tell me!” I’ve heard this many times.

Here’s an example of a puzzling phrase I heard just last week: “Ana dina wana.” In this case, you can probably figure out that the person was saying, “And I didn’t want to.” That is exactly what the person was thinking, but it was not what came out of his mouth. He was finally able to understand his speech clarity problem.

Many people benefit from a face-to-face interaction in real time with a professional speech expert. For example, if you have difficulty pronouncing certain sounds clearly, you should consult a speech pathologist to guide you. This is not the kind of thing you can figure out yourself. Check your Yellow Pages, the Internet, or go to www.asha.org to find professional help in your area.

That said, many common vocal irregularities can be cleared up with some simple training and effort. Those are the kinds of problems this book covers. As you begin to try out some new patterns of behavior, here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. A new speech pattern will feel strange (wrong, weird, phony, etc.). If it doesn’t feel somewhat strange at first, you’re probably not doing anything new. Only your habit will feel “right.”

2. People will frequently try a new pattern in a stilted, overly correct manner. Be patient. This will smooth out with repetition. You’re just trying too hard.

3. There must be systematic repetition to achieve real change. A few swipes at a new behavior won’t change you. Here is where many people get frustrated (“I tried it and it didn’t work!” Does this sound like some dieters you know?) You need deliberate, mindful repetition to make the new learning easy and smooth for you. Give yourself several weeks to practice several times a day, every day. Take whatever time you need; people change at their own rate. Start any speech change slowly and simply. By “simply” I mean that you should concentrate on the smallest unit—a word perhaps—and not rattle off a whole paragraph for starters. That’s too much to pay attention to. Pick up speed only after you are confident that you are doing the correct behavior. Speaking changes are not quick; slow and steady wins the race. Keep your practice periods short—six to twelve minutes of concentrated time. Don’t choose times when you will be distracted. Most people think that they are going to practice while driving. No you are not! Speech practice requires mindfulness and concentration on the new pattern. Driving requires attention and the ability to respond rapidly to events. These two activities do not mix.

4. Carryover into real communication requires effort. It is one thing to repeat a phrase perfectly during your practice period and quite another to do it while engaged in real communication. Conversations tend to bring out the old behavior.

Develop short and deliberate conversations that are designed to let you practice a particular pattern in a pretend casual communication with neutral ears (people you don’t know—the lady at the counter in the deli, the clerk at the shoe store, customer support on the phone, etc.), so the pressure of relationship management doesn’t distract you from putting your attention on your improvement goal. For example, perhaps you are working on the voiced /th/ (the, they, father). You are going to ask a shoe salesperson, “Does that shoe come in other colors?” Practice this several times before actually addressing the question to the clerk.

This practice using real people is actually crucial in your development. If you can’t apply new techniques to strangers, you won’t do so with colleagues and associates.

Were I actually working with you, I might take you on a walk around the block, dropping into various stores to find a way to practice with a stranger. Why don’t you just carry this book and pretend I am with you?

Fast Talkers

The rate of your speech most likely feels just right to you. It fits your temperament and tends to reflect your sense of urgency. But a too rapid pace of speech production can result in many shortcuts in articulation, forcing other people to work to understand you. Do you suspect that your speaking rate is a problem or an irritant for people? Let’s take the first step toward finding out!

The reading material below has easy, uncomplicated, and unemotional language. You are going to be reading this passage out loud. Practice this passage at your usual rate of speaking—this will take some doing. Get some feedback from a friend to see if you are successful at this. The very act of reading out loud tends to slow people down, so if you are too fast reading this material, you’re too fast in conversation.

Now record the passage. You are going to listen to this tape and make two determinations:

1. How does it sound? Better yet, have someone else (your external ears) listen and tell you how it sounds. This other person is especially important because you are likely to “hear” what you intended to say, not what you actually said.

2. How much time did it take you? The passage below has about 160 words and ideally should take about one minute to produce. Anything between 155 and 175 wpm (words per minute) would be an excellent rate for normal conversation. This can serve as your target reading rate.

If you dashed this passage off in something like thirty seconds, you are speaking way too fast for ordinary ears. You need to speak slower. The more technical your material, the more you need to monitor your rate to allow your listeners adequate time to process your message, about 120 to 140 wpm. “More technical” is a relative judgment, of course. If it is new to them, slow it down. If it is old or predictable material, you can speed up. The more people to whom you are speaking (or the larger the room is in which you are speaking), the slower your speech should be. You need to adapt to the room acoustics and the age of your audience. Many older people have age-related hearing problems that require more processing time. The more distractions and noise that are present in the room, the more difficulty people will have in hearing what you have to say. Pay attention to the speech rates of other people—including radio and TV announcers—to bring it into your consciousness. Perhaps you are associating with many people (especially your family) who speak rapidly as part of a cultural style. This will have a strong influence on your own speech rate.

If you have found that you routinely speak too fast (through feedback or actual word count), you need a strategy to break your habit. Think of it as developing a separate way of speaking, like speaking another language or playing a part in a play. Consider this slower rate as another dialect available to you in addition to your habitual style. We know how to develop these new speaking habits.

• Read the practice passage until you can hold it to one minute. Record it. Listen to it several times to get familiar with the feel and the sound of this pace: the breathing rhythm and the timing of the articulation. Spend some time on this step so you can really learn how it feels in your body.

• Find other reading material that is an easy narrative or description, perhaps a newspaper article, and try to read it at the 160 wpm rate. Keep checking your wpm and your timing. Warning: you may start just fine but lose your focus and speed up as you get involved with your material. Watch for this. Effective practice must be mindful and deliberate, with your goal ever in your mind. This is especially true when dealing with rate control.

• Listen to this tape several times to build familiarity and comfort with the rate. Find different material and repeat the record/listen procedure.

• Imitate your recorded speech without reading. Think of something easy to talk about and say it out loud. You might start with a passage that you have memorized in the past, say the Gettysburg Address, to practice your rate control.

• Leave a recorded message for yourself on your own phone so you can listen to it later to hear if you actually use the slower speaking rate.

• Call your external ears and try to maintain the 160 wpm rate. Record, listen. Record, listen. Record, listen. You need to do enough of this purposeful practice to make this rate comfortable for you. Your success depends primarily on your willingness to practice deliberately.

• Use the rate with neutral listeners. These can be phone inquiries, questioning a store employee, or making a restaurant order. With enough practice here, you can start having success using this rate with the people that matter to you.

• When you feel yourself getting emotional, you will undoubtedly speed up to your old rate of speaking. Remind yourself to use your reading aloud rate. It will be like going into dialect: a better—more mature, authoritative, and articulate—dialect.

I Think Faster Than I Can Speak!

Some people explain their rapid speech as an attempt to accommodate the speed of their thinking. They must think that slow speakers are, therefore, slow thinkers. This is a common stereotype. In Do You Speak American? MacNeil and Cran quote an individual describing a Southern person’s speech as “so slow it was like bubbles coming up through a swamp. I guess that must be the way his mind works.” Let me assure you right now that such conclusions are unwarranted. The Southern dialect, by the way, is the largest dialect group in America and shows no signs of diminishing.

