You want your passion for a particular project to be infectious and in order to do that your brain reaches back to get passion from how you feel while you are presenting. If you are nervous, unsure or feel you are taking up their time, your brain will kill all passion from your voice because it will focus on communicating the other signals.
If you aren’t passionate why should they be passionate about it? Also, in the absence of voice intonation or modulation, people will give your message a more negative connotation. Therefore you must have some fluctuation and variation in your voice.
So it is important when presenting that you keep in mind, not why it is important to you, but why it is significant to the audience.
Make sure you include a call to action so that your audience has definite steps to keep your message moving through the organization.
Take Action: The best way to practice varying your voice is to read children’s books out loud. Make sure you adjust your voice for each character and that you clearly articulate each word. Practice with a tape recorder so you can listen to yourself from the audience’s perspective. You can also think about a subject you are passionate about and then talk about that into a tape recorder. Listen to your voice fluctuation and see how it changes as you talk about something you have a lot of passion for. Then take any piece of reading and try to read it with that same passion.
To learn more on handling interruptions, difficult questions and more take a look at Anne’s book, Outcome Focus® Approach: How to be Become One with Your Audience. Go to the Store tab and click on Books.
