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Focus For The Week

There is a perfect instrument.

It is more expressive than a violin, more rousing than a trumpet, more precise than a piano and more unifying than the primal beat of a drum.

You own one of these instruments. Your voice. Do you know how to play it?

Your Result

You are succeeding.

All eyes are locked on. When you pause, there is total silence in the room. You hold the pause a little longer to test it. The attention increases.

Your vibrations break the moment, and you start your final story; the story that builds the desire to work with you to deliver the result, together.

Your Action

In my ‘Present like a Pro’ webinar in January (I promised I would launch a course of the same name in April – we are on schedule and you can sign up today) I said that professional speakers go onstage to create emotion, change perspectives and generate action. If we cannot do that, we don’t get paid.

You can create emotion in others with your vibrations.

When you speak, you vibrate the air around you.

The air molecules you set in motion from movements deep within your body, vibrate against the bodies of other people.  This incredibly personal and sensual interaction transmits authority and emotion to them.

Their ear drums are particularly sensitive to your vibrations. But their ribs and their chest cavities also vibrate in sympathy with your vibrations.  If you’ve been to a concert, you have felt your body vibrate, the drums and the bass notes compressing your chest.

Your voice is, quite literally, your vibe.

When you want to be understood, to influence, to unite, excite or persuade, you have at your disposal a perfect instrument.

It is more expressive than a violin. It is more rousing than a trumpet. It is more precise than a piano and more unifying than the primal beat of a drum.

Your instrument is also incredibly revealing. We are very sensitive creatures. I can immediately sense that you are not confident in yourself, that you fear us, the audience, or that you are in flow and on your A game, by the quality of vibration your body is transmitting to my body.

In an even deeper sense, then, your voice communicates the level that you are ‘vibrating at’ spiritually: in flow or in fear, for example: your vibe.

How can you play your instrument more effectively? We need to start with a quick guide to the instrument.

How Your Voice Works

A violin has three main sound producing parts: a string that vibrates, a bow that powers the vibration and a beautiful wooden soundbox that amplifies the vibration.

A piano has three main sound producing parts: strings that vibrate, hammers that power the vibration and a beautiful wooden case that amplifies the vibration.

A human has three main sound producing parts: vocal folds that vibrate, breath that powers the vibration and a beautiful body that amplifies the vibration.

Now there are things you can do with the vocal folds. For example, you can change their tension, like you can change the length of a violin string, to alter pitch. You can bring them together to make the sound more intense and less ‘breathy’. When you whisper you move them far apart, for example.

But in terms of the quality of your vibe, this part brings the lowest returns on your effort. Changing the strings on a violin will not alter it as much as changing the soundbox (resonance) or the way the bow is used across them.

I will invite you to play with your breathing and your soundbox today, if you’re up for it?

Powering your Vibe

Your breath powers your vibe. Like the hammer of the piano or the bow of the violin.

Whether I am preparing to dive to 100m without a tank, about to go onstage in Las Vegas, trying to sleep after a run that was a little too late in the evening and with an early morning high stakes meeting on my mind: my ability to use, change and control my breath is my most critical tool.

To make your vibe more powerful, you must breathe differently.

This is immediately emotionally challenging. Breath and emotion are intimately connected. Because of this, many people start to feel ‘inauthentic’ when they consciously change their breath. This feeling disappears as you begin to master the process but that can take time.

The foundation of all breathwork is where you direct the air to as it enters your body. Wherever you are now, notice what part of your body moves as you breath. Unless you are trained in acting, yoga, speaking, anxiety management (some form of breathwork) it is likely that your chest is moving.

Try to direct that breath so that your belly moves. This is your natural state (just watch a dog or a baby breathe).

Don’t worry if this is hard. For most people, it is.

It’s challenging because vanity demands we hold our bellies in and use our breath to puff out our chests.

It’s challenging because you may be asking all of your anxious tension, which you are used to holding in your body perhaps for decades, to move to one side to allow your breath down through your diaphragm (the muscle that divides your chest and your belly) and into your abs and digestive organs (which, by the way, are now being massaged by each breath!).

Now see if you can make the sides of your belly expand. Can you make the breath go to the  back of your belly around your spine. How precisely can you direct your breath into your body?

To power up your bow and to give it finesse when you play your ‘string’ you need your breath moving into your belly.

We have much more to do to really power up your bow! But we’ve positioned it correctly, and that will make a huge difference and give you greater power and a more relaxed and authoritive ‘vibe’.

You can practice that in bed, in the car, standing on a train, sitting in a meeting about to speak. Keep practicing it until you notice that you breath naturally into your belly and not into your chest. This will fundamentally change your ability to connect with others.

Now we can use that breath to change your vibration…

Sending out your Vibe

Imagine you have the finest violin in the world. A Stradivarius with its careful combination of maple and spruce.

Now wrap fifty elastic bands around it. What is the effect? It cannot vibrate freely.

The bones and the spaces in our bodies are our soundbox.

That is how incredibly sensual your voice is. Your bones and spaces in your body vibrate. They cause another person’s body to vibrate in response to you, to your emotions, to your ideas.

When we are tense, nervous, anxious: we cover our soundbox with elastic bands. And although the listeners do not understand the process that is happening. They instinctively pick up your tense and anxious vibes.

We’ll do one simple thing today to help you increase the resonance in your soundbox. We’ll focus only on your ribcage and your head.

Put your hand on your ribs. Now hum until you feel your vibration. Keep humming as you breathe out – but now, on each exhalation, feel your body relax and sink into the chair (you can lie down to try this if you really want to progress fast).

As you sink into the chair (or floor or bed) feel your ribs relax and feel the vibration increase as you hum on that exhale.

Now direct your breath deep into your belly. See if you can make your belly button move in and out.

How does that change the quality of vibration in your ribs?

Now repeat all of the above with your hands on your head. Change the note, the pitch, until your head starts to vibrate.

Relax your neck until the vibrations can reach from your larynx (voicebox) to your skull.

If you have a person near you whom you trust, ask them to hold their hands on your chest or head or spine to see if they can feel you increasing your vibe!

Isn’t that just amazing?

Your Decision

That result I described at the top is yours for the taking. But it takes Decisions and Actions and a lot of (sometimes painful in my experience!) Evaluation.

If I’ve done my part well, I hope you are feeling more powerful in, and more connected to, the world around you. But perhaps with a feeling that there’s a long way to go.

You CAN learn to manage your instrument in tense situations, under pressure, when you are being tested. It takes practice and you have the basics to work with here.

If you want to supercharge the impact you make when you present by signing up for DARE: to speak at the super early bird price of £149, you can do so here. I will be publishing the final syllabus on the 11th March. The course will go live on 28th April.

The super early bird link will be removed at midnight on this Wednesday, 5th March.

My Week

Alongside two fabulous events presenting on DARE High Performance: by design in the UK and one EMEA event online, I have been writing the new course.

Then on to France to meet with an exec team to discuss how they can use Stagecraft and Storytelling to support their work driving a global transformation to High Performance behaviours.

I’ve also taken the opportunity here in France to spend a couple of days in the mountains. The hills were too daunting for running so I have been using the world’s best positioned treadmill (share a photo if you can beat this!)

Write your story! 🖋️

Jim