When people respond to a personal sense of urgency, they take some articulatory shortcuts: First, their articulation (the speech movements that make the idea transmitted to the listener) may be incomplete. And second, their intonation is stifled in this press for speed. This is in contrast to a speech rate that is more attuned to the hearing needs of the listeners. Pay attention to the chapter called “Speaking Your Mind Effectively” where we examine the difference between self-expression and communication. The latter always considers the receiver in the formulation as well as the articulation of the message. The former, well, doesn’t. What makes this situation especially difficult is that the “too fast” speakers are not aware that their speech has become degraded and difficult to follow. Their sense of urgency overrides self-monitoring and the consideration of the needs of the listener.

Getting Aware of “Too Fast” Speech

When Fernando finally listened to what his colleagues and clients were trying to tell him—that he was speaking too darned fast for easy comprehension—he took responsibility and began his training with me. He could hear that it was a problem when he listened to our taped initial interview. The fast speaker really needs help in identifying how it feels to speak with such speed and urgency if he is going to have any chance to modify the rate. Like all speakers, he is focused on his intent and internal sense of meaning, not on the actual speech movements.

How We Started

I would engage Fernando in conversation and soon enough he would begin to break the speed limit on his clear speech and begin to slur his speech sounds. At this point he would hear me press a clicker to alert him. He had been instructed to stop speaking, consider his thought, look directly at me, and thoughtfully select his language. He needed to increase the frequency of pauses in his speech (with the help of Mr. Alligator, the clicker), wait for me to nod, signaling comprehension, before he continued. It drove him crazy, this pulling him out of his personal sense of expression into the discipline of considering the other person.

With Fernando it made sense to transcribe a paragraph of his spontaneous speech and examine what he was trying to say and how many words he used to say it. What we found were many repetitions and extraneous comments. We would reformulate the information to show how he could have given the actual content of his paragraph in just two sentences. This exercise became his daily homework: to record, transcribe, and reformulate in a tidier fashion. This reformulation was what had to happen in the pauses we were inducing with the clicker. In a short time, just the sight of the clicker made Fernando pause and consider his speech rate. It succeeded in getting his attention and raising his awareness of the listening and comprehension needs of other people.

Fernando insists that I scarred him for life and that he continues to have nightmares about Mr. Alligator. But he says this with a twinkle in his eye … and with much slower speech.

Loud Talkers

People listening to Karin frequently wish that she had a volume control knob that they could adjust. While her loudness level is usually appropriate in normal conversation, she has the capacity and tendency to get “amped up,” as she calls it, during emotional exchanges, and then the whole office knows it. Her colleagues roll their eyes, close their doors, and avoid Karin. She sounds very scary, aggressive, and threatening. You’d think that Karin would know this, right? Wrong! Karin is oblivious and vociferous in denial.

“I don’t think I’m too loud! I mean, it’s only natural that you’re going to get a bit upset when other people mess up all your work. Other people talk loud sometimes and they don’t get criticized like this!”

Karin had marched into my office full of rage, having been sent to me by her office supervisor. A “too loud voice” was just one of her identified communication problems on her performance review.

The first job—though not the simplest job—was to get Karin to own the problem. The fact that her employment was at stake had certainly gotten her attention, but she was too hurt and confused by the criticism to be able to deal with the issue. I offered my observation that she seemed to have a wonderfully spirited personality and larger-than-life expressive characteristics, and I wouldn’t be surprised if sometimes this came across as overwhelming to folks not as lively as her. Reframed and newly interpreted, she was now able to at least consider the loudness level of her speaking.

Because the judgment of volume is so subjective, I sometimes have to show (rather than tell) people what they’re doing with an electronic device. A sound level meter can be purchased at a local electronic store. I place the instrument between my client and me, making sure that it is smack-dab in between us. I set the response range so that my speech volume level is in the middle of the response range. Clients can see the needle flickering mid-dial. When they speak they may see it swing over and clang at the upper limits of the volume indicator, the red zone. The VU meter on an audio recorder can give you much the same information. This is powerful objective feedback about relative loudness, much more convincing than someone’s opinion.

Although Karin’s speech was not always “too loud,” I kept the meter available on my desk so Karin could see how frequently her volume hit the red zone.

If loud speech has been identified as a problem, your job will be to become aware of how it feels inside your body when you are loud. This “feeling”—physical and emotional—is your only independent cue that you are amping up. When you are feeling this way, you are probably sounding that way. You need to use this information to ratchet down your speaking to a more normal sound level. When the meter is not present, though, how will you know how you’re doing?

If people sometimes step back to increase the distance between you and their ears, this just might be a cue that you are speaking too loudly. You can always ask them if you are too loud. However, be sure that you never get upset with them for saying so. They have to feel safe to give you this feedback or they’ll stop doing it.

I sometimes ask my clients to talk to their supervisor (who probably referred them to me) to find a way to signal them when they are getting too loud in the work setting. They need to agree on a system. Sometimes I might stand at the back of the room during a presentation and give a discrete thumbs-up or thumbs-down as our agreed-upon signal of volume level adjustment. Karin’s supervisor agreed to use this cue during meetings.

Whenever speech is markedly too soft or too loud, it is a good idea to make sure that your hearing is not impaired; get a check-up with an audiologist if there is any question.

Karin was pleased with her progress in controlling her loudness (so was her supervisor), but she stayed “larger than life” as a personality, of course. One day she was telling me how she told off her boyfriend. “I let him have it right in the old red zone!”

Soft Talkers

Tracy was earnest. Mark worked hard. But neither one of them could get their voice to carry to the last row of the conference room. Their speaking style was geared for the intimacy of face-to-face conversation, not for projection to a larger group.

People who cannot be heard will not be understood. People who cannot command a space with their voice cannot fully utilize their authority or knowledge. If people are always asking you to speak up or repeat yourself, you should learn how to increase your vocal power through motivation, energy, and air support. You access these resources with the following practice plan.

Motivation

If you are timid and unsure of yourself, your voice will certainly display your discomfort. You need to address this issue first.

Start by doing the up-front work that fosters performance comfort. For example, do proper research on your presentation and rehearse aloud (ultimately with real people, getting feedback on your content, organization, and general effectiveness). When you are confident that you’re prepared, you are more likely to want to have your voice fill the space in front of you. The lack of adequate preparation is the major reason a person will not demonstrate authority in speaking and will suffer from stage fright. Please see “Speaking in Front of People” for more information on handling speech anxiety.

This attitudinal shift is an absolute requirement to move your agenda. This does not mean that you need to be Mr. Show Business to be a good speaker; you can be calm, centered, and genuine, but you can’t give your words “gas” with your foot firmly on the brake.

Mark had put a lot of effort into a research paper for his professional association. But all of his effort went into getting it perfect on paper for publication. No time was spent on how to present it verbally to his colleagues. So he just read it quickly with his eyes glued to the page. He wanted the presentation to be over more than he wanted to be heard and understood. Sure, he hoped that would happen, but he did not make it happen. You make it happen by assuming command of the room and captivating the space with your voice. A reluctance to do this may well explain your small voice in the first place.

Written and spoken language are very different forms of communication. While we can read spoken language with ease, we usually do not speak written language well. Since Mark had always read his papers to groups, we first had to develop a sense of conversation with an audience. This was a new and astonishing concept for Mark. We worked in a fairly large room with Mark at the podium and me at the back of the room. And we would just talk to each other. I asked Mark to tell me about his work—whatever popped into his head—but to keep his face up and his speech projected out to me. I would frequently change my position in the room. We were getting Mark accustomed to (1) the amount of energy necessary to command a room and (2) maintaining eye contact with his audience. Please note that I am not teaching Mark anything new here; I am simply reminding him of what he already knows about making himself heard in these circumstances.

