From Boring to Inspiring

How do you grab attention when speaking?

James Bond … now that was a fictitious character brought to life by the celebrated author, Ian Fleming.

Whenever I picked up one of Fleming’s books, like Goldfinger, From Russia with Love, or Casino Royale, I was immediately transported to adventure, risk, and boldness by the thrilling actions of James Bond 007.

I, and I’m sure you too, have been entranced by the voice of James Bond, portrayed by film star Sean Connery who played the role of Bond, dubbed by his fellow actors as The Voice.

At work, we need to speak with conviction to our bosses, our colleagues, our peers, and our customers. Often, we need to attend conference calls where we lack visual communication, where we have only our Voice to carry our words of action, strategy or reporting of actions to listeners who are regionally or internationally situated.

Our vocal awareness generally is poor. We do not pay much attention to how we speak. We just speak. However, there are myriad ways and disciplines that can make our Voice more powerful and attractive.

For example, the most fundamental power source of Voice is breath. Yet so many people pay little attention to proper breathing disciplines.

We breathe just using our upper chests, called claviular breathing, and when we expel the air to support our Voice, we tend to go higher in pitch as we speak. Yet if we only paid more attention to a deeper and more powerful way of breathing, that is, intercostal diaphragmatic breathing – expanding our lower rib cage and using our tummy to expand and contract, the quantity of air we inhale is increased. At the same time, if we use this more powerful way of breathing, we expand our width, depth and ‘tallness’ of our physique.

When this happens, we intuitively stand taller, command a dynamic presence and display gravitas.

This is the way nature intended us to be. With modern living and work, we tend to slouch in our chairs, hunched over our computers, barely breathing as we tap out our intense brain work using our flying fingers on the keyboard.

No wonder our Voice is unsatisfying, weak, lacking timbre, resonance and command!

It takes conscious awareness to correct all our faults in Vocal production … and when we carry this out correctly, we immediately reclaim our greatness that we were born with, but gave away in our pursuit of expediency and the wanting to be accepted in society as a ‘nice’ person, easy to get along with a wimpy Voice.

It’s really time to reclaim your Voice … A Voice Like Bond.

Do it, and I promise that you will begin a bolder life, expressing easily what you want, and creating energy whenever you speak.

(c) Ricky (The Coach) Lien