Want to share your ideas and vision so everyone understands you perfectly? Here's how to speak from your heart, and make it sound that way!

There's an easy and natural way to speak to others so you sound like you mean it. It's really the only way to be an honest and authentic speaker. And many professionals who speak to stakeholders day in and day out ignore it completely.

I'm talking about using a resonant voice that deeply and convincingly reflects how you really feel about things. What about you? Does that sound like the voice you're using?

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The Resonant Voice Is Straight From Your Heart

Speaking with this kind of voice involves achieving the right type of resonance. In public speaking, the word means attaining a rich and pleasing quality to the voice through vibrations in your principal resonating chambers: the mouth, nasal cavity, and chest. The problem with many speakers is that they pay attention to the first two chambers, and ignore the third.

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These speakers use what is called a "head voice"—which is where (of course) your mouth and nasal passages are found. I've always believed that this manner of speaking results from the way we approach issues, by overanalyzing them and leaving our physical selves behind. To me, it's all too easy to do this in our over-stimulated, digitalized and all-electronic world where our brains are constantly bombarded with stimuli. We're not out in our fields or public plazas where we used to share ideas and physically assert our presence!

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Characteristics of the Head Voice: A head voice is a too-thin voice. Indeed, it sounds over-intellectualized. It has the advantages of being crisp and intelligent-sounding. On the debit side, it can sound young and immature, inexperienced in the world of business and lacking wisdom.

Characteristics of the Chest Voice:The opposite of this type of speaking voice is a chest voice. Here, we're talking caramel and fondues, rather than a too-fast gulp of soda pop fizzling up your nose. Voices arising from the chest are deep, and tend to sound wise. They give the impression of maturity and experience. (Learn more on being a top-shelf speaker in my Free eBook, 12 Easy Ways to Achieve Presence and Charisma.) A chest voice is also good for revealing deep passion (hey, this is literally where your heart is!). On the down side, it can make you sound like an old stuffed chair: a fuddy-duddy whose last original idea was in 1975.

Benefits of a Balanced Vocal Sound: The solution? You guessed it: a balance between head voice and chest voice. That's what we call, in fact, a balanced resonance. It has the sound of leadership: mature and experienced, but crisp and smart, a brave sound that's spontaneous but from someone who's been around the block a few times. No callow thinking or rash decisions here! So now, record yourself speaking. (If you do it using virtual software, turn off the video.) Listen closely. Are you out of balance one way or the other?

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Want Maximum Impact? — Give Us One Big Idea!

Here's how the balanced, resonant voice works in practice: You reveal your vision or big idea, then your smart, passionate and balanced voice leads us to follow you in that vision. 

Once you've done that, you should leave it there. I mean, don't introduce your big idea, and then clutter it up immediately with lots of detail. It takes us time to mold our minds around your vision. Let that happen. Later on, you can lay out the itinerary for actually taking us on that exciting journey . . . provided that even then you don't lead us into the weeds.

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Gary Genard is an actor, author, and expert in public speaking and overcoming speaking fear. His company, The Genard Method offers live 1:1 Zoom executive coaching  and corporate group training worldwide. He was named for nine consecutive years as One of the World’s Top 30 Communication Professionals, and also named as One of America's Top 5 Speech Coaches. He is the author of the Amazon Best-Sellers How to Give a Speech and Speak for Leadership: An Executive Speech Coach's Secrets for Developing Leadership Presence. His book, Fearless Speaking, was named in 2019 as "One of the 100 Best Confidence Books of All Time." He is also the author of the Dr. William Scarlet Mysteries. Contact Gary here. 

Main photo credit: Julien L on unsplash.com