From there, we went on to a new way of speaking from abbreviated notes so he could not read his speech. He could glance at his brief topic cue words, but the content was to be discussed with his face open and available to the audience. He went from being a reader to being a speaker, and this made all the difference in his career and his personal sense of accomplishment.

Energy

As we have seen, Mark knew how to adjust the force of his voice for distance, just as you usually know when to whisper and when you need to shout. You can develop and refine this unconscious knowledge with actual practice projecting your voice across a room.

You can practice this at home. Place large pictures of people on the far side of the room. If you don’t have any large family photos, you can find pictures in magazines—usually in advertisements—that will do the trick. Use photos that have the person looking right at you. Then speak to the pictures as if they were real people in the room with you. You will be practicing your eye contact as well as your projection if you focus on each face for five seconds as you speak, delivering a complete thought to each face before moving on to another face. Even if you feel foolish at first, don’t quit! In order to learn something from this exercise, you need to keep it up until it becomes easy for you. Many have found that this exercise carries over to the actual presentation, and making eye contact (and speaking out at an appropriate volume) comes easier.

For best results, practice with real people—friends and family—so you can learn what your voice needs to do for them to hear you comfortably. These people will help you develop a sense of conversation as you speak to them, a fluency you want to take to your formal audience. When you are actually dealing with an audience, speak to the faces at the very back of the room. If they can hear you, everybody can hear you. Have your practice listeners let you know immediately if they are having any trouble hearing you by using a nonverbal cue, such as having an open hand visible when you are easy to hear and a lowered, closed hand indicating trouble hearing you. Please see the exercise for feedback in the chapter “Speaking in Front of People.”

Air

Effective voice projection requires plenty of air, so you won’t use throat tension instead.

Tracy wanted to become a trainer in the human resources department at a major oil company. Her lecture plans and visual aids were great; she had done that up-front work to create a presentation of which she was proud. She wanted to break out of the pack to be a leader. But she was all of five feet tall, one hundred pounds dripping wet, and shy in front of groups. You couldn’t hear her unless you were within arm’s reach.

When Tracy tried to speak louder, we found that she ran out of air rapidly; as a result, she was stopping to take in air at strange places in her stream of speech. Like many others, she had shallow breathing. Tracy thought she was breathing the best she could, and she assumed that she was just not built for greater air capacity. She was wrong.

When you hear a trained singer produce long beautiful tones that seem to spool out effortlessly and fill the hall, please know that that tone is the result of considerable preparation and effort, a good supply of air, and the confidence to use it. Speakers also learn how to maximize their intake and usage of air in order to have firm and clear voices. You don’t want your body to carry too much tension that limits the expansion necessary for good air intake.

I look for signs of tension in the neck and upper thoracic area. I ask if the person frequently experiences pain and fatigue in the neck and shoulders. A positive answer means we need to start with some exercises that will help the individual identify the muscular tension and then contrast it with a relaxed state.

Stretching and Breathing Exercises

As you try this series of stretching and breathing exercises, go at your own rate and don’t hurt yourself. Start with holding the stretch for five to ten seconds and work toward holding it for thirty seconds to allow the stretch to be more complete.

To reduce shoulder tension: Lift your left arm straight up close to the head and let the elbow bend so you are touching your spine as far down as possible. Reach your right arm low behind your back and try to touch or hold the fingers of your left hand. If you can’t reach, you can hold a handkerchief in your left hand for your right hand to reach for. Hold until it becomes uncomfortable, and then switch arms and repeat the exercise. Your shoulders should feel warm and loose.

To maximize air intake without shoulder tension: After you’ve loosened your shoulders, you should feel a relaxation in the upper back and chest. Keeping that relaxed feeling, let your arms hang heavy from the shoulders. Take a deep breath of air into your belly, not into your upper chest. Imagine the air filling up your lower back. You are breathing down, not up. This will be contrary to all the images of “taking a nice deep breath” to which you have been exposed, where people heave their shoulders up and make a big deal of inhalation. Relaxed inhalation is quiet and rather invisible, unless you are looking at the midsection of the body.

To support breathing-friendly posture: Stand with both arms straight up in the air, hands bent back and flat as if you were pushing up on the ceiling. Put great effort into inducing tension into your arms and shoulders as you push up. Hold as long as you can, and then let go. Let your arms hang and relax; they should feel warm and light. Keep your chest up exactly where it was in the exercise, elevated and ready for efficient breathing. This is a posture you want to maintain throughout your presentation—chest up but shoulders relaxed. Notice that your respiratory movement is primarily in your belly or midsection. This is what we are after.

Now practice speaking to those pictures again, but consciously practice the relaxed belly breathing as you do so. Breathe in deeply before you speak; give yourself time to breathe fully before the next sentence begins. Continue this conscious, slowed-but-deep breathing as you practice your presentation. Pay as much attention to this deep breathing pattern as you do your words. You’ll need to consciously counteract your old habit of grabbing for air in the upper body at first; with mindfulness and repetitions, this will become second nature.

Tracy’s employer allowed her to practice in the very room where she needed to do her speaking. When you can rehearse in the setting in which you’ll be working, you’ll be much more comfortable during the actual presentation; it will be one less “new” element to adjust to.

Tracy found that she could muster up a larger voice for classroom teaching. At first she felt that her voice was too loud (“I feel like I’m shouting!”), but that was just because it was in fact louder than her habitual level. A buddy in the back of the room gave her positive feedback. In addition, listening to a recording of the presentation assured her that the level of projection was appropriate and effective.

Tracy had to work very hard for her achievement. Truth to tell, nobody in her department expected much from her (I learned later). She showed ’em.

Raspy Talkers

I have never forgotten Peter, a man who came to me because he felt his voice was really ineffective. And he was right. He was holding his voice back in his throat as if it were hiding as far away from human interaction as it could. This resulted not only in a gravelly voice but also in muffled articulation as well, not to mention a sore throat at the end of the day. Peter needed to learn to place his voice and articulation more forward. As a result of our work, he did manage this change because he was highly motivated to improve and threw himself into his practice with discipline and passion. I told him how impressed I was at how rapidly he had improved his voice usage. Let me share with you what he said to me after our last session:

Prior to now I had been losing my battles with my boss because I felt my voice retracting and my attention was to my voice. The more I worried about it, the worse it became. And as I was worrying about how I sounded, I forgot what I was supposed to say. I would run out with my tail between my legs. But after two days of practice, when I met with him yesterday, I felt very confident. I felt that I could match him on a voice level. If I can be equal to him on a voice level I feel I can be far superior on an intellectual level.

After Peter left, I punched the air in triumph. Look at what this change has meant to this man. And what a clear example of the importance of your confidence in the sound of your voice, the primary carrier of your meaning and your presence. This one successful real-life experience for Peter formed the basis of renewed self-respect. He sees himself differently now. He knows how to overcome his raspy voice, not just in my office but where it really counts, in his interactions in the larger world. This can happen for you as well.

There are two important aspects of the raspy voice that need some thought:

1. The voice can be held back in the throat with inadequate breath support because of sheer habit, voice role models, or even a reluctance to speak out.

2. The voice may have a raspy quality because of a medical condition in the throat.

I highly recommend that you consult a doctor about your particular situation, whether or not there is any pain involved. In this chapter I have included a section on “Taking Care of Your Voice” because vocal problems can ensue from just the way we use (and abuse) our voices.

