What do you do if your vocal delivery is holding back your entrepreneurial success?

Voice Warm-Ups: Incorporate vocal warm-up exercises into your routine to improve your vocal range and clarity. Practice breathing exercises to support strong and controlled vocal delivery. Speech Coaching: Consider working with a speech coach or vocal trainer. A professional can provide personalized feedback and techniques to enhance your vocal skills. Record Yourself: Record your speeches or presentations and listen for areas that need improvement. Pay attention to pitch, tone, pace, and overall clarity in your delivery.

Honestly, vocal performance is one of the least important aspects of speaking. Maybe if English isn't your first language it might be your priority but until you can quickly craft an engaging speech don't worry about your voice. People would rather listen to speaker with a average voice and great message than a speaker with a great voice and an average message.

Recording yourself and listening back is a great first step and should give you some ideas. But don’t be afraid to seek pro advice. If I were to hurt my back, I wouldn’t expect necessarily to be able to sort it out myself, just because I’ve had a back all my life; I’m likely to go to a chiropractor and get it looked at. Similarly, if you’re wanting to improve your voice, ask an expert. The voice is a very complex instrument and a voice coach will have the knowledge and experience to get you where you want to go a lot quicker.

Intonation is the most oft overlooked aspect of speaking. It is very easy to stay at a certain tone or energy, but successful speakers are able to match the tone, intensity, and energy to the point they are trying to make. Done correctly, the right intonation can engage a dead audience, which then makes the speaking flow much more smoothly because you can then feed off of the audience. A speech should have hills and valley's that gradually incline to the final conclusion. The best practice is to record yourself, listen and take notes, and then ask two or three honest people to candidly and constructively criticize what parts of the speech they trailed off at and what parts engaged them most.

Our speech is made up of BREATH / SOUND RESONANCE / ARTICULATION. So we warm up all three. A quick five minute warm up that will prepare your voice if you need to speak: 2 mins siren (ng sound) or lip trills (brrrr, as if imitating a car engine) starting over a narrow range in the middle of your voice and then widening to take in the whole range Big breath in, push the breath out on a loud fffff 3/4 times in a row (to engage core breathing) - repeat a few times Run your tongue round your teeth top and bottom, 8 times in one direction and then the other, 4 and 4, 2 and 2, 1 and 1 (to relax tongue root - it may well start to ache about halfway through this) More sirening/lip trills. And you’re set!

This is a huge area… the best speakers approach a talk like a canvas… using different vocal techniques, speech structures and non-verbal elements to create a masterpiece of various colours and textures. But you can start small, matching appropriate pace/energy, pitch and tone to the different sections of the speech and using different vocal and non-verbal elements, including pauses, to emphasise key points. If you have a signature speech, it would be worth getting some pro advice from a voice coach, who can help you plan for effective vocal variety and thereby increase engagement and impact.

Find an elocution or speech and drama teacher and take exams. As an elocution teacher I can say here this does not mean you have to speak 'posh', I have local accent but I speak clearly and that is the important thing. These exams can be taken online or in person around the world. Exams can be taken in Reading Aloud for Performance, Communication, Verse Speaking, Public Speaking and more. All of these give you a reason to practise and improve you have something to aim for. From my experience of teaching these exams are addictive as well, people can't wait to get new pieces and go up through the grades.

Don Greene is a former Green Beret who now works as a sports psychologist with Olympic athletes, and also helps professional musicians and others cope with performance anxiety. One of his recommendations is that you get your heart rate up and do a practice where you go all out, surrender control, and find a wild, joyful freedom in what you're doing. It's meant to break you out of tentativeness and frozen anxiety. Try that, and try to find natural, uninhibited enjoyment in speaking. Someone who is having fun at the front of the room is fun to listen to, and that untamed enjoyment is contagious. Your delivery might sound awful, but if you radiate joy, it can turn any delivery into sheer music.

Speaking should always be fun and a good fun way of getting familiar with your voice as it sounds to you when you are speaking (and not how it sounds to others or when recorded) is to read out loud. If you have children read to them, make the stories come alive by using your voice. When you are in the kitchen take out a packet of food from the cupboard and read out loud what it says on the packet. Take your time, pause between the ingredients, make the product sound irresistible.

If all other tips fail, I would ask why you have no vocal delivery? Could it be a reflection of how you are feeling about your company? If so, then it is time to take a step back and remind yourself why you do what you do. As humans, we naturally have vocal variety.