Breathing for Public Speaking
I was invited to contribute to some public speaking courses in Plymouth, run by Alexis Bowater OBE, from Bowater Communications, which have been inspiring to work on. These are excellent day courses run by Alexis, a respected journalist, TV presenter and PR campaign leader and Duncan Little who has worked extensively in TV and now runs his own Hypnotherapy practise. As presenters, we all focused on why Pubic Speaking is so hard for many people and what we can do about it. That old fight/flight reflex affects people in so many different ways and it’s something we work with in singing lessons, choirs and workshops, a lot. Getting over this hurdle is vital for many of the attendees, as it affects their promotion potential. Promotion often means they have to give lectures, interviews, deal with press and that movement up the promotional ladder is thwarted because of the fear of speaking up.
So, what can we do about it?
Duncan explained an excellent model of why the brain freezes and how we change that. Understanding what is going on for you in the moment is halfway to making a better, more helpful change. Something we use a lot of in performance. Alexis gave us a wealth of her ‘experience won’ wisdom and the best 3 part preparation for ‘on the spot’ interviews ever – it was a golden nugget of information. Something that we can all use in so many situations . I cant give the game away - but it was brilliant!
I worked on getting breathing and voices unlocked – and my goodness they were all so brave! Working with Singers and Actors most of the time, I forget that the noises we make to warm up our voices are unusual to other ears! Once they got over the embarrassment and shock (!) I had them trilling, bubbling, sssing, shhhhhing and of course letting go of their bellies – big time! Voices that don’t modulate, don’t inspire! Getting expression into your voice requires some prep.
Getting them to breathe away from their chests and into their stomachs and to feel a change into calm and confident, was a real turning point. As singers, we know a high breath clamps our throats, limits our phrasing, tone and agility – but for non singers it is a massive new piece of information!
What was amazing is that they started to speak out loud, quite naturally, into the circle and then after our session, they got up and delivered an impromptu 1 minute speech in front of the others. so wonderful to hear.
It is important to remember, that like singing, we all need to keep practising our new found skills and embed them into our daily habits. New breathing skills obviously need practise as we are using new and different muscles to produce that change. So too with keeping our voices flexible. Interestingly, we noticed in choir a couple of our women who were in senior positions at work, seemed to have lost their vocal flexibility. We realised that using the lower, more professional and authoritative work tone was impacting their range and voicing. After particularly serious phone calls, zooms and meetings we got them to trill up through the soprano end of their voices to counteract that constriction and clamping. Worth trying!
Keeping our fact preparation up to date, so that in that crucial moment, we can use them effectively and be confident that we have everything we need under our finger tips, is vital. All the exercises in the world won’t work if you never do them. The biggest element I took from the course? Be prepared!