In the following discussion, I assume I am working with a person who has a habitual voice pattern that is changeable through learning. Sometimes people pick up a habit of speaking from their surroundings through an attempt to fit in, especially in adolescence. It was, for Peter, just the way men sounded in his Midwest hometown. Like all adolescents, he wanted to sound like a man just as soon as he could. (We all want to sound like the people we admire!) When Peter heard his voice on our recording he recognized that he sounded just like his father.

There is a voice “placement” that is right for you, and it should involve the center of your oral structure—not high and in front of your face, nor back and low in your throat. But—just like Goldilocks found Momma Bear’s porridge—“just right.”

If you watch old movies, you may notice that the “bad guys” frequently speak with a clenched jaw and little movement of the lips. They are determined not to betray any emotion in their face as they speak—that would make them vulnerable. Try to notice the difference in those light-hearted or family films where people allow their faces to be mobile and expressive with speech articulation readily visible. Can you hear the difference in the intelligibility of their speech? “Bad guys” are harder to understand. Just as well, eh?

Kathryn wanted to be more articulate in her presentations to colleagues in her financial firm, both in person and in teleconferencing. People were asking her to repeat herself, and she was getting frustrated. She was trying to speak as clearly as she could. But as I listened to Kathryn, it was clear that it wasn’t her speech production that was the problem; it was that she had a constantly raspy sound for a voice. It was a rough, hoarse sound, something like a creaking door. Her voice seemed stuck way back down in her throat with no possibilities of resonance or clarity of tone. I determined that the sound of her voice was not a matter of pathology but of habit, where she had become accustomed to making her vocal tone. Why do you suppose she developed this pattern? She was the first female in an office of very dominant men. What do you think?

I think she did everything she could to be “one of the boys” and to reduce as much of her femininity as possible. So she limited the amount of vocal variety of her intonations and pushed her average pitch level down to the bottom of her range. The sound she produced is called “glottal fry,” a creaking-door kind of sound. Kathryn thought that this was the sound of her voice; she didn’t know that she could produce a real vocal vibration that had a tonal quality something like the way your voice sounds when you sing. This is accomplished with a readjustment of the vocal cord tension and the air passing through the cords. I did the following exercises with Kathryn, and they might help you get started.

Exercises

Make the /m/ sound with your lips loose and comfortable, and hum for a bit. Do you feel the vibration on your lips? You will also feel vibration coming from your throat, but I want you to notice that there is also a vibration happening right up in the front of your mouth. That’s where to focus your attention now as you open your lips and make the /e/ vowel, alternating the sounds (mmmmeeeemmmeeeemmmmeee) without taking a breath. Make the /e/ right up where you are making the /m/, as in the word “me.” Make sure that the /e/ is coming out of your mouth and not your nose! (The /m/ has to come out your nose.) You may want to increase the amount of air you are using to produce your voice or even raise the pitch of your voice just a bit.

Record this practice and listen to see if your voice quality doesn’t sound markedly smoother in this exercise. If it doesn’t, you need to increase your air pressure to produce more of a singing tone without the rasp.

Use other vowels with the /m/, such as “ay,” “uh,” or “oh.”

Try other consonants, such as /l/, /w/, or/z/, remembering to keep the sense of the vowel right up in the front of your mouth and using the voiced consonants to help you place the sound right up in the front of your face.

Note: This exercise directly addresses the problem of starting your vowels with a sharp explosion of air in your throat at the beginning of syllable initiation. We are trying to avoid that by linking the beginning of the vowel with the voicing already present in the consonant.

Say the following sentence and put your attention on the contacts you make with your lips and tongue tip. Use these contacts as a focus for your voice: Many members tried the pie. If you put your hand on your throat, you should feel a constant vibration in your larynx. Now mark the following sentences for the consonant sounds that are right up in the front of your mouth. Hint: they are m, n, l, w, z, t, b, and p. [Caution: what is the speech sound that begins the word “one”?] It’s the “w,” isn’t it? My name is unusual. One alone to be my own. We’ll meet whenever we want to. Leave me a memo. Don’t let your voice sink back in your throat; keep it up front with these consonants.

I had Kathryn bring me a copy of the material that she needed for her next presentation, and we used those sentences in our work, identifying the front placement sounds and getting her to place her voice up around those front consonants. Before she went into a teleconference, I would have her phone me with the first paragraph of her report so she could have some immediate and appropriate practice before the actual call (and I could check her consistency). I reminded her to think of her speech as proceeding from her lips right to the microphone to help keep her out of her throat.

Your habit will fight this effort, of course, and will try to keep you back in your throat. That feels natural to you. But you are trying to learn something new here, the feeling of vocal resonance up in the front of your face. I sometimes ask clients to phone their home or office phone number from my office and leave a short practice session on their own voice mail. In this case, I would stress the proximity of the lips to the mouthpiece of the phone to keep them out of their throat. They can hear this proximity on the recording, and it helps them reconnect with the new speaking style and practice it correctly when they are not in my office. This is especially useful when you are trying something quite new to you.

The price for Kathryn’s improvement was mindful, daily, and deliberate practice for several weeks, for she was truly dealing with a behavior that had both psychological and habitual elements to it. All I had to do to motivate Kathryn was to play her initial voice tape and she would shriek, “I hate it! I’ll never talk that way again!” And she didn’t. She has told me that she reminds herself to “kiss the mic” as a way of bringing her speech energy to the front of her face.

Taking Care of Your Voice

The raspy (hoarse, rough) voice is frequently associated with overworked or damaged vocal cords. If you are a professional voice user—and you are if your work depends on your talking—you need to learn some fundamental steps to preserve your voice.

Nowhere is this more important than with people whose work or avocation calls for extreme vocal effort. Coaches, drill instructors, and some singers and teachers fall into this category.

It is a good idea to form the habit of drinking plenty of water before you do a lot of speaking. The water you drink an hour or so before you speak will have been absorbed and distributed to the lining of your vocal mechanism (among other places) where it lubricates the surfaces and makes vocal cord vibration function well.

If you find yourself working hard to clear your throat, or if your voice gets sore and hard to produce, try increasing your water consumption an hour before your speak. The more you must use your voice for long periods (attention, teachers and singers) the more this is important.

Anything that makes you increase your vocal effort markedly or over a period of time can constitute vocal abuse and result in vocal rasp or discomfort as a first sign. Examine the source of your overworked voice:

yelling at ball games, children, etc.
excessive loud laughing or hard coughing
talking loudly in noisy bars or around machinery

just trying to make yourself heard over an extended period in a noisy restaurant.

“Lil Debbie the Dynamo” was a well-known fitness instructor, famous for her perky attitude; trim and muscled little body; cute, girly appearance, and low, raspy voice. The look of her and the sound of her voice were always in contrast. But if you observed Debbie at work, it would be evident to you why her voice was constantly gravelly.

Whenever she led a class in exercise, she exuded huge amounts of personal energy, demonstrating the physical activities the people in the class were to follow. She continued to shout out instructions, encouragements, and whoops of high energy to motivate her students as she led the class in aerobic exercises. Or she could be on her back leading the class in abdominal crunches, and she was still shouting, with her head twisted to the side. And of course, like most instructors, she had the accompanying music cranked up. So she was in full physical effort on her back, head twisted, outshouting loud music to forty people for an hour. And she did this several hours a day.

Let’s see. Let’s think really hard. What could possibly cause Debbie’s voice to be chronically raspy?

