1. Listen to your outgoing phone messages for a few days. How are your vocal habits and voice quality? These are habits you can practice every day.
2. For better projection, open your mouth wider, so that you can articulate each word clearly. This helps with both volume and enunciation.
3. To reduce vocal stress, sip lukewarm liquid. Don’t clear your voice repeatedly, or you will make matters worse. Remember that strain in your voice is almost always more obvious to you than it is to your audience.
4. To sound more confident, avoid sentences that end with an upward note at the end, making them sound like questions. Instead, end each sentence (or phrase) with a downward emphasis.
5. Too many ums? Slow down slightly. Become more at ease with a pause. Rehearse your content out loud, not just in your head.
6. Avoid common qualifier words like “hopefully, maybe, a little, just…” which weaken your message. Be direct and forceful in your wording.
7. Breathe before you begin speaking. You’ll have enough breath to end each sentence with full voice; and you won’t trail off at the end of a sentence.
8. Try to keep from thinking ahead too much – if you lose your train of thought, you will end up with more fillers.
9. Use a voice recorder or listen to your voice messages to check your enunciation, volume and clarity.
10. For greater vocal interest and inflection, emphasize 2-3 key words in each sentence. Experiment with which words to emphasize, making sure you don’t change the meaning of the sentence.
