Alyson Connolly

Cheat Sheet / Updated 05-05-2023

Creating and operating a nonprofit organization can be a gratifying and worthwhile endeavor. Success depends on developing a good idea that meets a real need, testing that idea, planning (and then planning some more), and inspiring others. Though the work is demanding, it’s also deeply rewarding. Here, we include helpful information to help you raise money when you’re just starting out and apply for e-grants.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-03-2022

Even though some make it look easy, public speaking requires effort. But you don’t want the audience to see that effort. You want your voice to be the same one you use when talking to family, friends, and colleagues. You can develop your own style and sound like yourself. However, many issues can arise while preparing for and during your speech. You may be afraid, your body language may make you look and feel shaky, or your breathing may not be helping you as much as it could be. All these things can be addressed.

Article / Updated 10-31-2018

Stuttering is a disorder where the rhythm of speech is interrupted by repetitions or prolonged sounds. It can start in children as they are exploring how to speak. Often, once a child gets older and more of a seasoned vet when it comes to speech, stuttering can go away. But not always. It can linger into adulthood. You might stutter because you’re anxious. Or you may be anxious because you stutter. It’s a vicious cycle. Often, a stutterer just wants to get everything out as quickly as possible (hey, that’s typical of many non-stutterers, too). Breathe to alleviate stuttering “Don’t tell me,” you’re saying. “It all comes down to breathing, doesn’t it?” Of course it does. Breath is the thing that makes your speech go round, baby. It’s the material you need to make sound. As I say elsewhere, slow down your breath. Breathe deep as if into your abdomen. When you breathe from your upper chest, it stresses you out. You can’t get much air into your body that way — you can start to look like a person on the verge of drowning. You take short gasps of air, which can even make you hyperventilate. Breathing calmly helps you gain control, thereby increasing your confidence. Many politicians, actors, and singers stutter, but we never know it until we hear them being interviewed. Singing can help. When a stutterer sings, the rhythm can prevent them from stuttering. In their book Understanding Stammering or Stuttering (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2012), authors Elaine Kelman and Alison Whyte surmise that the combination of melody and speech, which come from different parts of the brain, may result in greater fluency. Singing words that he had trouble speaking helped King George VI. It was much safer than the advice he was previously given, which was to speak with marbles in his mouth. Poor guy could’ve choked. So try singing lines from your speech. Try to feel that rhythm when you’re speaking. Roll with word flubs It wasn’t too long ago that most people believed stutterers had a sort of cognitive delay. To this day, some stutterers and others believe that. A listener may wait patiently for a stutterer to get out those words, but seeing how hard a time the stutterer is having can cause anxiety. Humans are empathy machines a lot of the time, after all. I have worked with a few people who stutter, and I tell them, like I tell all my clients, that if they feel they haven’t presented their speech as well as they practiced, or if they do stutter in the speech — just let it go. You really can’t do much more than that. Nobody’s perfect. As a speaker, you have a story to tell, and we want to hear it. If you appear flustered and frustrated because you stutter when giving a speech, the audience will pick up on that frustration. They’ll be worried about you — and that’s when they’ll lose their grip on your message. Exercise: Sooth the stuttering storm Try to drop your breath deep into your abdomen. Breathe in for a count of four, and then out for a count of four. If you still feel the breath dropping deep into your abdomen after four, go ahead and increase the count — but only count to a number where you can breathe in and out without feeling any tensions in your body. Now that you’re breathing slowly, it’s time to speak slowly. Speak some one-syllable words: “Cat, made, time, seam.” Then graduate to multi-syllable words: “Doorknob, baseball, crossover, moonlight.” Now move along to sentences of some complexity: “The public speaker, who was giving a speech about the health benefits of bananas, was thoroughly engaging.” Take a favorite book and spend some time reading out loud. Find a place in your house where you can be calm. Brew some tea or coffee, then read. And as you read out loud, make the time to breathe and really form your words. There could be many reasons for your stutter. Seeking professional help from a speech language pathologist may be beneficial.