I talked the management of the gym into letting me do a brown-bag presentation to the staff about the care of their voices when leading vigorous exercises, suggesting that they

• use amplification of their voice (if this is not an option, try to always face the class when giving instructions)

• turn the music volume down

• not yell so much (especially with their body distorted)

• omit unnecessary vocal noisemaking

• always face their class when giving instructions

• not talk and demonstrate at the same time

• be sure to drink more water

The Coach in the Boat

The coxswain of a competitive rowing club has to motivate rowers to overcome exhaustion, provide extremely precise and concise instructions on specific tactical maneuvers, and penetrate surrounding noise and clatter.

And the coxswain has to do all this with her voice. Casie, the sixteen-year-old coxswain of a rowing club, came to me not because she frequently “lost her voice” during midseason regattas (which she did!), but to have a competitive advantage in commanding her boat. Although most coxswains use a microphone or speaker system, there is still a heavy demand for vocal intensity. The head coach kept encouraging Casie to communicate stronger competitive emotion to the rowers. Casie would try by increasing vocal effort, specifically throat tension.

So how did I keep Casie competitive and still save her voice for another race?

First, I instructed Casie in “vocal rest.” When she did not absolutely need to use her voice for competitive purposes she needed to just be quiet and let her vocal cords rest. (She already knew about drinking water.) She was to let her team understand her situation and find someone else to help give instructions and organize the team during preliminary setup activities, saving her effort for the competition.

When Casie got excited, she used mostly upper-chest effort in breathing, thus increasing the tension in her throat. She needed to develop greater abdominal breathing. If you look at the instructions for air management in the previous section, “Soft Talkers,” you’ll see the information Casie needed to redirect her breathing energy, out of her throat and into her midsection. We practiced this breathing approach using the actual commands that she would normally use in directing the crew.

Casie needed increased awareness of the level of her emotion during competition; she would put more pressure on her vocal cords to communicate urgency, and she had staccato releases of her voice (see “Staccato Talkers”) when she issued commands. She started each syllable abruptly. We tried to visualize the actual competitive situation in my office as she practiced her commands, knowing that carryover to the real situation was the most tricky step in our work. Casie’s situation was made much more difficult because the team coach focused on Casie as a motivator of the rowers. She insisted on hearing urgency in Casie’s voice during races (which was the cause of the vocal abuse in the first place). After our work Casie was able to apply good vocal care habits, but only when the coach was not around! But her attempts did help preserve her voice, and her periods of discomfort were less severe and less frequent.

Sometimes people clearly have signs of vocal abuse, but there is no obvious source of overuse. It actually could be just the way they start a syllable in their regular speaking! Read the section “Staccato Talkers” to find yet another way to traumatize your voice.

Do I have to tell you about the effects of smoking on your vocal cords? I thought not. But I will share with you a notice I saw on a lamppost in New York City twenty-six years ago: Smoking is filthy and stupid, so stop it. I did.

High Talkers

The number one concern of most speakers—male or female—has to do with the pitch level of their voice. They worry that their voice is too high. (Never have I been consulted by people who were afraid their pitch was too low.) But why this preoccupation with pitch level in the first place?

I think it has to do with the law of the jungle. The pitch of your voice depends upon the length of your vocal cords. These are two muscular folds inside your larynx (the “voice box” in your throat) that vibrate to produce your voice. Longer folds, which produce a lower-pitched voice, are usually found in bigger (more powerful) bodies.

This principle holds true for all kinds of creatures. Compare the roar of the mighty lion to the squeak of a smaller monkey. The sounds alone describe the predator-prey relationship. And, you will recall, big creatures eat little creatures with remarkable consistency.

In addition, the parental voice is lower in pitch than that of the (relatively small) offspring. The infantile higher voice is very effective in bringing out more tolerant and nurturing responses from the adult. You may have noticed that some grown-up people also make good use of this fact. Listen to some of your colleagues to hear if someone’s voice sounds markedly higher than others and notice what your intuition tells you.

Perhaps you know the woman who looks forty and sounds fourteen? This youthful sound may well be a habit: daddy’s little girl. When it works for her she can get the boss to either cut her some slack or increase his or her caretaking. It definitely diminishes the employee’s gravitas. The manipulative aspect will be evident to colleagues and resented.

Since the lower-pitched voice so often describes the large animal as well as the adult animal, many of us try for the lowest possible voice we can muster. This is seldom a conscious choice, but you just may recall the circumstances of your first efforts to deepen your voice. It probably happened during puberty when you answered the phone, when you gave a speech, or when it was important to impress. The need to give off the radiance of the big, strong, mature person is acutely felt during that time, and forcing the voice down is something you can do to cope with the dreadful anxiety of this transitional period.

Here is one last story to make the case. It’s nighttime in the bullfrog pond. The male frogs depend upon the sound of their croak to attract the females to them. The lady frogs prefer the lowest “voice” because it communicates that the fellow is large, thus more mature, successful, and desirable as a mate. Male frogs seem to know this, too, since the other male frogs will position themselves near the large frog and pick off ladies on their way to the big frog.

And it’s not just frogs!

Hal was a prominent attorney sent to me by his ENT (ear, nose, and throat) doctor because of apparent vocal abuse. He presented with engorged, red vocal cords with a low-pitched, hoarse voice. Clearly a case of vocal abuse that was on its way to produce vocal cord nodules (small growths on the cords), said the physician. Hal’s history revealed that he went to Israel frequently where he had lively arguments in close quarters. His associates smoked heavily and they shouted at each other a lot.

I experimented with his pitch level, raising it a bit to produce a clearer tone, and we practiced using that pitch level in our discussions. His voice was clearer and certainly more comfortable. I designed a practice program that had him using this voice outside my office. He looked at me with alarm. “What!? And give up my low, sexy voice?”

Note: You may know a man who rather enjoys his low, gravelly “Godfather” voice and image. Keep nudging him to have an ear, nose, and throat doctor take a look. There might be a condition that is best dealt with early.

And it’s not just men!

I will tell you about Nicole, one of my failures. Her boss contacted me and told me that one of their top patent attorneys had a certain style that was … well, it didn’t jibe with her professional role.

Frequently this kind of description means that the individual in question comes from a working-class background and doesn’t have the social polish, style, or even grammar of the other associates. “No, no, that’s not it,” he said. “It’s too hard to describe. Maybe it’s too feminine?” But if I could change her speaking style, they could use her with external clients and increase revenue, rather than just have her do the research work internally.

“So, okay, send her in.”

Ms. Hotshot Patent Attorney turns out to be Ms. VaVaVoom—figure like an hourglass and dressed to show it off. Big eyes, nicely emphasized. Long, black hair brought up to the top of her head with ringlets falling down her face. And the shoes! Well, use your imagination.

I have made the point repeatedly that people are usually unaware of the impression they make by the way they express themselves. Not so in this case. Did I mention that she was French? Her voice was breathy, highly melodic, and, of course, French accented.

When I play the audiotape of our interview to my clients, I always ask the clients what they think of the sound of their voice. Nicole listened to her voice, smiled, and said, “Men think it’s sexy.”

Okay, what would she think of developing another style of speaking for the workplace?

“Why should I?”

Well, her boss thought it would be a good career move for her, expanding her contact with new clients.

Nicole shrugged.

Clearly Nicole had found a style of presentation that worked for her and had zero interest in accommodating her boss. No motivation, no change.

