Improve Your Voice with Breath Support & Projection | Speak Clearly and Confidently

Hi everyone, it's Jennifer. Today we are going to work on breath support and we are going to work on breath support and projection of your voice so that people can clearly hear you when you are speaking. Everyone can benefit from working on breath support and projection and not only do I work with speakers who are not native speakers of English but I work with a lot of native English speakers and a lot of women on using their voice to sound more confident and clear when they are speaking and I always start with breath support. So let's start there and then again we're going to end the lesson with working on projection. When we breathe we don't really think about it. We're going to think about it today and we are going to think about breathing into the diagram which is down here. This is going to move. Some people say think about breathing into your stomach. I like to think about touching right here and you can feel this muscle expanding and you can feel then all of your lungs, the whole chest filling up with air and expanding. So let's do five big breaths breathing with the diagram. Very good. Okay as I started I was sort of using my shoulders to breathe in. As I got a little bit better then I was only using my diaphragm to breathe in. With breath support you also want to think about keeping your shoulders down so that you're nice and relaxed and then that allows you to be able to fill up your lungs more. Also think about sitting up a little taller or standing a little taller and I like to think of someone sort of pulling the back of my head up with a string that opens up my entire vocal tract and allows me to get a lot of air in and then it also helps me to allow that air to exit the mouth. This is leading into the second part of the lesson today which is voice projection. Being heard, being loud enough for the situation. So many people I know speak with more of a whisper not on purpose but it could be for many reasons. I work with many people where they kind of sit like this when they're having a meeting or they sit way back and then the lungs are kind of getting compressed and you can't really project your voice. I also see a lot of people speaking at the ground like this again you're kind of contracting everything you can't get good breath support and then your voice is hitting the ground or it's too far away from the person. So again really simple just think about sitting up and staying engaged with your communication partner the person that you are talking to. So that's a really easy tip just think about sitting up straighter and that helps with your voice tremendously. If you're new to this I also recommend to a lot of my students to stand up while they are in zoom meetings. That really does help with you to keep everything engaged and to be able to fill up your lungs more so that you can use good breath support and then good posture to help with your projection which means hitting your communication partner with your voice. So let's practice this. I'm going to take a deep breath. I'm going to have you take a deep breath and then we are going to count to five and I want you to think about touching me with your voice. All right are we ready let's take a big deep breath. One, two, three, four, five. Now let's try all the numbers together. One, two, three, four, five. How did you do? Okay if you felt like maybe you were screaming don't think about being louder again think about projection touching the person that you are speaking to. You can do this by putting an imaginary person a little further off from the computer like behind your computer or phone and think about hitting that person with your voice instead of being louder. So let's try let's direct our voice to beyond the computer. Now let's think about what happens if you feel like you were losing your projection. Maybe you weren't able to keep all of the air coming out of your mouth. Then what you're going to do until you get better at this is you are going to add a pause. Okay so we're going to try that. We're going to pause after each letter. Okay you ready? A, B, C. Okay very good. Now let's do A, B, C. And now let's try three. A, B, C. Awesome. Okay so to summarize our tip for today stand up a little straighter. Breathe in and fill up your lungs. Breathe deeper. Use your diaphragm and try to hit your communication partner. Direct the stream of your air to your communication partner so that you can be clear and confident in your speaking. Let me know what you thought about this lesson and let me know how this goes when you try this at work or in your next interaction with your friends. Give it a try. I can't wait to hear how it goes. Have an amazing day everybody.