How to find your voice

When I need to speak for a work function or a prepared speech in Toastmasters, sometimes I'll find myself practicing over and over again. I can't get it quite right. I recently found some useful advice in Derek Sivers' Anything You Want.

You have options

In Chapter 16 of Derek's book, he describes how his teacher would push him to try and sing the song a dozen different ways: up an octave, down an octave, faster, slower, like Bob Dylan, like Tom Waits, and so on. The lesson is that just because you've heard it one way, it doesn't mean that's the one and only way.

Derek extrapolates this lesson to entrepreneurship. If you have a business plan, what happens if you take away the website? How does the plan change if you suddenly have 10,000 users? What happens in a franchising scenario? Businesses never go as planned so we should be ready with options.

Derek summed it up well by writing

Choose the plan with the most options. The best plan is the one that lets you change your plans.

Applications in public speaking

The same lessons apply in public speaking. When you practice, try a few variations. Here are a few ideas to get you started. Please send me an email to let me know of any good ones you think of.

Twice as fast
Twice as slow
High pitch
Low pitch
Lots of hand gestures
Hands behind your back
While smiling
While frowning
Yell
Whisper
Sing
Like Barack Obama
Like Donald Trump
Like President Thomas J. Whitmore in Independence Day (1996)
Pretend you're at a birthday party
Pretend you're at a funeral
As if it's the last thing you will ever say
As if you're giving friendly advice at a coffee shop

It's more fun

Practicing can often seem like a chore. When attempting this technique for the first time, you will quickly notice that it feels a bit silly or even difficult. Keep at it. Once you break free of that initial hurdle, you can actually have a good time whispering out the next project update for work or bellowing a wedding toast.

The extreme variation will also help you step back from memorizing your script. You wouldn't tell the same jokes at a funeral would you? I guess it depends on who died... Traditional practice often leads to just trying memorize the words. The words are a small percentage of a speech though.

Calibration

A speech includes your tone, your pace, your pauses, and your body language. When you practice just one way, it locks you into that style. Exploring the extremes of all these different facets of our communication can help you find the most natural style for the moment.

Your style of speaking should also guide your audience emotionally. When telling an intense story, you might lean in, speaking softer but more quickly, rushing towards some climatic event. If the event is more somber, you may speak with long, heavy pauses to give weight to the words.

Flexibility

You have a big speech coming up. You're going to present to the board of your company. It's your moment to shine. When you get to the conference room though, you find out it's an auditorium and you're presenting to a much larger audience than you anticipated. If you only practiced for one set of circumstances, you're in trouble.

Let's pretend you did try this variation technique. You have practiced this ten different ways. This exact scenario may not have come up but you know what changes you need to make. You'll need to speak slower and smile bigger for the crowd. Maybe tone down the technical details. All you have to do is switch to a different option.