Is your voice really too high, or do you just think it is? It is not unusual to find that the individual really has issues with self-esteem and personal power or that he behaves in subordinate ways, elicits dominating behavior in others and thinks it was the pitch of his voice that was the operating factor. The classroom listening experiment that was described in “Hearing Yourself as Others Hear You” in the Appendix offers the best possible situation to make a determination of a high voice. There are exercises in the chapter “Getting It Pitch Perfect” if you think this is an area of concern for you.

I want to alert you to a pattern of pitch usage that is a bit tricky. It has to do with how to begin a sentence. Michelle had gotten the impression that her voice was too high, so she came to get her voice lowered. As I listened to Michelle talk, I noticed two things: in general, her pitch level was actually well within the normal range for women of her age, but I also heard that the first word in many of her sentences tended to be at a high pitch. This usage caught the ear and made the impression of a high voice because it was at the top of her range and she used it so often.

Try saying the following sentences as you think Michelle would: “I didn’t say that. He was the one who mentioned it. All day I worried about it.” Does it feel natural to you or really strange? Also, listen to the people around you to see if you can spot this pattern in others.

You must use your external ears to see if this information applies to you because you will not be aware of your normal intonation habits in any other way. Of course, Michelle was entirely unaware of this pattern. Once it was recorded and brought to her attention, she was horrified. Michelle and I got to work with some prepared sentences.

If you suspect that you may speak this way, try the following exercises.

Begin by looking at this sentence: “I would never do that.” Pick a word (almost any word) to be a stressed word. This means it would be a little higher, a little louder, and maybe even a little longer than the other syllables. Let’s say you pick “never,” for example. You would have a pattern like this:

Start practicing your sentence at midrange so you can go up on the stressed syllable. Now do the sentence with the first syllable higher (this will take some surprising effort):

Then try shifting between the two versions of the sentence to experience your ability to control the stress pattern. Record and see what a huge contrast in meaning this little difference makes.

It will strike you as strange that I’m asking you to do this “problem” on purpose, but this is the only way that you are going to be able to recognize, control and eliminate the habit and gain conscious control of your speech intonation. You can apply this practice pattern to many different aspects of speech where you need to become mindful of the old pattern in order to replace it with the new. You must make the unconscious conscious. Got that? If you do it on purpose, you’ll start noticing it when it just happens. You can’t fix it unless you can hear it.

Because the sound of your voice is such a complicated issue, external advice can be particularly important to you:

• Consult a voice professional, like a speech pathologist, who is trained to make accurate observations and to give appropriate advice. You’ll hear the objective information you need to make a sensible decision.

• Use the self-help CD (The Sound of Your Voice) mentioned in the back of the book. There are instructions to record yourself in a social context to get a much more accurate sense of your voice in a social setting.

• Pay attention to the consistent feedback you get from people whom you respect. If they say things like “You sound a lot younger than I expected” or “I heard your high little voice down the hall, so I knew you hadn’t left,” then you probably should look into this.

Feedback may come indirectly. The middle-aged woman answers the phone, and the caller asks to speak to her mother or the lady of the house. This is pretty good feedback that her voice may be too high, wouldn’t you agree? If this happens to you, you are undoubtedly irritated and chagrined, but don’t dismiss this valuable piece of information.

Caution: You may have a “telephone voice” when you answer the phone that is not really your usual voice. You may use a light lilting tone that sounds girlish. Or you may have a questioning, hesitant sound when you answer the phone with the voice trailing upward. “Hello? Who’s calling?” This is useful information about your telephone habits, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect your regular voice usage.

Many people find that they have worried needlessly about their vocal pitch. We do get some funny ideas in our heads sometimes! But these funny ideas can have serious and restricting consequences.

This chapter only considers the issue of “high” pitch because it appears to be such a common concern and because it is not at all a simple situation. The section called “Getting It Pitch Perfect” has practical exercises to actually work with other pitch issues.

Indecisive Talkers

Reid was notified in a written performance review that he had deficits in communication skills—specifically, that he lacked both authority and decisiveness. No examples, no clarification. Reid was surprised, hurt, and thoroughly puzzled. So he tried to act tougher. This ended in social disaster at work, and he felt like a jerk. Luckily, his was the kind of problem we could catch in an audio recording. Reid would make a statement of fact in a fairly flat tone. He would not drop his voice at the end of the statement; therefore it sounded equivocal, not definite.

Say, “I’m not going to put up with it,” and keep your voice at just one pitch level. You will not sound very convincing. You will sound like Reid.

Reid needed to learn to create four levels of pitch in this sentence (and others like it):

The word “not” needed to have elevated pitch and would receive primary stress and “Up” would have secondary stress. “With it” would be said at a lower pitch than the rest of the sentence.

Note: issues of emphasis and stress will be dealt with in the section “Getting Emphatic.”

Reid started his work with a lot of simple repetition of this emphasis pattern. I would say other sentences with similar intonation, and he would attempt to repeat them. First I would tell him if he did, in fact, repeat them accurately. Then he had to develop his own feel for it. Later he would make the judgment himself by listening to the recording.

Reid was able and willing to imitate the patterns. This is not always the case. There are people, especially men, who are trying to talk at the very bottom of their pitch capability in order to achieve the lowest voice possible. Because they start at the bottom of their range they have no margin of their pitch range left to be able to go down in pitch to signal finality. In these kinds of cases, we first have to get the voice usage placed a bit higher in their natural range so that they can go down at the end of a statement. Trying to force your voice below the limits of your physical capability can result in severe voice abuse.

Auditory imitation is the fastest way to approach this issue. Some people are highly talented in imitating vocal patterns and are the ones who make the fastest progress. Do you have someone who can act as a model for you to imitate? I asked Reid to listen for the speech of an acquaintance that had a more authoritative speaking pattern that he admired. He was to pay attention to the melody of the person’s speech and try to imitate it. (You will probably want to do this in private.) With practice, this imitation will become much easier. If you don’t have an acquaintance or a colleague available to you, you can find your model on the radio or a TV show. This is good because you can play and replay to your heart’s content as you analyze exactly what the person is doing with his voice.

At first, a new voice pattern will probably not be readily available to you when it comes to real communication with real people. You will revert to habit. Everybody does. That’s why you need special practice to make these patterns more available to you for actual usage. It’s called “carryover.”

Write some imaginary scenes that make it possible to practice the sentence form. Pretend that someone has asked you a question. For example:

Question: Are you working today?
You: (speaking aloud) “I am not going in.”

Example:

Try these sentences below. Remember that you need to stress one or more words to show meaning, but you need to come down at the end of the sentence to show finality. You may want to mark your written sentences for cues to go up or down with your voice if you find that helpful.

Q: Is Pete going to have to do your job?
You: He won’t like that.

Q: Are you trying to bug him?
You: I wouldn’t say it that way.

Q: Well then, what would you say?
You: I simply don’t care if he has to do it.

Make up your own scenes. Practice. Record. Listen. Do it again. Make up other scenes.

Go down to the neighborhood drugstore and try to practice a conversation. You might think about what you are going to say first and try it out loud before you get there. “I tried this toothpaste. It claims to be for sensitive teeth. I’m hoping there is another flavor available.” This is an intermediate step using the neutral ears on real people to expand your practice. Yes, I know you’ll feel foolish, and, no, your practice partner will not be aware of what you are doing.