Article / Updated 10-31-2018

Don’t push or ram your speech down people’s throats. Sometimes speakers do this so they can be heard — they feel they must do it. It happens in the boardroom as well as onstage. In renowned vocal pedagogue Barbara Houseman’s book Finding Your Voice (Nick Hern Books, 2007), she states, “the brain associates effort with a need to close or constrict the throat.” The resulting sound reflects the tension in the body: The tension can wind up in the throat, so speakers lose the ability to adjust much of the range of pitch or tone. They’re stuck on one level, and all the audience gets is the monotonous, loud drone of someone who’s worried she won’t get the message across without it. And it’s a horrible cycle: The speaker compensates by getting louder and louder and often becomes physically and vocally drained. When I started out acting, I got a weird bit of direction. A director once told me that I was pushing myself on the other actor, specifically with my chin and neck. I looked around: There was a solid three feet around me and the other player. A total personal bubble. No pushing in sight. “No need to force yourself on him!” the director shouted, as I stood in the corner of the stage by myself, and the other actor was at the front. “It’s a quiet scene!” What was the director talking about? And what was I doing wrong? I should have clued in when he was talking about the intimacy of the scene. Many people who are inexperienced performers tend to push their voices too hard, at all times. They go full tilt, regardless of the tone of the speech. I learned that day that when there is a quiet scene, it’s okay to act appropriately quiet. What we want to hear in a speaker is one who speaks with ease, not one who is turning red, is tense all over, and looks like he’s gonna blow. Disconnect your thoughts and feelings What does pushing do to your message? Sure, you may feel the emotion, but you’re only using one way to express it. The quiet, the soft — it all goes away. It’s like the so-called “loudness wars” in music. In the past few decades, there’s been a push to engineer popular music to be as loud as it possibly can go on a recording, presumably to grab attention on the radio. All the frequencies are boosted and compressed, which undercuts the difference between the soft parts and the loud parts. What this has done is flatten the dynamics, and make recorded music sound much more monotonous, all the way through a song. You don’t have the change in tone from the acoustic part in Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” to the heavier parts. When those differences are gone, the differences in emotion go away along with it. Speech works the same way. When I listen to someone who is pushing, whether it be at a dinner party or at a presentation, it all sounds the same. There are none of those ridges and valleys, those emotional leaps you get when volume or tone changes. The audience is there for the content of the speech, but they want the content to provide that emotion, too, and the emotion often comes from the performance itself. At the very least, the dynamics of the performance enhance the emotion in the content. Wingin’ it I know nothing about football. If someone were to ask me to describe the mechanics of the game, chances are I would take a deep breath, gather some courage, throw my chest out, and start talking in a really loud voice to muddle my way through it. For some reason, our brains tell us that these things compensate for knowledge. We push when we’re not prepared or when we lack confidence in what we’re saying. For example, if you’re giving a speech about the benefits of vitamin D, you’d better believe it yourself. (Some devoice when they’re unprepared, not wanting anyone to hear what they haven’t worked on.) Ever been to a school council meeting when the president unexpectedly asks the chair of the playground committee to give an update? First the committee chair says, “My apologies, I wasn’t prepared for this.” (Never say sorry or give an excuse, by the way.) But then guess what happens? The chair starts talking loudly. Another example is when comedians are bombing. They’ll push and push until they get anything out of the audience.

