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How To Improve Your Professional Voice / Vocal Image

Introduction

Humans are exceptional at making quick judgements. People make very quick judgements about who you are within seconds of meeting. 

What is a Vocal Image?

The image that other people create in their minds as you open your mouth and speak. 
It makes 50% of your first impression. Another 50% is contributed by your Visual Image. Visual image is your dress code combined with your body language and we all are somewhat aware of focusing on our visual image.
People make judgements depending on your visual and vocal images about
  • Who you are a person 
  • How successful you are
  • How confident do you look
  • How friendly and trustworthy do you look
You use your vocal image very dynamically when you are with your friends and sharing something that you are excited about. The problem arises when you use your professional or default voice, and then you start to sound like a "child asked to play an adult", serious, with no facial expressions, and monotonous. In this situation, we are left with very few vocal dynamics and facial expressions, making us less engaging, less influential, and less impactful.

Ways To Improve Vocal Image

Understand How Powerful Your Voice can be 

Your voice is much more than an instrument used to project your words out of your mouth into the ears of others.
Your range of emotions lives underneath your voice. What words we use is essential but the way we use our voice is equally important. 
Listeners have mirror neurons in their brains which allows them to share the emotions that you are experiencing unless you are good enough at causing them to feel them.
For example. Why do we get scared in horror movies or cry in emotional scenes? Because our mirror neurons allow us to share the emotions of the characters.
We can use our voice to help others feel what we want them to feel, to create more understanding, clarity, and connection.

Develop Your Vocal Taste and Style

Expose yourself to more vocal styles. An easy way to do this is to watch the top 20 ted talks videos by view count to become aware of how powerful people's voices can be by paying attention to them.

How to Develop a Sense of Style?

Ask yourself.
  1. Who uses their voice in a way that grabs your attention and draws you in? If you like something about someone's voice, why do you like it or what qualities in that person's voice do you like?
  2. What annoys you and what you don't like? If you find someone's voice annoying, what qualities about that person's voice do you find annoying?
You can develop a sense of taste and style by having clarity on what vocal image do you like and what vocal image do you want to have?

Look in the Vocal Mirror

Build self-awareness. You can not go where you want to go if you don't know where you are. Build more awareness of what your vocal image is saying about you. 
The best way to do it is to record yourself, then listen and look at it. Write down the following things
  • What do you like about your vocal image?
  • What are the limitations of your vocal image? i.e., Is your vocal image saying something wrong about you?

Read Children's Books

Advantages
  • Use of emotive words that allows you to play with your voice way more
  • we tend to inflect more with children's books
  • we tend to be more dramatic
It is a very pragmatic way to practice and add more vocal variety to your voice. 

Create videos

It is the best way to practice and track your progress and helps you to see the progress that might be invisible if seen continuously. Make 1 video per month and at the end of the year, you will be left with 12 markers to track your progress.
Film yourself answering these questions
  1. What are three things you'd tell your 21-year old self?
  2. Share a lesson on happiness.
  3. What's something you need help with?
  4. Share a story about a moment in time that has shaped you into the person you are today.
  5. What was your biggest failure and what did you learn from it?
  6. What was your biggest success? and what did you learn from that?
  7. Tell me about one of your heroes, what 3 powerful lessons did you learn from them?
Or come up with any other question you like! The point of this exercise is to practice.



Location: India

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