There are, of course, other cues in our speaking that contribute to the impression of indecisiveness. A pattern of offering softening phrases is certainly one of them that weaken the statement (“I was just wondering if … if it’s okay with you … I don’t know, but …”), and you sound tentative. See “Using the Simple Declarative Sentence” for a more powerful form of expression.

Reid loved this work and developed a facility for the short, declarative sentence with the decisive intonation pattern. To gain both skill and confidence, we picked certain situations where he would make the effort to use this pattern, starting with neutral ears, of course. So he bought his toothpaste with real decisiveness. He ordered his cheeseburger like a captain of industry.

Reid belonged to a men’s breakfast club and a local church congregation. Since the breakfast club began each meeting with personal introductions, we could use this weekly opportunity to practice his new vocal pattern in front of people who were acquainted with him. It worked well for our goals because it was a simple pattern that he could practice in advance and execute with comfort and success. His efforts at the church led to an opportunity to be a lay reader on the pulpit. While the King James Version of the Bible does not readily lend itself to easy speech work, we managed the archaic language of the weekly scripture by using the visual cues mentioned above to add vocal variety to the passages and to mark for emphasis and phrasing. He received much praise and satisfaction for his pulpit appearances.

Next on our list were his reports at staff meetings. At this point, Reid knew how to prepare his materials to manage a more definite speaking style. As he gained confidence from his repeated practice, he did not have to write in any more little arrows either.

Staccato Talkers

May worked in the counseling program of a university and had to speak to people practically every minute of the day. Sometimes she interviewed, sometimes she taught, and sometimes she consulted and counseled. Her voice was starting to feel tired and sore by the end of the day, so she went to an ENT physician. “Vocal abuse” was the diagnosis, she told me. This diagnosis frequently identifies people who misuse their voice by straining it when they talk, sing, or yell in such a way that the vocal cords get engorged, irritated, or develop small growths making the voice hoarse. May was really puzzled with this diagnosis; she had no history of yelling or talking loudly over long periods of time. Everybody in the department had to talk a lot, so it couldn’t be that, she thought.

We found the cause in just the way she started her voice in most of her syllables. The sound was released abruptly with a kind of coughlike blast. This was the source of friction and irritation of the vocal folds. Have you ever imitated the sound of a machine gun? You probably used this hard vocal attack at the beginning of each syllable (aa-aa-aa-aa-aa).

Try saying the following sentence: “I asked Aunt Annie about our options.” May would start each of the words with a little explosion in the onset of her voice. How about you? (This habit of explosive voice onset is called a “glottal attack,” if you want to discuss it at cocktail parties.)

Say “honest” and “anger.” Do you start them with an easy initiation of voice or a hard catch? Most people use a hard contact here, so we’re using these examples just to help you feel and identify that hard catch in the throat.

Now try whispering the words in the sentence above, feeling the soft flow of air at the beginning of the words and the sentence.

Next add voice, staying alert for starting any syllable with the hard-edged opening of the vocal folds. You might try feeling the airflow with your hand before starting the voice. You will have more success if you keep your voice soft and the release slow; this will give you the chance to monitor and correct a habit of hard closure and release.

Make up your own list of words (beginning with vowels) that are useful to you for practice. Here is May’s list: actually, accounts, ever, every, often, HR, annual, invite, irritate, inquire, other, another, action, encourage, initial, evaluate, our, I, eager, over, only, on, an, in, any, over, up, ask, and entire.

Say these words following another spoken word so you can just glide into the vowel with the air from the previous word. For example, “This_actually, those_accidents, when_ever, count_every.” Let the air from the first word glide right into the vowel beginning the next word. This flow between words is called “linking” and is a very good thing indeed. No, it is not sloppy. It actually contributes to vocal support, clarity, and comfort in speaking.

Practice linking in sentences, marking the transition from the end of one word to the beginning of the next word that begins with a vowel. I have marked the following example from William James with a linking line between the words where you are most likely to put a glottal attack on the vowel: Our lives_are like_islands_in the sea, or like trees_in the forest, which commingle their roots_in the darkness_underground. It will help if you put your hand on your throat to monitor the continuous flow of your voice. Try this approach with other sentences of your own choosing. If you record it, I think you’ll like what you hear.

You will probably glue your eyes to the paper on which your practice sentences are written. Put the material into your memory and lift your eyes from the written form. Or close your eyes as you do some repetition so you can deliberately concentrate on the auditory–vocal sensations. Finally, stand up and walk around as you practice, getting the new breathing and voicing behaviors into the whole of your body. Like all changes, this requires daily repetition and expansion to become your own. If you find that you use this staccato pattern, you should be on the lookout for situations where you are energized or angry. It is likely that you will really attack each syllable with maximum effort. Perhaps you should speak softly and carry a big stick instead. Hmmm?

May was able to use the linked, gentle syllables best in situations where she had a minute to think and compose herself. It was harder for her whenever people asked her to repeat what she had said or if she was trying to speak in front of a group. She told me that she no longer had any discomfort at the end of the day, however, and felt that she was more likely than not to apply the linking principle to her speaking, if you’d just give her a minute.

Breathy Talkers

When you allow air to escape with your voice and drop your pitch a tad, it becomes “soft”; this sound can be heard as intimate and sensual. Marilyn Monroe spoke that way. You will frequently hear an actress use this kind of voice when she wants to suggest personal intimacy.

Soft breathiness may be a matter of habit and quite unintentional. Because of its association with intimacy, a breathy woman may be heard as being “available” when that was not her intent. (But let’s admit that some of you are skilled in turning this voice on when that is the signal you intend to send!) This breathy voice can be a problem for you and your listeners: It has low volume and is hard to hear especially in noisy conditions, it creates indistinct articulation, and you run short of air because it escapes in the tone.

If you suspect this may describe your speech, you need to use external ears to listen to you and let you know if they think this applies to you. As with most habits, the style of voice production will feel just fine to the user, so it takes an outside ear to identify the sound.

If you are wasting air, you will need to find a way to apply more energy to your voice production so that your air can be used more efficiently. Try the following ideas, and have your feedback in place to let you know what works for you.

To add more muscular tension to your vocal folds, just try speaking louder and see what happens. If this results in a clearer voice, practice using this amount of energy in a deliberate practice regimen. Let your external ears tell you that it sounds fine (although you may feel like you’re shouting).

I have had a number of young Asian women tell me that their soft, breathy voices were encouraged in their homes and that “speaking up” was definitely frowned upon and considered unattractive. For many of these young women, what worked at home did not work in their place of business, and they had to face the conflict between the home and work demands.

When Kyoko walked in the door, I could read deference from her carriage and demeanor. Then she spoke with a soft and wispy voice so self-effacing that she practically disappeared. She worked for a major corporation during the day and went to her parent’s home at night. She knew exactly what her problem was; she just didn’t know what to do about it. Because she was so self-aware, I told her that she was “a smart cookie.” This was a new expression for Kyoko, and she really liked it. She repeated it with a big smile: “Smart cookie!”

Kyoko was able to produce a strong, clear voice just from imitating of me, so learning a new pattern was not difficult for her. But what about the carryover into the workplace? That was the difficult part. A new strategy was called for.

We invented two characters for her that described the two dialects available to her. One was called “Kyoko,” and that characterized her habitual voice and demeanor. And then there was “Smart Cookie,” who walked and talked in a different way: her body was upright, her gaze was direct, and her voice was firm. We practiced “dialect switching,” using one style of speaking when it was appropriate and the other when that was the thing to do. The idea was to understand and respect the communication style of both cultures and to be able to use the appropriate style in the various settings.

