The
course was offered via our in-house Staff Development team and it was of
interest to me because my voice is 'little' - I'm not naturally loud and
booming. Sometimes my voice whispers away in the background trying to be heard
over the din made by 200 students in the lecture theatre and I hoped to develop
some techniques to help me project my voice. During the year I deliver a number
of talks in an old ballroom-type space at a partner institution where I have to
stand on stage and talk to 50 people without the aid of a microphone in a two
storey high space - it was this session I had in mind when I decided I needed
to attend this course.
The
first activity was to lay on the floor and practise breathing from the belly
not the shoulders. This is an activity much-practised by actors. We had to feel
our breath going in and out of our bodies to get in tune with how our body
relaxes when we breathe in this way. The intention of breathing from the
diaphragm is to calm yourself and avoid higher breathing in the chest which
tenses you up and can make your voice sound stressed.
The
only way I can think to describe activity two is as 'wiggling and jiggling' our
bodies. We started on all fours (!) to stretch out our backs then gradually
began to stand up and continued by stretching our arms and rib cage. This was
still about feeling the breath go in and out of our bodies although heaven
knows what the people in the meeting room opposite thought we were up to. We
also practised a spine roll and whilst our heads were dangling by our knees we
had to shake our shoulders side to side, let our arms swing loose and babble -
I kid you not. Still, in for a penny, in
for a pound - I was certainly beyond the boundaries of my comfort zone but not
in a scary way as we did all these activities as a group.
Babbling
was quite appropriate for me as one of the other presenting quirks that happens
to me at the start of term is that I often babble some fluffed words for the
first few talks of the year. I think I go a bit rusty over the summer and then
can't articulate the words as well as I'd like to (after the third/forth talk
this disappears and I'm ad-libbing away). We spent a while doing some humming,
tongue twisters, stretching our mouth/jaw/face and talking with our thumb in
our mouth. Thankfully for me we weren't asked to sing and all the talking out
loud/humming stuff was done as a group so we were all idiots together. We did a
lot of saying 'ahh' as if we were in the dentist's chair and then attempting to
project the sound across the room. All this was about opening up our mouths to
get our tongues around the words and to give the sound a wider hole to escape
from.
Then
it was time for some Shakespeare. The breath is the start of your communication
(words/speech). Taking a breath means you have time to pause and connect with
your space and audience. A good tip for public speaking be it meetings or
lectures is to think 'new thought / new breath'. To practise this we read a
section from A Midsummer's Night Dream
- reading aloud then taking a breath at each point of punctuation. It's quite
difficult but it works. Taking a breath keeps your audience engaged as they are
subconsciously thinking - they are about to breathe, there must be more talking
to come, therefore I must keep listening…
The
final set of activities involved the group splitting in two and standing
opposite each other like tram lines. We picked a partner and had to talk to
them and then every few minutes we had to step further away from each other and
keep projecting our voices to our partner. The technique I picked up from this
segment was the most valuable to me. As my voice is fairly little I should stop
trying to talk over noise and instead imagine I am bouncing my words along the
floor to my intended audience. Hopefully this technique will help me conquer
the battle of trying to project my voice the next time I’m in a lecture theatre
and the microphone ceases to work.
It
was a challenging course in terms of getting over the embarrassment of being on
all fours with your colleagues (not something I'm recommending for our next
staff meeting although it was an effective icebreaker). In future I shall be
attempting to bounce my voice of the floor so that it projects to my audience
and I might (behind closed doors) try warming up to make sure I can articulate
my words clearly for the first talks of the year.
