Opera Singing Can Make You A Better Public Speaker!

I recently attended a session of the Melbourne Knowledge Management Leadership Forum. For variety, this evening’s session was a workshop by former opera singer turned corporate voice coach Louise Mahler of The Art of Business.

I had some great experiences, and I learnt a bit about how I use my voice and how I can use it better. Louise highlighted that the voice was connected to both body and mind, and ran through a range of stereotypical voices often heard in the business context and showed us how they were related to physical posture and other factors.

Louise gave me several tips, including why taking a deep breath before giving a speech is not the best way to relax (by contrast, breathing out forcefully relaxes the diaphragm and thereby the speaker), showing me the right way to stand while waiting to give a speech or between segments (including a run down of the wrong ways we often see and why they are wrong), and how to develop more power in the voice by maintaining good posture (particularly around the neck), exercising the glutes (e.g. by moving around) and by not blocking the power when it comes out around the throat region (for example, when you speak your mouth should be open by around two fingers width or more for your speaking to be fully open and powerful).

A range of other topics were also covered. For example, we typically only use a fraction of our vocal range, but Louise tells us successful sale speople use up to 87 “voices” in 5 minutes. The way to develop our vocal range is to become familiar with and “grow” the voices we already have within us.

For those of us who go to Toastmasters or otherwise practice public speaking, Louise also critiqued the way “vocal variety” is practised at Toastmasters. Rather than deliberately varying the voice delivery in a planned way, her recommended path to achieving pleasing vocal variety is to first free up your speaking with proper technique (perhaps use a voice coach!) and then let your emotions and presentation topic drive the vocal variety. Louise also suggested that “elocution lessons” had “gone the way of the dinosaur” as they focused predominantly around the toungue and jaw and did not take into account the full mechanisms throughout the body to free up and develop a powerful voice.

The final thought from Louise that I will mention here is this: “amateurs practice until they get it right, professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong.”