How Diaphragmatic Breathing Is Linked to Your Voice -Blog Series: #7 ENGAGE

​How do you impact your audience, so they are engaged with your message and feel your passion in order to get the results you wished for? Perhaps your presentation or performance lacks punch or energy. Speaking without enough volume, without speech variation, or without measured pace and emphasis will cause your listeners not to engage.

To achieve engagement, rapport, and enjoyment from your presentations prepare yourself with your breathing skills and your strategic use of emphasis in your delivery. Your ability to have vocal readiness to build your audience emotionally with your story or examples is effective when you know where to pause to give added emphasis and where to change your tone nuances.

Here are a few key exercises to organize your content and warmup your voice.
#1. Vocal Warmup

• Drink water to keep your vocal folds moist
• Relax your body and mind to focus – take 3 deep breaths with the diaphragm
• Release any tension in your body with movement – stretches, dancing, shaking your limbs
• Mobilize you mouth and face with lip and tongue stretches, pouts, smiles, wiggles, open and close your mouth to loosen your jaw widely
• Hum slowly with closed lips, then open your mouth to utter smooth sound at varying pitch levels and volume: -Hmmmn – Ahhhhh- Aaawe - Ooooo, Eeee
• End with positive self-talk and energy – Yes! Yes! Yes!

 
#2. Mark your content with cues for your breathing, tone, and pauses

• Use a slant (/) in your rehearsal script where you need to take in a deep breath, so you with not run out air
• Underline a few key adjectives or verbs that you can emphasize with your vocal nuance to make your message clearly understood and varied
• Use a slant, or a cue to “Pause Here” before a significant word in your sentence. This draws in your audience to feel the emotional effect.
• Practise this technique with the following sentence: “John is coming home today.” Insert a pause before speaking any one of the words in the sentence.
  • John / is coming home today.
  • John is / coming home today.
  • John is coming / home today.
  • John is coming home / today.

Notice how your meaning will change depending on where you choose to insert the pause and the word that is emphasized. This strategy is most effective in storytelling when you are leading to a climax, or poetic imagery.

#3. Do a Drama Improv Warm-up to set up your creative energy.

• Point or pick up objects around your room, name each one as something else – for example, point to lamp and call it a dog, then talk to your dog; or pick up a pen and call it a toothbrush, then mime brushing your teeth with it. Do not plan, simply be spontaneous with whatever first comes into your mind, and have fun doing this exercise.
• Prepare the activities and exercises that will help you be confident and familiar with your next presentation. Review and mark your content where you will ask the audience a question, or have them do an activity as a group or in teams; or play a game, quiz, or take a poll; or have someone come up to be a helper or a participant. When you are relaxed and having fun presenting the activity; then so will your audience be engaged.

Throughout this series of 7 blog posts on How Diaphragmatic Breathing is Linked to your Voice, I created with my one-word anagram reminder for you:
BREATHE.

• B – Breathe with the diaphragm as your core strategy for all the letters

• R – Relax
• E – Energize
• A – Articulate
• T – Tone
• H – Humanize
• E - Engage

Diaphragmatic breathing is the deep breathing key that you want to master as an everlasting link to vitalizing your speech and rehearsing your crucial moments of your presentation.

If you would like more exercises to engage your audience with emphasis techniques, take a look at Chapter Seven on Engage With Emphasis in “Breathing…Just Steps to Breathtaking Speeches” by Speech Coach, Brenda C. Smith.
Have you read the previous Blog# 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 in this Series on How Diaphragmatic Breathing Is Linked to Your Voice?

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