Article / Updated 10-31-2018

There are two main types of nasal problems in speaking. The first is hyponasality, which sounds like you have a cold or nasal obstruction caused by allergies. The other is hypernasality, which sounds almost like you’re talking through your nose. Think Janice from Friends. “Oh. My. God. Chandlah.” You’ve actually got two palates. One is the hard palate, which extends from the back of your teeth back along the middle of the roof of your mouth. That’s the one your tongue is always touching. The soft palate, meanwhile, is behind your hard palate, and pretty hard to get at with your tongue. Its job is to close off the nasal passages during swallowing. When it lowers, it lets you make the nasal sounds of ng, n, and m. These sounds are meant to vibrate through your nose. For a non-nasal sound, the soft palate at the back of the throat stays up there, allowing for the breath to enter more fully in the mouth. How can you tell if you’ve got this nasal issue? Start by saying something, literally any sentence. Now put your thumb and another finger gently on each side of your nose. Then pinch your nose and repeat the same sentence. Do you sound different? If you sound drastically different, it’s because that sound that is supposed to be coming through your mouth was coming through your nose. Guess what: You’ve got a sound that’s nasal. Exercises: Nix Nasality How do you avoid sounding too nasal? You need to send air and vibration through your mouth as you speak, not through your nose. I know, it’s weird thing to try to do. Plug your nose and practice speaking through your mouth without your nose. Exercise 1: Open your mouth as wide as you can. Pretend you’re chewing a mouthful of crackers. (Be careful that when you open your mouth you’re not creating tension anywhere else on your body.) Once you have a wide mouth, switch between the nasal sound and non-nasal sound (now that you know the difference). Exaggerate your nasal sound even more when you say, “I am happy to speak with you today.” Really feel the vibrations buzzing in your nose. Then drop your jaw and open your mouth, visualizing the sound at your breastbone, and repeat the sentence again. Move between the nasal and the dropped sound and notice the difference. Exercise 2: To see the opening and closing of the soft palate, take a look in the mirror. Open your mouth wide and yawn. Exercise your soft palate to see how it works by breathing out on a K sound. Exercise 3: Breathe in and on the exhale say, “Aaah.” All the air should come from your mouth. Then breathe in again and on the exhale say, “Aaah” from your nose — some of the sound will come out of your nose, then into a long nasal ng sound where all the sound comes from your nose. Close your eyes and do this complete round a few times. Can you hear the difference? Exercise 4: Exaggerate your nasal sound even more. Think of Janice on Friends or Fran Drescher in The Nanny while you’re saying, “I am happy to speak with you today.” Really feel the vibrations buzzing in your nose. Then drop your jaw, open your mouth, visualize the sound at your breastbone, and repeat the sentence again. Move between the nasal and the dropped sound and notice the difference.

Article / Updated 10-31-2018

Breathing is the first thing we do in life and the last thing we do in life. It’s with us wherever we go. Ever try to regulate your breath? You can, but not for long. When your problem is breathiness, you’re going to have to get in there and do a little tweaking. How breathing works When you take a breath in, or inhale, the lungs fill up with air, the ribs expand up and out, and the diaphragm, which is dome-shaped, flattens as the abdominal muscles move down and release. When we exhale, the diaphragm flexes upward, the ribs contract, and the abdominal muscles move in and up as air is expelled from the lungs. The diaphragm has resumed its dome shape. Your core muscles are used to support the release of air from your lungs. The air then passes through your vocal folds. So where do problems arise? Your body doesn’t allow the diaphragm to flatten to its full potential due to tension. You grip those abdominal muscles and exhale all that air that should be coming out of your lungs and into your vocal folds. Instead, you get a wispy sound, called breathiness, kind of like your vacuum makes when the bag’s full. What breathiness does to credibility The breathy person sounds like a lazy person, someone who is holding back in life, who doesn’t seem to care. “But it’s not true!” you say. “I’m breathy, and the farthest thing from lazy!” Well, now’s your time to prove it. Maybe it’s not laziness. Maybe it’s a lack of trust in others or in yourself. Maybe you just need a little impetus to sound like you know you can. But make no mistake: Speaking without breath support sounds dull. There’s no room for inflection or resonance, and without that you’re not a very engaging speaker. Breathiness can be caused by lack of breath support and a lack of contact of air at the vocal folds. So to make sure you support your breath at all times, to break that dang habit, see the nearby exercises. Exercises: Beat back breathiness Exercise 1: Imagine blowing up a balloon. Note how the bottom of the balloon expands first. Imagine that’s how your lungs look too. Breathe in through your nose and try to drop your breath deep into your abdomen. As you fill up your lungs, notice your ribs swing open as you fill up with air. When you exhale, your abdominal muscles should move in and up toward your spine, kind of like rolling up a tube of toothpaste. I always ask clients to breathe in through their nose because it acts as a cleansing breath. When we breathe through our mouths, we often don’t take as big a breath in to make it feel like we’re filling up the lower abdomen, even though it is our lungs that are actually filling up with air. Breathing through the mouth often causes us to expand only the upper chest, and when you breathe from the upper chest, you can only take short breaths, which aren’t enough to sustain your breath through a long sentence. But breathing through the nose isn’t always possible during a presentation. You often can’t take that time to make sure you have that “belly breath.” So, it’s important to at least learn what it’s like to take that breath in from your nose, and then re-create it while breathing in with your mouth during a speech. Exercise 2: To feel your abdominal muscles working, try breathing in and exhaling with a “Shhh,” like a librarian. Tell that mischievous library patron a few times: “Shhh, shhh, shhh.” Can you feel your abdominal muscles pull in and up? That means that they’re engaged and working to support your breath. Exercise 3: This one will help you get that breath support you need, although it takes a bit of math. Well, counting. Anyways: Count to one, and then breathe. Next, count to two, and then breathe. Continue this until you reach 10. How does your body feel? If you feel any tension building up, start over. Do it until you can go all the way through, with no stopping, without any tension building up in your body. Make sure you’re counting with energy. Imagine you’re playing hide and seek and counting before you go off to catch someone.

