The Secret to a Great Spontaneous Speech

I work with many mid and senior level individuals on the Art of Delivering a great speech.  We work on
script blocking, vocal messaging, body language.  All in an effort to make their speech appear natural and seamless.  With all of the various techniques you can use and apply, the biggest secret to sounding spontaneous and conversational is... Practice!

Many of my clients err on the other side of this equation though, erroneously believing that over-rehearsing will make them sound mechanical and wooden.  Certainly, if that is what they are rehearsing then that will be the end result they achieve.  However, in order to have the confidence to let your content 'go' and to focus on the true delivery of the underlying messages you need to know your content backward and forward. Not a memorization of content, but an internalization of your content.

Great actors know this. They don't rehearse their role once or twice, they rehearse for weeks in an effort to sound and appear unscripted.  It's the rehearsal that frees your mind from its fears of forgetfulness, allowing you to be fully present in the moment, delivering your speech in a way that resonates with the audience.

"It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech."                                         - Mark Twain

I typically refer to the content of a speech, the actual words you use, as your primary message.  However, the delivery of it - your voice and body language - are the vehicles by which your secondary messages are delivered. It's your secondary messages that direct what you want your audience to think, feel or do as a result of what you are sharing.  It is your secondary messages that set your speech apart from all that precede or follow.  People will forget much of what you share with them, but they will long remember how you made them feel.

Think of the soundtrack to a movie.  Often, the soundtrack is operating at a more unconscious level.  We are paying more conscious attention to the action on the screen, the words the actors say.  However, the dramatic build-up of the moment the babysitter opens that basement door and begins creeping down the stairs would not have us squirming in our seats without that soundtrack.

So too with the need for you to integrate your non-verbal communication with your verbal.  You want them to operate in sync, to strengthen and clarify the messages you are delivering to your audience, thereby assuring the messages they receive.  This requires practice.  And more practice.  However, getting good at anything in life requires the same.  No one is perfect at anything right out of the gate.  Just because you have been speaking for most of your life does not mean you are automatically capable or skilled in public speaking.  Don't mistake the two.  Public speaking is an entirely different medium and the skills need to be rehearsed for us to gain any measure of competency.

"There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave."         - Dale Carnegie

Actively rehearsing, strategically and consciously working to ensure that your verbal and non-verbal cues align and work to support your key messages, is the difference between being a disaster or a master on-stage. Practice may not be the 'secret' you were hoping for, and it may sound counter-intuitive - but it is the secret of all the great speakers we admire.  Practice your Spontaneity.


(for those that would like to learn more about the above and about applying Body Language principles in other aspects of their communication, check out our Beyond Words program at www.titantraining.ca)

Presentation Basics - Breathing

Breathing is life.  If you're not breathing, you're dead.  Simple fact that we're all aware of.  However, breathing is also voice.  Without breath there is no voice.  It stands to reason then that the quality of your voice and the amount of voice you have is also driven by the type and quality of breath.  Typically, when working with clients on their personal presence or formal presentation skills, we will need to work on their breathing.   For most of us, as long as we were breathing, people were happy with however we chose to make it happen.

If we want stronger, deeper, louder or more compelling voices though, we may need to relearn the way in which we breath.  Most of us breathe from the upper third of our lungs (called Tidal Breathing).  If we want to increase the depth of our voices, or we want to project them more, we need to learn to breathe from the middle third of our lungs, called diaphragmatic breathing.  To do so requires us to breathe from a different place, not to take in a different amount of air.  Professional singers, actors on stage, deep sea divers, musicians that play a wind or horn instrument all learn to breathe from the diaphragm in order to support their craft.  You can too.

To practice, start by standing up.  It is important that you stand fully upright, with the spine elongated.  If you slump you compress your diaphragm and cannot breathe from it.  Place a hand on your upper chest and one on your upper stomach area, just below the bridge of your ribs.  Take a nice, slow, deep breath in.  Watch which hand moves.  (Breathe out!)  Instead of seeing the upper hand rise and fall as you breathe (indicating that you are filling the upper third of your lungs with air), try to make the bottom hand (the one on your diaphragm) move in an out.  This will require that you target your breath more, but it will begin to train your brain and body to begin breathing from this area more often.  The more consistently you practice breathing from your diaphragm the more you begin to create the habit of breathing from it.

Breathing from the diaphragm also has a number of additional benefits.  Let's face it, most of us don't give many formal presentations and, even if we do, we tend to get very anxious and stressed about doing one.  We carry this tension in our bodies, which then influences the way we move and sound - making us appear uncomfortable.  Our presentation suffers.  I offer you two suggestions below to help you deal with some of this tension...

