A strong confident voice will completely change the way people react to you.
It makes you more attractive, it'll make you a stronger leader,
people will respect your ideas more just because of the way you say them, and it'll even make you funnier.
And there's a lot of ways to do this wrong and a lot of bad advice out there.
I know that because I thrashed my vocal cords.
I screwed them up so badly that someone needed to go in and actually
perform surgery and cut part of them out
which led to a month of being completely mute and
I mean it was nine months of hours and hours and thousands of dollars on coaching
and speech therapy before I was back to my normal.
So today we're gonna talk about the three things that make a voice good,
attractive, strong, confident which is sounding good having a good pitch,
being resonant and having your voice carry so it's easy for people to hear you
and being expressive so that what you say captivates.
And we'll also cover some things a lot of people screw up including myself
and what led me down that really horrible road.
So step one — having a good sounding pitch — a good timbre to your voice.
There's really two ways to screw this up.
The first is to sound really nasally and to sound like Fran Drescher and the second
is to try too hard to have a deep voice where you go,
"Oh, I think I should have a deep manly and commanding voice," and you sound like you're doing a bad impression.
It's also horrible on your vocal cords because you're pressing them down
and making them smash together so you'll get hoarse very quickly.
What you want to do is speak from this part of your face what's called the mask
and I have a really great exercise at the end of the video for how to work on that
plus being more expressive and the whole thing takes maybe a minute
But in the meantime, there's two things you can do to almost instantly improve the timbre your voice.
The first — just yawn. It sounds stupid but
so much of what goes wrong with your vocal tonality and speaking
comes from tension — tensed neck, tensed jaws, all the stress of life, really,
just carrying with you so a simple yawn... just...
It really stretches all that out and it creates a more relaxed tone.
The second is an exercise from Elliott Hulse called grounding.
I'll link to the full video in the description but the short version is this —
Get barefoot and then bounce on your heels while making an almost tribal sound.
It's gonna look goofy but bear with me because it's incredibly effective.
It looks like this.
[Ben makes a constant "Ah" sound all the while bouncing on his heels]
And it may look goofy and it may make you laugh to watch but
if you do this you will almost immediately hear a difference in your own voice.
So that's timbre and pitch; now let's talk about how to have a full voice and
a resonant voice that carries — that carries in a crowd, that carries from a stage
or even that just makes you sound confident one on one.
The key here is air — airflow. The more air that you are using when you speak,
the easier it will be to have what you say carry and if you don't believe me,
just exhale all of your air completely out and then try to talk.
It's a weird experience because you physically cannot do it.
So airflow — how does it work? The basics — don't breathe into your chest;
when you breathe, your shoulders should not go up and down; you should breathe into your diaphragm.
But I see a lot of people do this incorrectly
and when they breathe, they just try to force their stomach in and out;
that's not how proper breath works. It should be a full 360 from your lower back to your stomach.
Now there's a lot of body language advice that people give that is actually going
to really hurt you here because tension is the enemy of strong vocal projection.
One of my favorite vocal coaches that I've ever had — he said it best,
"Power through freedom — not force."
So what are the bad body language tips that wreak havoc on your voice?
One — we are all told to stand up straight.
That's tough because some of us have been doing bench press for too long,
some of us work at a computer... there's a lot of hunch happening in our society.
So stand up straight; that's easy — just jack your shoulders back; flex your back.
What this does is it creates so much tension in your chest and your back
that then can't expand and contract when you breathe.
Another thing that I was super guilty of — the idea that,
"Oh, if you want to look confident, you should lift your your chin up.
Don't worry about the tension that's in your neck or what's causing you to
go forward as if you're on your phone but just lift your chin,"
and you can hear immediately; it just destroys the quality of your sound and it creates a lot of pressure on your vocal chords.
And the third thing that I I've been guilty of since college —
so many times, we get told to suck in our stomach or flex our abs or you're shirtless on the beach and you want to look good
and so you constrict this area which is the power source
of all of your performance — your athletic performance, your sexual performance,
your vocal performance; it comes from deep breathing and fluidity
but instead we tense here and then our air runs into this very small pocket
because our diaphragm can't move so we have little air and we compensate
when we want to create loud noises — we create tension and we force it. We just smash our vocal cords together.