Article / Updated 10-31-2018

Devoicing is when your voice sounds like a whisper and is almost inaudible. But it doesn’t just happen out of shame or embarrassment. You often devoice when you soothe someone. Doctors and caregivers use devoicing to sound reassuring and trustworthy. And it’s good for these things. But in public speaking, devoicing is problematic. You’re not soothing your audience (probably not, anyways). And when you devoice, your energy goes completely flat. If you’re a natural devoicer Devoicing, as I’ve mentioned, is a legitimate way to speak to someone in certain situations. Maybe you do it a lot. But it’s almost impossible to be heard when you devoice to a large crowd — in that situation, your voice must have the timbre to sustain a strong message. Maybe you find it hard to draw attention to yourself. You can’t make yourself heard in social scenes. Maybe you’re constantly asked to repeat yourself. That gets tiresome. Devoicers can become so hard to communicate with the listener just stops trying. That can damage confidence. So how do you speak sentimentally when you have to use a full voice? One way I’ve taught my clients to overcome this is to do away with the idea that emotions have their own volume. Of course, there may be times in a speech where you get louder. But the point is to never dip too low, regardless of whether is time to be sentimental or not. Not all devoicing comes from emotion. Where you look with your eyes and body position can cause it, too. Something I see quite a bit is speakers applying one of the most harmful body positions you’ll ever see onstage: the down and in position. This looks exactly the way you picture it: looking down, arms scrunched together, trying their darnedest to sink into those floorboards. And where are they looking? Directly in front of their feet. Not good. Speak to an audience the way you speak to someone — you look at them, or close to them. Your body position follows your eyes. Body position is a tricky thing to have to figure out onstage. Sometimes when you’re onstage, you can’t see anyone anyway, so what are you supposed to look at? If you’re around a boardroom table, are you looking at everyone directly in the face? For many, it’s easier to sink into themselves and stare at the floor than to stare the boss in the eyes as if over tiramisu on a fantastic date. Here’s a simple solution: Look the audience in the eye. Yup, I mean it. You know the saying “the eyes are the windows to the soul”? Well, they are in Chris Anderson’s book Ted Talks (HarperCollins, 2016). He writes that the best speakers look at the audience: “Great speakers find a way of making an early connection with their audience. It can be as simple as walking confidently onstage, looking around, making eye contact with two or three people, and smiling.” When you look at someone in the audience, you form a connection with that person, if only for a few seconds. It builds trust in you and makes the audience member feel important. It makes you feel more confident and powerful. If you don’t look people in the eye, that gives them the opportunity to look away from you and focus on something else. So, find someone in the audience and look at that person for no more than 5–6 seconds, then move on. You could even add a smile; why not? You will transfer the same feeling to the other person. It’s a win-win. Exercise: Command the Crowd You’ve gotten rid of devoicing, you’ve found your breath, and you know where to look. It’s time to command the crowd. How do you do that? With passion, of course. Use your emotional connection to your speech. When you’re invested in speaking because it’s important to you, you get inspired, and you then transfer that energy to your voice. It’s time to chant. Oh, what’s that? I’ve gone off the deep end? Bear with me, folks. Take a piece of text. Any piece of text. It could be the warning on a coffee cup stating that it’s hot, or the label on your favorite beer. If you’re feeling frisky, it could be a sentence you’ve written in your speech. Now take video or record yourself speaking the text the way you think you’d say it during your presentation. Pick a pitch that is comfortable for you, right in the middle of your range. Take a breath as if from deep in your abdomen and then let go. Chant the sentence. For example: “Thank you for coming.” Then immediately speak the same sentence, quickly enough that you don’t have time to analyze your voice. On the video or recording, take a look at both versions. What’s different about the second? It should sounds more natural than the first.

