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5 Simple Remedies to Overcome Your Speaking Voice Bad Habits

By Edward Hope

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 09Mar2009 Word count: 515 Viewed: 636 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Our speaking voice should be a wonderful expressive instrument for communication. However, many of us have unconsciously fallen into bad habits either in conversation or public speaking. Others will inevitably associate the habits of our voice with habits of our mind and will use these habits to draw a conclusion as to our character. Very few of us ever make the time to improve the quality of our voice to make it pleasing and melodious. We do have the makings of a good voice and training will help make it better.

An excellent check on the qualities of your voice is to record it and play back. Even without this a little listening practice will make you conscious of your voice. Listen to your voice and honestly analyze to determine any bad habits.

The most common public speaking bad habits, their consequences and their simple remedies are listed below:

Bad Habit 1 - A strident high pitched voice. This has the hallmarks of a nervous person. It is hard on the listeners and many will find it difficult to listen to the point they lose interest.

Remedy - Take several deep breaths, this will help to calm the nerves and make it easier to control your voice.

Bad Habit 2 - A monotonous drone, speaking too slow or deliberately. This will ruin even the best prepared presentation by making it sound dull and may even put some people to sleep.

Remedy - Pick up the tempo of your talk through thinking faster. You will naturally talk faster when your zest to do your best gets into gear.

Bad Habit 3 - Rapid delivery - this exhausts the audience and they will lose the context of your ideas.

Remedy - Start off slow and adopt a conversational manner as talking to a friend. Make sure you enunciate clearly.

Bad Habit 4 - Too soft - who will know what you said? Remedy - Test the volume when you speak. Ask whether they can hear you at the back. Most audiences will appreciate you taking the time.

Additionally many voice faults can be remedied by reading "out loud." Read a variety of material; try everything from casual quotations to vigorous argument. The "out loud" reading must have feeling put into it. Reflect the feeling of the words in your voice. Experiment with words that reflect love and compare the sounds with words that convey hatred. Your voice will reflect the mood you have in mind and the audience will target in on it. Practice rounding out your syllables and opening you mouth wide to raise the resonance of your voice. This will help cure mumbling. However, be careful you don't end up with an affected accent that sounds worse than the original issue.

By understanding your own voice bad habits and tackling them you can replace these habits with good "listening" tones. It is useful to recall that Demosthenes a famed Greek orator from long ago struggled with stammering. It is recorded that he overcame this challenge by filling his mouth with pebbles and talking over the roar of crashing waves.

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