How to Master Public Speaking Voice

Changes in my public speaking voice help me direct the audience to better understand what emotions they need to be feeling in those moments, when I want to be funny, emotional or serious. Follow me on Instagram: @masteryourtalk

1. The 3 Types of Tones (1:22)

You can generally group vocal tones in 3 different categories: Speaking, High and Low.
Speaking Tones. This one’s fairly simple, this is the general voice you use when you speak, it’s important that no matter how you think you sound, you’ll need an accountability partner to help you figure if you have a voice that people want to hear. In my case, my tone used to be extremely aggressive, like I was attacking you when I spoke, like I DEMANDED your attention, rather than persuading you into listening to me by making my voice sound like honey. The key is just to figure out what’s missing in how your voice sounds, for some, it’s hard to hear, for others, like me, it’s very aggressive, and it could even be very shaky that exhibits low confidence. Remember, you absolutely can be an introvert and present very well, there’s a big difference between speaking QUIETLY and SHAKY. Quiet can easily be fixed with a microphone, but shakiness needs to be addressed. This is how you think about your public speaking voice, because it'll be different for everyone.

High Tones. Optimism, positivism, something amazing happening at the company or for the stakeholders of the presentation. To emphasize a really exciting moment, like the future or technology.

Low Tones. To emphasize important issues, generally somber ones, or introverts can use low tones to emphasize exciting moments as well – it all really depends on your audience and how high your voice can actually go.

2. What Do All Types of Tones Have in Common? (3:43)

The commonality of both high and low tones is they are ARTIFICALLY woven in my presentations, I’m not some magician that conjures them up, in most cases, I decide in advance where I want to use high and low tones. This is precisely why it is impossible to master vocal tones without an obsession with your audience that is literally out of this world, because you won’t care enough to insert the changes in tones to excite your audience, which means you’re dead in the water for vocal tones. For example, if you skip ahead to my pitch video, you’ll notice that when I present the STAR recommendation, my vocal tones increase dramatically to put emphasis on the recommendation, but you also realize like so, I can use high OR low to demonstrate this, so let’s go over where one is more preferable than another, but I always use both in my pitches. This is how we can slowly understand how to leverage our public speaking voice for effect.

3. An Example on How to Manage Vocal Tones (5:10)

Let’s dig more into this so you understand the correlation between vocal tones and mastering your audience.

The question begs itself to be ask: WHY did I choose to increase my vocal tones at the moment that STAR came up? This is because Human Resources judges, are in GENERAL, very fluffy, energetic people from all the competitions I’ve been to in the discipline, but since I can use any vocal tone effectively since I have a huge vocal range, I went with a high one because I figured the HR judges will be addicted to the energy I bring that they alive with on a day by day basis, so that they would like me for it.

Do you realize how detailed this analysis is over 1 SENTENCE? 1 MOMENT of my 20-minute presentation everyone. I think of every IMPORTANT sentence in the same way.

As you recall from my pitch example, I didn’t start this presentation with Michael is blab la bla, no I started with EXCITEMENT. WHY? BECAUSE HR PEOPLE LOVE PEOPLE, SO I need to show the same level of excitement for their employees as they do – that is the true way to mastering vocal tones, understand your audience and THEN AND ONLY THEN, you artificially weave in vocal tone changes to get them off their seats yelling MAN, Brenden GETS me, he UNDERSTANDS me.

I know this one is very difficult to grasp everyone, so please ask me questions in the comments and I’ll definitely get around to answering them. It's how you'll get closer to mastering and finding your own public speaking voice.

If there’s one thing you take away from this, it’s that vocal tones have nothing to do with singing or being a news reporter, it’s about understanding how your voice flows and how to use the higher and lower ranges of that voice to ARTIFICIALLY enhance your presentations based on your audience that day or moment.

If you know one person that’s hit a ceiling in their growth as a public speaker, and they’re looking for something to REALLY UP their game, send them this video so that they’ll be 10 steps closer to mastering their talk.

For business or one-on-one public speaking coaching inquiries, you can reach me at [email protected].

Special thanks to Maison Leporem for letting me use the space.
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