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COACHING
Every world champion has a coach. There is one simple reason for this:
you cannot see you own game. These people become champions because
of their dedication to the principle that improvement is the point: there is
no destination for them, just an endless pursuit of that extra one percent.
They achieve continuous improvement with the help of coaches – people
who can see what might be possible to improve, and who can devise
programmes and exercises to deliver it.
If you are serious about public speaking, you might consider seeking out a
professional coach, whether a specialist in platform skills or a drama or
singing coach to work with your voice – a subject we’ll be turning to in
the next few pages. But you can also get great results by making an
agreement to coach in a pair. You can give each other sandwich feedback,
which involves praise, criticism and praise. The praise is the bread; the
criticism the meat in the sandwich. So, the first element will pick out
something that was well done; the second might be positively expressed
as: “What you could work on is…”, or “Your stretch might be…”; the final
element is a positive summary, emphasising another good aspect.
If you can’t find anyone to coach you, don’t despair: you can coach
yourself up to a point by using a recording. Make a little analogue of a
stage or theatre in your home: maybe the couch is the audience and the
TV behind you your screen. Set up a video camera and record yourself
speaking. As you watch back, you will be able to see any little issues you
might want to fix and get a really good ‘third party’ perspective on your
content and delivery. Take notes and work on one thing at a time.
Compare your content, structure and delivery to master speakers, from
TED and elsewhere. Be brutally honest with yourself and you will
improve.
Chapter
6:
Your vocal toolbox
The medium is the message
- Marshall McLuhan
People often ask me which is more important – great content, or great
delivery? Some scriptwriters and speaking coaches place content ahead of
delivery, asserting that brilliant material will survive poor delivery, while
even the best delivery will not keep people engaged in poor content.
Others say the exact opposite!
If I were forced to choose between the 2, I agree with TED curator Chris
Anderson who says in my interview with him: “The only rule that we’re
absolutely insistent on is that someone has something worth saying.
Without that you can have all the performance in the world and it’s not
only worthless; it’s deeply annoying.”
Nevertheless, it’s better to have both! I believe that content and delivery
are 2 of the 3 legs on which powerful communication rests: any
memorable speech must have both. The third, equally important leg is
you
–
your authentic personality, your honesty, integrity and love all
combining to make you a generator of great content
and
great delivery.
In the last chapter, we investigated what to say in detail, so I hope you
now have plenty of tools to plan and structure superb content. Now, let’s
consider the way that you say it – not just in public speaking but in
everything you say, all the time. We’re going to do that by opening your
vocal toolbox, something that most people don’t know they have.
The human voice is an amazing, complex instrument – the one
instrument that we all play. Sadly, not many people take lessons or
practice the skill of speaking: there are relatively few virtuosi of the voice.
This has surely been exacerbated by the culture of celebrity. We set
singers and actors on pedestals, convince ourselves that they are special,
and believe that we could never be like them. Have you ever said (or
heard said) “I can’t sing”? If you said that in any tribal society, today or
throughout human history, people would look at you very strangely and
say: “But everyone sings!” Only recently have we delegated singing to
specialists and resigned from it en masse, sentencing our voices to
express only a fraction of their true power.
This is not a book about singing, but I do recommend that you try taking
some singing lessons or join a vocal or choral group. Not only will you
become more conscious of your voice and its potential, but also you might
surprise yourself and love it. My brother, completely musically untutored,
joined a community choir here in Orkney some years ago and now sings
great choral pieces like Handel’s
Messiah
in impressive venues with
world-renowned orchestras and conductors. Singing has become a great
source of joy and passion for him; maybe it will for you, too. And don’t
forget the research showing that human beings gain many health and
emotional benefits from making music – possibly including growing fresh
neurons, given the recent research on musical training and brain
development.
Whether you sing or not, it is possible to develop your speaking voice and
become a master of this wonderful instrument. That is the subject of this
chapter.
Exercise: Your vocal
inventory
Before we start rummaging in your vocal toolbox, I suggest that you take a step back
and review your current vocal assets and liabilities by taking a dispassionate inventory.
What are the strengths of your voice? And what are the weaknesses? In order to get
clear and complete in this exercise, try recording yourself speaking in various ways.
You may have different ways of speaking for specific situations (for example, my
mother had a very well-defined telephone voice which she would never use in face-
to-face conversation) and the sound of your voice will be greatly affected by your
emotional state.
You can record yourself at fair quality on most smartphones with built-in voice memo
apps; or, for better quality and more features like transcribing to text or sharing with
other apps, you can get a specialist app like Just Press Record (iOS) or RecForge
(Android); or if you have an interest in recording high-quality audio you can get a
digital audio recorder like a Zoom – I still use an old Zoom H2 for its great
combination of quality and simplicity.
Once you have a range of recordings of yourself speaking, listen back on good
headphones, taking notes in the 2 columns (one for your vocal assets, one for
liabilities). You can also ask friends or family members to help you by giving you their
feedback in those 2 columns. This will help you to identify what it is that you want to
work on to move your voice up to where you would like it to be.
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