I took short scenes from various plays and modified them so that one character was a Kyoko and one was a Smart Cookie. We read these scenes, taking turns being Kyoko or Smart Cookie (imitating the speaking style of each other) so she became facile in turning the dialects on and off. This was great fun for both of us. One day she gave me a written marketing report she was to give later that day, saying, “Read this in Kyoko!” Then she could laugh at me till it was her turn to read it in Smart Cookie.

This “dialect switching” worked very well for Kyoko because her social milieu at work enthusiastically supported the efforts she was making for clearer speaking. Though her parents knew Kyoko was smart, I don’t think they knew about her being a Smart Cookie.

Kyoko was able to produce a firmer voice with only effort and modeling (imitating me), but sometimes the vocal muscles need a little reinforcement to make a firmer closure and resultant tone, so here is one exercise that just might help you.

Pick up a chair or something else rather heavy and hold it in front of you at arm’s length. Talk for a while and see what happens to your voice as you do so. You may well find that the vocal folds come together more firmly and that your voice is clearer. Once you can get the feel of it you can try to replicate the sensation without using the chair. Again, ask your external ears if you are doing what you intend.

If the breathy quality seems to persist, please consult an ENT physician just to check that everything’s okay. The sound of your voice could be an indication that something is preventing your vocal cords from coming together firmly, thus the escape of air. If that is the case, you should know about it as soon as possible. This medical visit is no big deal. It doesn’t hurt, takes little time, and can provide much relief. Be a grown-up and go.

Fading Talkers

People had trouble hearing Owen when he tried to give reports to a committee at work. The beginnings of his sentences were fine. It was the ends of his sentences that seemed to just dribble down into mumbles. This created a huge problem when the whole point of the statement was in the last few words. For example,

All of our efforts on the West Coast, beginning in January and extending into June, resulted in significant changes in the demand for the product, leading to sales figures of over dollars …

To the people on the committee, Owen appeared to just lose confidence when his words became difficult to follow during the course of the sentence. This is the most common interpretation of the habitual pattern of “fading,” and this is why Owen’s boss suggested that he work with me “to develop his confidence.”

But sometimes individuals just don’t manage their air supply during speech and run out before they’re done talking. There is usually a pretty good connection between the thoughts we want to express and the amount of air that we take in to support the speech. This smooth working relationship between our thinking and our breath supply can become uncoordinated when our personal language process is under stress (for example, we are dealing with language suited for reading rather than speaking); we are operating with more sophisticated or complicated language than our norm—just using somebody else’s language can throw us off; or we are in a stressful public speaking situation and our attention is fragmented.

Fading occurs when we continue to talk after our air reserves have given out and our natural ability to find a place to breathe is not operating. With Owen, we started by familiarizing him with the phrasal structure of verbal communication and the knowledge that just because words continue to appear on a page doesn’t mean that he needs to continue to talk nonstop.

Spoken vs. Written Language

There is a great deal of difference between our language as it is spoken and as it is written, and this causes no end of difficulty for some people when reading aloud. It appears that their allegiance to the written form—sentences, words, and letters—is far more compelling than their confidence with the spoken elements—phrases, syllables, vowels, and consonants. Phrasing is a grouping of words involved in the same idea and is an important element of spoken language, which preceded written language by a long shot. But we are so heavily schooled in the written form that we have lost confidence in our ability to read aloud in a way that respects our natural ability to use phrases.

You should listen to how often other people pause, take a quick breath, and go on with their sentence. (This is not that easy. You are accustomed to listening to what people say and not the behavioral details of how they say it.) You’ll see how normal and easy the quick breath is. Try to imitate someone who seems to have good control of their phrasing and air supply. Be especially mindful of the ease of hearing the words at the end of their sentences.

Find some written material that you would like to work with. It could be job-related or recreational. The very first thing you need to do is to recognize the phrasal structure because that’s where we usually take a breath. Owen came up with the following example from work: I have been reading all the reports coming from that department/ even those from the outlying branches/ and it seems to me that the situation is stagnant/ that we’re on some kind of plateau. The / marks indicate that a quick breath is appropriate and useful at this point.

As you examine each sentence of your material, see if there aren’t units of meaning (phrases) that you can identify and mark. Now read the material out loud, taking small quick breaths between phrases. If you record yourself you should hear that your voice remains strong throughout the whole phrase. This is good. In addition, you do not want to hear yourself taking a big long breath.

Continue to practice this, limiting yourself to no more than fifteen words per phrase. The idea is to get familiar with pausing according to meaning. Practice for however long it takes to get this knowledge. If you are a parent with small children, reading to them provides an excellent opportunity for your breath control practice since the sentences are not complex. Reid brought in his children’s books. He would mark with a pencil where he thought he should take a breath. He’d read, we’d record, and he’d listen till he was satisfied with his delivery.

Now lift your eyes and try a sentence from memory. If you record yourself during this activity, you’ll be in a position to know if you’ve actually done what you intended to do. The Night Before Christmas is an excellent poem on which to practice this more deliberate phrasing, and you may already know this one by heart.

Here is a bit of excellent language that depends upon appropriate phrasing for its impact. You are going to break up the sentence into its component ideas. I am removing punctuation to encourage you to think about the sound of the material without the graphic cues. In the example below, it should feel natural to you to say the opening words, “Four-score-and-seven-years-ago,” as a phrase. At the end of the phrase is where you can grab a quick breath. Drawing upon your own sense of meaning, put in a slash (/) in the material below where you think a breath should occur. Use a double slash (//) for a longer pause for emphasis. (I’ll put my version on the next page.) Read this aloud, record, and listen to find if you have clearly articulated all of Mr. Lincoln’s words, especially those at the end of a phrase. You will find that this attention to phrasing will be the answer to a lot of your “fading” problems.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure we are met on a great battle-field of that war we have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this but in a larger sense we cannot dedicate we cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground the brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract the world will little note nor long remember what we say here but it can never forget what they did here it is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced it is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Concentrate on the ends of the phrases to be sure they are adequately supported. The rest of the sentence will take care of itself. Imagine that you are sending out that final word and the period at the end with energy. You may have a friend who can discretely signal you if your voice is starting to fade away during a presentation. Reid needed this kind of reminder, especially toward the beginning of our work until he got the hang of it. Reid’s boss has congratulated us on Reid’s improvement of “confidence.” I guess it’s not obvious that he deserves the praise for breath support. But that’s our little secret.

If I were I sitting beside you, I would probably mark the Lincoln passage this way, but I might do it differently tomorrow. I may look at it with a different sense of interpretation that would be reflected in my phrasing.

Four score and seven years ago / our fathers brought forth on this continent / a new nation / conceived in Liberty / and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. // Now we are engaged in a great civil war / testing whether that nation / or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. // We are met on a great battle-field of that war. // We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives / that that nation might live. // It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. // But / in a larger sense / we cannot dedicate / we cannot consecrate / we cannot hallow this ground. // The brave men / living and dead who struggled here / have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. // The world will little note / nor long remember what we say here / but it can never forget what they did here. // It is for us the living / rather / to be dedicated here to the unfinished work / which they who fought here / have thus far so nobly advanced. // It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us // that from these honored dead we take increased devotion / to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion // that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain // that this nation / under God / shall have a new birth of freedom // and that government of the people / by the people / for the people / shall not perish from the earth.