This year may have been a challenging one at work, with more demands than usual put on you to speak in front of an audience, or make presentations online.

When we prepare the content for a speech, we gather interesting and relevant material and rehearse how long the presentation will take. But, do we take the time to actually speak the speech and find out how our delivery could be better?

When spoken presentations are made, the way we use our voices is of paramount importance. It’s literally make or break for the content to be received and understood in a way that is memorable for the right reasons.

Take a short sentence, for example, ‘In the coming months, the steady growth of the company is likely to continue.’ You can rush through this fairly bland line, there’s nothing surprising or particularly interesting there, unlikely to cause a ripple. Or is there? Take a breath, think about the meaning of the words: what will be the impact of steady growth? That’s a good thing, isn’t it? It’s hugely positive in an uncertain trading world. Let the word ‘growth’ sing out. Pitch the word higher than the other words. Make the word ‘growth’ linger longer and take up more space in the sentence. The word ‘continue’ also has very positive connotations. Growth isn’t going to be a flash in the pan, it’s going to continue and that is a strong basis for any organisation. So let these words have more time, emphasise them.

So what is pitch and how do we use it?

Pitch is the note of our voice, low notes are created using the base levels of our voice, we have the mid-range – the more usual or comfortable area – and the higher notes associated with surprise, excitement or even anxiety, if over-used.

Using a higher or lower pitch can help point to areas in your speech that you want your listeners to particularly hear.

Using our voice in any different way from what we normally do can sound odd to begin with. It can sound wrong or false. That is because we are used to speaking in a certain way or pattern, muscle memory enables us to speak on auto-pilot so we can think about the content rather than the way we are delivering our messages.

Trusting our new speech patterns takes time and commitment. Just a little change though, can make a big difference to our speech, which can become interesting and we sound committed and invested in what we are saying.

If you’d like to change just one or two things in your speech making, try these. Pitching up on key words, or using your voice to extend the length of a word you want to draw attention to. You’ll be surprised at how much difference this can make.

Write out a few sentences that you might use – even in a greeting before you get into the actual presentation – a find some key words you want to land with your audience. Practise out loud a few times and record yourself before, during and after a few goes. The more you practise, the better you get.

Your voice might just surprise you!

For more information on how to make your presentations even more compelling, please get in touch for a chat about how a professional business voice coach can help. I’m based in Bath, UK but coach professional people throughout the UK and across the world.