1. It is not unusual for people, when they get nervous, to feel short of breath or sick to their stomachs.  This is because the nerves that control your digestion and your respiration attach to the C3 and C4 vertebrae, which are in the middle of the back of your neck.  When we get nervous and tense, we tend to tighten and bunch up these muscles (how many of your feel stress through the muscles of your neck and upper shoulders?).  As we tense these muscles up, we impact the nerves controlling our breathing and digestion.  The solution then is to relax those muscles, release the tension.  Certainly getting someone to massage them for you would work.  When at work or at other times you don't have access to someone willing to give you a neck massage, try the following exercise.  Stand comfortably and bend over, letting the head hand freely.  Really make an effort to fully relax the neck muscles.  You can test this out by taking your fingers and gently pushing on your head (while it's hanging).  If you feel resistance your haven't fully released it.  Allowing the neck to hang freely, and using the weight of the head (much heavier than you realize!) to pull and extend the vertebrae of the neck, helps relieve the tension and release the pressure on those nerves.


2. Practice your breathing!  Take a couple of quiet moments periodically throughout the day to breathe deeply and fully.  Sit fully upright and put a hand lightly on your diaphragm to serve as a target for the muscles you want to engage.  In addition to practicing breathing from the diaphragm, concentrate on the breath you take.  Breathe through the nose only since breathing through the mouth tends to signal to your brain that you are in distress.  Not the effect we're after!  Deepen your breathing by elongating your exhalations, not your inhalations.  Your lungs will adjust naturally and automatically to replace the air you have lost through your exhalations. Therefore, you don't have to focus on your inhalations, they will take care of themselves.  Additionally, when you're nervous, trying to inhale more could result in hyperventilation.  Focusing on the exhalation is what will prove calming.  Try to extend and lengthen the number of outward counts of breath each time.  Although you could certainly start and end your day with 15-30 minutes of controlled breathing, most of my clients don't tend to find, have or make the time for this.  Instead, using this technique periodically throughout the day, for 3-5 breaths, will serve to help you maintain a greater sense of calmness, well-being  and will help keep your stress in check.

Vocal Influence

People have long been adding emphasis to words and phrases when they speak, in an effort to create interest and enhance understanding.  However, there is an additional use of emphasis we should be aware of that comes to us from the world of hypnotism.  Savvy marketers, advertsiers and politicians have used this technique for years, all in their ongoing efforts to inlfuence our choices and the direction of our thoughts.

The technique is called 'tonal marking' by hypnotists.  In essence, you mark out (emphasize) segments of your spoken communications by modifying your voice pitch, volume and/or pace.  This change in your voice serves to emphasize and lend more weight to those specific segments of your message.  In doing so, you essentially end up with a message contained within the body of the communication.

Consider the message below, where the bolded and capitalized words represent the segments you are tonally marking.

           "I don't want your to BUY THIS TOASTER until you've decided that
            IT'S THE ONE FOR YOU"

On the surface, the message appears neutral and fair.  However, when you look only at the passages that were marked tonally, a hidden, somewhat subliminal, message is seen. When tonal marking is used in sales and marketing pitches (as above) it is typically referred to as an embedded command.  Its use may be more or less effective given other elements present throughout the rest of the 'pitch'.

However, what about when the technique is used during communications in which we are not consciously being 'sold' something?  What if we were listening to someone give a talk about gender differences?  They aren't trying to formally sell us, their goal is simply to inform, educate, perhaps entertain.  What if they are relatively new to the professional speakers circuit though, and are trying to create a positive reputation for themself, create a bit of 'buzz' around their name?  It's important to them then that you find them interesting and knowledgeable, that you... in short... like them.  They might then choose to embed messages into their speech to help drive this impression. They might include sentences like the following houghout their speech...

     "if you, LIKE ME, find communicating with the opposite gender confusing..."

     "I'M often astounded to find how much more PASSIONATE women sound when..."

     "When it comes to understanding the motivations of the oppositve sex, I, LIKE YOU find that..."

It's the tonal marking of various phrases, delivered over the course of speech, that provides the subtext.  Now consider the potential for influencing your audience when these messages are delivered over the course of a 10 minute, 30 or 60 minute presentation.

What about if you delivered one such message about yourself with your 5-minute update at the weekly management meeting?  Could the consistent and repetitive nature of this message influence and reinforce their perception of you?  Research would have us believe YES.

TRY your own experiment, by giving IT a go.  YOU just might find that you LIKE the results IT brings!