50 TIPS for Better Voice Quality and Habits

 

Analyze your voice habits:

1. Listen to your outgoing phone messages for a few days. How are your vocal habits and voice quality? These are habits you can practice every day.
Improve enunciation:
2. Breathe. Sometimes we forget to breathe when under stress; not good for voice production. Conscious breathing will help support your voice and lend your voice more clarity and volume.
The number one tip for improving your voice:
3. Open your mouth wider as you speak. This helps with volume and with enunciation. If you are a fast talker, it may even slow you down slightly.
Sound confident:
4. Breathe before you begin.
5. Open your mouth wide enough to articulate clearly.
6. End each sentence with full voice and a downward inflection.

Relax your voice:

7. Breathe. Sip lukewarm liquid. Do not clear your voice repeatedly, or you will make matters worse. Good news: strain in your voice is almost always more obvious to you than it is to your audience.
Reduce vocal fillers:
8. Since most fillers seem to creep in between sentences, just substitute a pause.
9. Try to keep from thinking ahead too much—if you lose your train of thought, you will end up with more fillers.
Improve a flat or soft voice:
10.  Open your mouth wider to increase volume.
11.  You may have tension in your face; try relaxing your jaw by massaging gently right in front of your ears.
12. Be sure to keep breathing.
Project your voice:
13. You can learn to project your voice without straining it by breathing from the diaphragm. Practice speaking lying down, using abdominal muscles to project your voice to the ceiling.
Eliminate up-speak:
14. If you end sentences with upward inflections, you sound like you are asking questions, and it makes you sound uncertain. For more credibility, your statements should have a firm, downward inflection.
Improve enunciation:
15. Open your mouth wider. Look in the mirror and see if your mouth really opens—it should! Really work your lips, tongue and jaw to form each word.
16. Slow down just slightly, enough to allow a slight pause between words and sentences.
17. Use a voice recorder or listen to your voice messages to check your enunciation.
18. When rehearsing for a presentation, record your words and listen back for good enunciation.
Better language habits: 
19. Avoid qualifier words: “kind of, sort of, hopefully, maybe, just, just a little.” Example: “If I could just have a moment of your time, I will hopefully clarify my position.”
20. Reduce the number of fillers and non-words: “um, uh, ah, well, so, like, you know, and-um.” Example: “It’s like, you know, um, the meeting is going to be cancelled, so…”
21. Avoid “careless endings” such as gonna, shoulda, coulda, woulda, comin’, goin,’ etc.
Build better grammar:
22. Ask someone you trust to tell you if you habitually make any grammatical or pronunciation errors in your speech. These are “blind spots” we can only fix once we are aware of them.

Control your pace:

23. If you speak too fast, rather than s-l-o-w-i-n-g down radically, open your mouth wider, enunciate more clearly, and pause more frequently. These will help you sound less rushed.
24. If you speak too slowly, you may be focusing too much on the rehearsed words, or searching for the perfect word. Increased focus on the meaning rather than the words may help.

Volume:

25. If you are a soft talker, breathe, open your mouth, and try to increase volume gradually, not dramatically.
26. Record your voice, experimenting with the volume. How loud can you speak without your voice cracking?
27. Read children's books out loud, where some parts need to be loud. Keep pushing your voice until you can act out all the loud parts.

Um….Kill the Fillers:

28. Record your voice or ask someone to give you honest feedback. If your fillers are small and infrequent, you may stop worrying. If they are large and frequent, especially between each phrase and sentence, you will want to reduce them.
29. Record your practice presentations and voice messages. Try to breathe where you might have inserted the filler.
30. Become more comfortable with pauses.
31. Stay mindful when speaking. Don't think ahead to the next point you are about to make. Finish each thought, pause, and then begin the next one.

A great way to improve your vocal inflections and range:

32. If you have young children in your life, get some of their favorite books to record for them. Exaggerate each voice; get into the phrasing and the pacing.
33. Stretch yourself to see just how entertaining and dramatic you can make your voice. Over time you will become more comfortable with a wider range. Bonus: your loved young ones can hear you reading them their favorite books any time they want!

Speak up! How to get more volume with less stress:

34. The vocal cords are small and fatigue quickly, which leads to your voice sounding shaky. The answer is diaphragmatic breathing, or tummy breathing.
35. Use your tummy muscles to “push” your voice out for more volume, and more power with less stress.
36. Make sure your mouth is open wide enough and your throat is relaxed.
37. Check for tension in your chest or tummy, and relax those muscles.
Vary your rate of speech:
38. Slow down for important points. By slowing your speech rate while delivering your key points, you can convey emphasis and importance.
39. Speed up when you want to share your excitement, or when telling a story for illustration.

Pause when you:

40. Want to add emphasis to a key point in your presentation.
41. Move from one slide to another, or after taking and answering a question.
42. Need to think about where you are going next, or want your audience to think about what you just said.
43. Want to regain the full attention of the audience.

What’s your pitch?

44. If your voice gets too high when you speak due to nerves or stress, you will sound less confident. Slow down, breathe, and try to speak in your normal pitch.
45. If your normal pitch is higher than you would like, be sure to breathe, open your mouth wider, and push your sound out with your tummy.

Warm up your voice

46. Before you begin your presentation, especially if it is in the morning, hum or sing out loud to limber up your voice.
47. Loosen your shoulders. Raise them up, up, up, and then let them fall. Slowly turn your neck to one side and then the other, giving it a good stretch.  Keep that feeling of relaxation in your neck and shoulders.
48. Loosen your face. Open your mouth as wide as you can. Work your jaw up and down. Widen your eyes as wide as you can. Smile broadly.  Release any tension you notice anywhere in your face.

Final Tips

49. Stand up when you speak. It gives your voice more power.
50. Smile when you speak. Listeners can hear it in your voice.
How do you stand? What surprised you? What are you willing to try in order to improve your vocal quality and habits?

source:.applauseinc.net