When we don’t use enough variety as we speak, it’s almost inevitable that people stop listening and tune out.
And consistency is the enemy of engagement!
‘Sameness’ will not get attention, and it won’t keep attention. Let alone bring it back once it’s been lost.
And unless you’re super-aware of your own speaking style, it’s surprisingly easy to slip into sounding the same, most of the time.
Particularly when you’re:
- In a stream of consciousness flow. Pace is likely to remain constant – think of your voice on cruise control, and you probably won’t be far off!
- Focused intently on the content. Whatever your habits are, they’ll come out, because your mind is occupied elsewhere.
- Nervous about what you’re saying. When you’re afraid, you might rush, become monotonous or tonally ‘lifeless’. And struggle with breath.
Vocal variety is like verbal punctuation:
Imagine reading a page of words with no punctuation, everything running together.
No paragraphs.
No bolding.
No commas or full stops.
That’s what it’s like for an audience when the speaker doesn’t use enough variety…or pause…
Pausing is essential if you want your listeners(s) to absorb and digest your ideas. And it’s not natural to do when you’re the only one speaking.
To add more variety:
Awareness is always the first step – and it doesn’t take much to improve the situation.
Ask someone you trust to give you constructive feedback.
Recording yourself is useful too, even though it’s not always fun to listen back to!
My perspective on this, when clients comment that they don’t want to hear themselves speaking…and I know this can sound harsh, it’s not meant to:
If you’re not willing to listen to yourself, is it fair to ask others to listen to you?
After you’ve learned what could be improved:
Pick one thing – for example, pausing, or emphasis – and practise focusing on adding more frequency to your conversations or presentations.
Emphasis is one of my favourites, it alone can make a big difference to sounding more interesting.
And emphasis can be hard to achieve, bearing in mind that English is a stressed syllable language, which can be very challenging to non-native English speakers where their own language doesn’t use stress.
So whether you choose pausing, emphasis or pace – or something else – aim only for one focus area at a time.
Then practise until it’s embedded into your system without you needing to focus deliberately on making it happen.
For more suggestions on vocal variety, you could think about space when speaking as white space. Or if you rush when speaking this can help.
Best wishes with your public speaking or presentations!
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