Hello and a very merry Christmas from the picturesque village of Cazorla in Spain,home of the best olive oil on the planet!I hope you enjoy my Christmas video message.

As we leave for a few days of well earned R&R in Spain I just wanted to thank all of you fellow presenters and influencers, experienced and inexperienced, for your support and comments over the past year.

Our skills are going to be even more important in 2009. Smart businesses, like the one I met with yesterday, understand that the best way to beat the economic situation is to refresh their skills and be even better at presenting and influencing in 2009. The year is packed full of amazing opportunities for the savvy and the courageous. I look forward to celebrating all our successes in the coming year

Namaste

Today I’d like to share with you some observations I made after being “caught” by a membership canvasser for GreenPeace.

Now normally I must admit that I avoid such uninvited sales pitches but today I voluntarilly chose too listen to their pitch and I have to say I was impressed. So impress in fact that I thought I’d share some of my observations with you because we can all learn from good practice irrespective of the source.

So here’s what I noticed:

1. The pwer of a smile!  – The young lady in question engaged me witha warm smile and strong eye contact before she ever started to speak.
2. Confident handshake – After saying hi, she introduced herself and offered her hand. I shook it and immediately felt a higher degree of connection with my enthusiastic canvasser.
3. Infectious enthusiasm – Sharia was clearly enthusiastic about her cause.  I could see it in her eyes and body language  in her voice and  and I could her it in her voice and vocabulary.
4. Establish common ground – By asking some great questions early on, she ascertained by interest in and knowledge of Greenpeace and its activities.  She then went o  to deepen that by exploring my views on environmental issues.
5. Utilise the influence principle of comittment and consistency – Once she knew how interested I was, she managed the conversation in such a way, using great questions, so that I was encouraged to publically express my pro-environmental views, thus making it much mopre likely that I would act in a consistent way to these stated views by signing up for Greenpeace
6. Tell an emotive story – Sharia was a natural storyteller and she had a repertoire of powerful short stories that clearly brought the work that Greenpeace do to life for me.

Get the picture.  So perhaps you can think about how you could  utilise these same principles to increase your ability to persuade and influence others.

This may sound like a strange question but it is a vital one for presenters and public speakers.    Most of us take our voice for granted and yet  it is a such more powerful and complex  that we owe it to ourselves to develop our ability to make the most of it.

In this post I’d like to explore just one aspect of the voice, that of resonance.  The human body is fully of hollow, air filled cavities that resonate when we speak.   The main resonating chambers are

• Chest cavity
• Throat
• Nasal Cavities & Sinuses

Some people  have learned to speak “normally” from one of the these three chambers and as a result they have a particular vocal tone.   If you tend to project your voice via your sinuses you will have a brighter, higher pitched and more nasal sound.  If you tend to project from the chest cavity, your voice will be deeper, more rounded and resonant because the chest cavity is much bigger.

The good news is that anyone can easily learn to vary their tonality simply by changing the resonating chamber they are focussing on.

Here’s a simple exercise to get you started.

Stand up straight, take a deep breath and put your hand lightly on the bridge of your nose.   Now, imagining that the sound were coming from this area of your head, say out loud “This is my nose” and notice the quality of the sound produced and how it feels within your body

Now repeat the above exercise with your hand placed lightly on your throat and focus on projecting the sound from this area of your body.  Say outloud “This is my throat” and notice how it sounds and feels.

Finally, place your hand on the middle of your chest and focus on your voice vibrating in this part of your body.  Say out loud “This is my chest” and again pay attention to the sound and body feelings.

These exercises, if practised regularly, will help you to develop an awareness of how each area effects your voice.

Once you have this awareness you can experiment with speaking “normally” from one of these areas and notice how flexible you can become.   The next stage is to start to combine the resonance from two or more chambers at the same time to “craft” the vocal tone you desire.

Have fun and let me you how you get on.

Hi

Although this post is not directly about presentation or influencing skills It is very relevant to anyone who reads this blog and who is not sure how to use RSS (Really Simple Syndication).   It is also a great example of a different type of audio visual presentation!