Article / Updated 10-31-2018

Upspeak is a high rise in intonation at the end of a sentence that makes it end up sounding like a question. Upspeak perhaps reached its height in the “Valley girl” talk of the 1980s, partly due to Frank Zappa’s hit song, “Valley Girl.” Upspeak tends to creep into people’s speech now and then due to habit and mimicking others, or when they’re not feeling confident. Some of my clients who speak English as a second language (ESL) use upspeak. It’s as if they’re asking you if what they are saying is correct? Sometimes people say every sentence as if it were a question? Like you’re reading this now? Even if it’s not a question, but actually a statement? Like for instance? The car is blue? The truck is, like, red? It’s exhausting even writing that way. And unfortunately, once again, women tend to use upspeak more. A study that analyzed the answers given in the game show Jeopardy! revealed that women who answered the question correctly used upspeak in their answer 48 percent of the time, whereas men used it in 27 percent of their correct answers. (I know, seems like a weird study; you’re supposed to answer Jeopardy! questions in the form of a question.) Know why we upspeak For men or women, upspeak is just one of those habits we pick up from people speaking around us, from popular entertainment and media, or when we’re not sure if the words we’re saying are correct, as in my ESL clients. But upspeak tends to make you sound not confident and monotonous. If you encounter someone who is asking a question with everything he’s saying, you might start to think that person isn’t too confident. Whether it’s true or not, people who speak with upspeak sound like they’re looking for approval from those they’re conversing with. And it’s really tough to sustain a conversation with someone like that. I find that upspeak comes out a lot during public speaking, especially when people are unsure they’ll get the type of reception they’re hoping for. Just the fact that they aren’t confident with themselves speaking can bring it out. Upspeak is also monotonous to listen to. Hearing people speak can be boring if they’re using the same intonation the whole time. People crave variety when listening. Even if the topic is compelling, the monotony of upspeak may overwhelm everything else. Exercise: Get rid of that question mark in your voice It’s time to gain the confidence to lose upspeak once and for all. Question intonation is now for questions only, okay? All statements will now be declarative statements. How do you do that? Well, by saying statements like they should be said, over and over. Take a piece of ruled paper and on each line, write a statement — something true about yourself. You can write what kind of shirt you’re wearing, one describing your style of pants, and so on. When you look out the window, what’s the weather like? Get down at least a dozen of these. Better yet, fill up the paper. Now, read them one by one to yourself. These are mundane things. Truths! You’re wearing a blue shirt; no one can dispute that. Listen to how you’re saying these statements. At the end of the sentence your pitch should sound a tad lower than the previous word, but not so low that you can’t hear that final word. In all likelihood, you’ve lost any upspeak altogether. You’ve become conscious of your intonation. The following exercise “Getting rid of that question mark in your voice” can help you lose your intonation, but in a real speech you probably won’t be talking about the color of your shirt. You’ll need to take your speech and get rid of any question asking there, too. Write every line of your speech on a separate line of a piece of paper, just as you do with the random truths you write for the exercise. You should see a similar structure: barely any questions. Find a chair and stand in front of it, but don’t sit down yet. Say a line of your speech out loud. Think of each line as an individual statement rather than a part of a larger work. Sit down firmly on the chair at the end of the line. This can help drop your pitch, which is what should happen at the end of a sentence. Sound better? Need some more inspiration? Try reading a children’s book if you have one handy. Take out your favorite Dr. Seuss, for example, and read it out loud. Children’s books are typically full of plain, simple statements. Aphorisms are easy on the ears of kids and may just retrain you, too. Our lives are complex things, and our language often reflects that complexity, but when you have a short amount of time to convince someone of something, it’s a good idea to turn that nuanced reasoning into pure, cold, statements.

