People buy with emotion and justify with logic
Your voice is a powerful tool.
How is it possible to sound smart even if you are literally saying nothing? You will not believe it until you see a professional funny person, Will Stephen, shows presentation skills in this TEDx Talk.
I always considered that the high-pitch voice put me at a disadvantage. To show the professional image and the confidence, I often remind myself to speak as logical as I can. However, sometimes the conversation didn’t go well as expected. One day, I talked about this problem with my colleague, one sentence he told me is completely woke me up — “people buy with emotion and justify with logic, you should focus more on your voice!”
According to psychology professor Albert Mehrabian’s 7–38–55 rule, 38% of meaning is communicated through tone of voice, 55% through body language, and only 7% through spoken words. Non-verbal communication is very powerful and which can change the emotion of audience at the very beginning. You only have 30 seconds to engage your audiences and make your message has the impact you intended. That is why a well-prepared opening is quite essential. How to get the attention from audiences? Today let’s focus on the vocal part and there are few techniques you can use:
- Ask question: to give audience an imagination or a vision “what if you can travel to the future, what would you do?”, “who in this room has flicked a booger?” Asking people to give you something can give you the power. And sometimes, you are not really need their responses; what you want is to cue people to think. In that case, you can use stronger tone and drop the pitch to end the question and to start a new paragraph.
- Tell a story: At the first beginning of your presentation, to start with a story is a useful technique to hook your audiences and to keep them interested in discovering what you are going to tell next.
There are four basic vocal elements: Pitch, Pace, Power, and Pause.
Pitch — speaking in a high, low or natural voice.Speaking in a higher pitch can show that you are scared of something. By contrast, speaking in a deeper voice can convey a sense of authority.
Pace — the speed at which someone speaks. You can slow down through key statements so that the audience focuses more on the point that you’re making. You can also speed up to create a sense of excitement or energy.
Pause — being used as punctuation in a presentation, to create suspense or emphasis.
Power — speaking loudly or quietly, e.g. if you speak very loudly, you will demonstrate anger or joy; If you speak quietly, you can demonstrate fear or sadness.
Combine these four elements to build an assertiveness tone without changing who you are. You can learn more on this article:
Julian Treasure also introduces few tools which will increase the power of your speaking: register, timber, prosody, pace, pitch and volume. Start from 4:10.
