Speaking with Confidence

Lesson 3: Your voice: breath, pace, pitch and pause

Goal: hear your own voice honestly, and pick one thing (pace, volume, pitch or pausing) to work on this week.

Listen to yourself first

Play back the recording from Exercise 0. Most people dislike hearing their own voice: in your head you hear it through your skull bones as well as the air, which makes it sound deeper and fuller than it does to everyone else. The recording is closer to what others hear. It’s fine.

Listen once for each of these, and jot down what you notice:

Breath is the engine

A steady voice sits on steady breath. When you’re nervous you breathe high in the chest and run out of air mid-sentence, so your voice thins and speeds up.

• Stand or sit tall, shoulders down, feet flat.
• Breathe low: put a hand on your belly and feel it move out as you breathe in.
• Take a breath at the start of each new idea, not halfway through a sentence.

Volume: aim for the back wall

Speak to the furthest person, not the nearest. In a small meeting, that’s the person at the far end of the table; on a call, it’s someone with average headphones in a noisy café. Most nervous speakers are too quiet, not too loud. The most common feedback in speaking clubs is “I couldn’t hear the end of your sentences”: keep your energy up through the last word.

Pace: slower than feels natural

Conversational English runs at roughly 140 to 170 words a minute. Nerves push you faster. Aim to slow down for:

• Anything new or complicated
• Numbers, names and dates
• Your main point, the first time you say it

You’ll feel slow. You’ll sound measured.

Pitch and variety

A flat voice makes even good content hard to follow. Variety (in pitch, pace and volume) tells listeners what matters and that you care about it. Actors train this deliberately, and voicing the characters in your stories is an easy way to practise it (Lesson 7). In voice research, lower-pitched voices were rated as stronger and more competent leaders, for both men and women (Klofstad and colleagues, 2012). Some evidence from lab studies with recorded voices. Don’t try to put on a deep voice; it sounds strained. Do avoid ending every statement with a rising tone, which can make firm points sound like questions.

The pause is your friend

A pause before an important point builds attention. A pause after it lets it land. A pause instead of “um” makes you sound composed. Two seconds of silence feels like an age to you and like normal thinking time to the listener.

Should you count your ums?

Speaking clubs often have someone count filler words (“um”, “ah”, “so”, “you know”). It’s a useful awareness exercise. But “um” and “uh” aren’t pure noise: they signal that you’re thinking and about to say something, and listeners use them to stay oriented (Clark and Fox Tree, 2002; Fox Tree, 2001). Some evidence.

The aim is not zero fillers. It’s to stop them crowding out your message: a filler at the start of every sentence, or a “like” every few words, is distracting. Swap some of them for a short pause.

Look after your voice

• Drink water through the day; caffeine and alcohol dry you out.
• Warm up before a long day of talking: hum, do lip trills, say a few tongue twisters slowly.
• Don’t shout over noise for long; move closer or use a microphone.
• If you’ve been hoarse for more than three weeks, or your voice changes for no clear reason, see your GP. They may refer you to an ear, nose and throat specialist or a speech pathologist. See healthdirect on laryngitis.

Sing in a choir

Singing in a group is one of the most enjoyable ways to train your speaking voice, and it doesn’t feel like training at all. Every rehearsal works on the same things this lesson covers:

• Breath: warm-ups and long phrases teach you to breathe low and make the air last.
• Projection: you learn to fill a room without shouting or straining.
• Pitch and range: using more of your range when you sing makes it easier to vary your pitch when you speak.
• Posture: choirs stand tall, feet planted, shoulders down, which is the same stance as Lesson 4.
• Listening: blending with the people around you is close listening, every week.
• Performing with company: standing in front of an audience as part of a group is a gentle way to get used to being watched.

Choir members consistently report better breathing, posture, mood and confidence (Clift and Hancox, 2001), and a systematic review found reasonable evidence that choir singing improves wellbeing in adults (Daykin and colleagues, 2017). Some evidence: much of it is self-reported. The speaking benefits are a practitioner tip, but one most singers will recognise.

You don’t need to read music or have a “good voice”. Many community choirs don’t audition. On the Gold Coast, for example, Vocal Waves is a non-auditioned community choir for adults, singing contemporary and traditional songs at community events and concerts. The course author sings with them. Search for “community choir” and your suburb to find one near you.

Working with a voice coach

Recording yourself and getting feedback from friends takes you a long way. A professional ear takes you further, faster: a coach hears in five minutes what you’ve been doing for twenty years, and gives you exercises to change it. It’s worth considering if your job depends on your voice, if you have a big talk coming up, or if you’ve worked on something for months without shifting it.

There are two kinds of help, and it’s worth knowing which you need:

• A speech pathologist with a voice interest treats voice problems: hoarseness, strain, a voice that tires or cracks, and changes after illness. They also do accent work and vocal training for people who talk for a living. Find one through Speech Pathology Australia.
• A voice and presentation coach works on delivery: sounding confident, warmth and authority, pace and pause, telling stories, nerves, media and camera work.

Two Australian coaches the course author knows and recommends:

• Kirsten Geraghty, Vocal Impact: a speech pathologist with over 30 years’ experience. Voice therapy, vocal training for people who use their voice all day (teachers, lawyers, presenters, salespeople), and accent reduction for people who want to be understood more easily or change how they sound at work. Workshops for schools and companies, and online sessions.
• Sally Prosser, Sally Prosser Voice: a voice and public speaking coach and former TV news journalist (Ten, Seven and the ABC), and author of the book Voiceprint. Her short videos on Instagram and TikTok and her LinkedIn newsletter are a free, practical way to pick up voice and delivery tips a minute at a time.

A note on accents: your accent is not a fault, and you don’t need to change it to speak with confidence. Clarity (pace, pausing, finishing your words) matters far more. Accent work is a personal choice, usually made because people keep asking you to repeat yourself, and a good coach treats it that way.

Exercise 3

Choose one paragraph from a news article. Record yourself reading it three times: once at your normal pace, once deliberately slower with a pause at each full stop, and once with exaggerated pitch variety, as if reading to a child. Play them back. The second or third usually sounds better than you expect. Use a bit of that in your next meeting.

Sources

• Clift and Hancox (2001), The perceived benefits of singing, Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health
• Daykin et al. (2017), What works for wellbeing? A systematic review of wellbeing outcomes for music and singing in adults, Perspectives in Public Health
• Klofstad, Anderson and Peters (2012), Sounds like a winner: voice pitch influences perception of leadership capacity in both men and women, Proceedings of the Royal Society B
• Clark and Fox Tree (2002), Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking, Cognition
• Fox Tree (2001), Listeners’ uses of um and uh in speech comprehension, Memory & Cognition
• healthdirect, Laryngitis