Now that said, that is actually great body language — to have your shoulders back
and to have your head up and to have great abs.
That's important stuff for how you look and how people perceive you but
you don't do it by overcompensating and faking it and flexing other areas;
you do it by developing actual good postural muscles.
If you want to see a video on that, I can totally make one.
I'm not gonna force it on you but if you want that, let me know in the comments
and if enough people say so, I'm happy to do that.
So let's assume now you're neutral; you're not weirdly tense in any area and you can
breathe 360 degrees down into your belly. How do you take it to the next level? How do you project and resonate?
Well, projecting — the word itself actually kind of gives you a hint of what to do but
I want to give you an exercise that will hammer at home so just
take your phone out put it down put it four feet away and then try to be as loud
as you can there and what a lot of people will do is they'll look at their phone, they'll aim four feet away and they'll force and they'll push and they'll flex.
And you'll get this shouting that sounds terrible, first of all has a very bad pitch, and second, it doesn't make it very far.
Now what I want you to do — don't touch anything, same phone, same distance away — imagine lobbing your voice twice as far.
This is a little woowoo but stay with me; the mind and body are connected.
That mind-body connection is real. Your vocal cords don't act exactly like your arm;
you can't just think, "Oh, I want to flex my vocal cords or relax them."
But they do respond incredibly well to being told what to do by your mind.
It's actually the whole foundation of the Alexander Technique.
So phone's there; lob your voice. Just imagine that you want to talk over your phone and about twice as far.
If your pitch rises, that's totally fine because high noises actually cut through background noise better than low ones
which is why a crying baby on an airplane is such a nightmare for every single person on the plane.
And that's really the only thing you need if you want to project further is to remove that bad tension
and then work on lobbing your voice; you will notice an immediate difference especially in bars or crowds.
Now let's talk about the third thing which is having an expressive voice with a lot of range.
Forget your fictional characters; think about any person that you look up to
in real life whether it's Will Smith, The Rock, Ellen DeGeneres, Tony Robbins —
they are expressive like crazy expressive.
They will take you on lows and highs, they tell stories that go up and down,
and it's all because of how they use their voice and that vocal range.
Now what's nice is there's a one-minute exercise that you can do that helps you
speak from your mask and have strong vocal range and it looks like this.
[Ben makes a "Mmmm" sound that goes up then down]
Super silly, I know. My roommates make fun of me for it all the time but
what that little rollercoaster does is it creates a vibration in the front of your face
with the hum; you'll feel your teeth vibrating and your lips vibrating —
that's how you know you're doing it right and that makes you vocalize from your
mask and then by going up and down, you're basically just going to the gym for your vocal cords.
Over time, if you just do that a minute a day, you will start to reach higher highs
and lower lows; you'll become more expressive and a better storyteller and more interesting speaker.
So that's it. That is how you speak with a great pitch, that is how you project,
and that is how you have an expressive vocal range.
Now, because today is Charlie's 30th birthday, we have a special little ending
and I'm going to call him in to finish this video off.
Hey guys, Charlie here so I just wanted to say, first and foremost, thank you.
It is my birthday today; I am turning 30.
And I wanted to say thank you for the last couple of years which has been,
quite frankly, amazing largely in part to this YouTube channel because
Charisma on Command has been one of the more magical fun things in my life
and I have you guys to thank for watching these videos and for supporting us so
thank you so much for that.
In addition, we had my birthday campaign; we started it in the last video
and in just a few days, we have raised over $8,000 for Charity: Water which
is mind-blowing but in addition to that, over 200 of you have signed up to donate
your birthday as well and that makes me feel awesome.
I feel like we're getting a little mini revolution going here in the Charisma
on Command community to do good in the world not just to be confident
and charismatic which is awesome and important but really to make an impact
on those people who don't have quite as much as we do.
So thank you guys so much for an amazing birthday.
If you would like to donate to the campaign, every little bit is appreciated
not just by me but by the people who are receiving clean water
and a hundred percent of those proceeds go directly to the projects
that will drill the wells and get the filters so if you want to donate, that link is in the description.
If you would like to donate your birthday and get an email so that you can do
the same thing whenever your birthday comes. that link is in the description as well.
Thank you guys for an amazing birthday and I will see you in the next video.