Article / Updated 10-31-2018

Vocal fry, or creaky voice, seems to be everywhere nowadays, from podcast announcers to reality show hosts. What is it? To create sound, air moves past our larynx to the vocal folds, which vibrate smoothly. Vocal fry occurs when you speak in your lowest possible register, as low as you can go. You don’t have enough energy or breath to produce the sound. Instead of the vocal folds moving easily together, they are slamming shut. Very little air can pass through. This creates a creak or popping sound, often compared to bacon frying in a pan. Sometimes you can hear it at the end of a phrase or sentence, and sometimes all the way through a sentence. And you hear it from women and men. Vocal fry is commonly employed by young people, but some older folks have it too. Currently, the criticism of it has sometimes been tangled up with criticism of young people — in particular, girls. However, a study of 18–22-year-olds at Centenary College in Lousiana found that men, too, have vocal fry but tend to use it throughout their speech, whereas women mainly use it at the end of a phrase. Unfortunately, some people of my generation have found a hill to die on, and that hill is vocal fry. They say it sounds annoying. Some say that the claim that vocal fry is annoying is a sexist argument. Others say, no, it actually is annoying. I’m not advocating for either side. I’m a vocal coach. My problem with vocal fry is simply that its symptoms are such that they fly in the face of my teachings about breath and projection. So, for that reason alone, I’m going to try to help you stop your vocal fry. The causes of vocal fry Vocal fry is caused by one of two things that both have the same results: Holding back and not allowing your breath to flow through your vocal tract fully. Or you run out of breath and your vocal energy drops into your lowest register. Vocal fry often emerges at the end of phrases because that’s when you run out of breath or lose your vocal energy. Think about a guitar. When you tune a guitar, you tighten or loosen the strings until they’re vibrating at the right pitches. When they’re out of tune, they sound wrong and clash with each other. They might even smack off each other and the guitar body itself. The same thing happens when you don’t have enough breath. Your vocal folds don’t tighten properly, so they don’t vibrate correctly and can cause popping sounds. Speaking in your lowest possible pitch: When you speak in lower pitch, you tend to give it less air than is normally needed, and this can result in vocal fry. Why would anyone speak in a lower pitch? Well, it often has to do with instinct. People often speak lower when they’re trying to speak authoritatively. It gives a certain amount of empowerment, for sure. But when what comes out instead is vocal fry, authoritativeness goes out the window — plus it’s really hard to hear. Why vocal fry is perceived negatively Your seat is fastened and the flight attendants have just done the safety spiel that you didn’t listen to. Then, as the plane begins to taxi, on comes a crackly voice that seems caught in a cultural feedback loop: At this point it’s hard to determine whether some pilots sound that way because they just do, or because they’ve heard other pilots talk that way. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.” But he seems barely whispering, and his voice rattles and crackles and trails off at the end. I’m not saying all pilots speak with vocal fry; some are pretty darned clear and expressive. The point is that with the fancy sound systems we have these days, we hear their voice very clearly. Plus when we can only hear a voice, we aren’t distracted by what the person is wearing or by the spinach in their teeth. Researchers at Duke University conducted a study to determine how young women who had vocal fry fared in the job market. Men and women were asked to record a message with vocal fry and then one without. Eighty percent of people choosing a candidate for the job picked the message spoken by the non-vocal fry voice, and, unfortunately, women had an even tougher time getting jobs than men when both had vocal fry. These interviewers found candidates more trustworthy when they didn’t have vocal fry, even if both candidates were otherwise the same. Note: This may be partly the result of a generational divide — those who have reached the point in their careers where they are interviewing people are probably a little older. Regardless, vocal fry shouldn’t be part of your public speaking. Exercise: Diagnose and address vocal fry Finding your optimal pitch: Before I get into diagnosing and addressing vocal fry, you need to find your optimal pitch. This is the sound we make when the larynx is released, tongue is relaxed, and body is aligned. It’s where you breathe easily and feel comfortable in the placement of your voice. Say an “aaah.” Try to vary your pitch and note how it feels. Does your throat tighten or does it feel free and easy? Say, “aaah” in a higher pitch. Do you feel as free and easy as the first time? Go lower and see what happens. Get out! Whenever Elaine on Seinfeld heard something crazy, she would yell, “Get out!” and push one of the male characters aggressively. Say, “Get out!” Gradually slide your pitch up, repeating, “Get out!” each time, resonating it in your chest, your oral cavity (mouth), and your head. Go as high as you can and stop when you feel like you’re pushing your voice out in a squeak. Now go back down, repeating, “Get out!” Take note where you feel most comfortable and your voice sounds free and expressive. That’s your optimal pitch. To find out if you have vocal fry, try this: Whisper, “One, two, three, four, five,” without much pause, as if it were a sentence. Then say those numbers again out loud. Do you hear any croaks or crackles? Does your voice tend to drop off at the end of your sentence? Do it again now, but this time with proper breath support. Take deep breaths as if from your lower abdomen. Your ribs, lungs, and belly should all expand when you inhale. When you start speaking, say your whole sentence to the end with enough breath that you could do it again if you wanted. Imagine you’re keeping a balloon suspended in the air when you say a sentence. Keep it suspended with your breath until the end of a sentence. It’s a good idea to raise your pitch a little higher than your general habit dictates. A slightly higher pitch makes your tone stronger and clearer. There are different ways of describing vocal registers and speech pathologists tend to categorize them as follows, from lowest to highest: vocal fry, modal, falsetto, and whistle. The modal range is the middle of your voice range, where it operates more efficiently.

Article / Updated 10-31-2018

The fight, flight, or freeze response can do some wild things to your mind when you're facing a fear of public speaking. What are some things your body can do to fight back? This article includes exercises that will help you regain control when you step in front of those bright lights. Exercise: Assume the position Stand upright in a neutral position. Feel roots growing down to the earth from the bottom of your feet while the rest of your body is growing up to the sky. Now slouch down and droop, like Shaggy from Scooby Doo. Try to walk around the room in this position. What happens to your pace? Where’s your focus? What are your thoughts? Put one hand on your lower abs and one on your upper chest. Breathe in and out. What hand moves first when you are breathing in? Give your body a good shake and return to your normal stance. Now stand as tall as you can, with your chest out, and walk around the room again. Notice your pace. Are you moving faster? Is your focus more focused outward, at the world? Where does your breath feel like it’s coming in when you inhale? Are you dropping it deeper into your lower abs? What are you thinking about? What are some words that can describe this feeling? When you hold your head up and stand tall it sends a message to the brain that you are strong and confident, so you actually begin to feel more confident. Before, when you were Shaggy and your body was contracted and slouchy, you were instinctually taking up less room, and your voice sounded smaller and less confident. In my workshops, one of the exercises I use to explore the difference in the positions I call in and down (slouched) and up and out (tall with head held high) involves role play. Each group pairs off and decides to play out a scenario with a problem. For example, it could be a boss reprimanding an employee who always comes late to work. The pair then decides which one will be in an in and down position and who will be in an up and out position. They tend to conclude that it’s more likely the boss would maintain the up and out pose and the lowly employee the down and in. They role-play for a few minutes and then I ask them to keep the characters and problem but switch their body positions. What happens is interesting. In an up and out position the boss is confident, can articulate clearly why arriving late is a problem, and comes up with solutions — such as set an alarm clock. When she’s in a down and in position, though, she can’t make eye contact, has trouble stringing two sentences together, and just wants to get the heck out of there. When the employee is in the down and in position she feels bad and has little self-esteem, and might even feel that she’s going to get fired. When she’s in the up and out position, she wonders why there is a problem. She thinks clearly and comes up with answers. Exercise: Stand up with less effort Sit in a chair with your feet flat on the floor. Put your hand on the back of your neck. Now try to stand up. Are your neck muscles tightening? Do you feel your neck pull forward? Your neck is just an innocent bystander and it shouldn’t be involved when you stand up. The Alexander Technique, created by Frederick Matthais Alexander, is a process of initiating movement with ease. We can move in a more comfortable way with no strain. So, try it again. Sit in a chair, with your hand on your neck. Start to stand up. When you feel a pull from your neck, just roll your neck slightly forward until you don’t feel the pull. Then stand. Doesn’t that feel easier? It takes less effort, and your neck will thank you. As you probably know, you don’t need to be standing in front of 1,000 people to feel anxious. Sitting around a conference table explaining the goings on in your department can do it. So sit up straight! A 2009 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology held a test for body posture and self-evaluation. Participants were asked to write down their strengths and weaknesses. When they were slumped in a down and in position, they were not as articulate and had difficulty listing their strengths. Those who sat up straight with their feet flat on the floor in an up and out posture wrote more positive qualities about themselves. Changing your posture can also change your mood about things, which may be particularly important when you need to include your input in something. When you’re in a slumped position sitting around the boardroom table, you’re more likely to be persuaded by others even if you know that your idea is better.