“Thanks for the great voice session last night. Your observation about me often repeating the first word of a sentence twice has really helped me out. I have taken your advice to speak straight out and emphasize the first word more. Because of the class, now I pay much more attention to how other people speak as well and can pick up on little nuances and their communication styles.”

”Because I have an Asian accent, I find listening and understanding other foreign accents much easier.  I hear how the Americans in our class have much more trouble listening to foreign accents and so I work much harder to speak slowly and clearly in order to be understood.”

As the instructor for the voice and speech class, I want to point out that we form a group voice consciousness very quickly by working in a telephone virtual world of sound. No one is distracted by physical presence and listening well and speaking well become heightened. Learning to listen is a vital part of speaking skills.

One might say that speaking and listening are very intimate bedfellows. Most people do not realize that they really don’t listen closely when others speak and therefore they fall into the trap of making many conscious or unconscious assumptions about the speaker’s content, attitude and over all personality.

To keep your listener from making assumptions, which are often fueled by the listener’s prejudices, it is important to use your voice to get your MEANING across as clearly, powerfully and confidently as you can.

In our June course we have the maximum of 6 participants: 3 are American speakers and 3 are foreign speakers, Africa, India and Asia. No matter what your accent, VPS begins with the basics of good voice production: learning to breathe in a relaxed way.

You learn to inhale and then speak the words as you exhale, making sure not to trail off at the end of your phrases and/or sentences.  This is a simple voice and speech technique and yet each person breathes in a very individual way and as their exhale passes through his/her vocal chords a very unique sound is produced. So unique that each person’s voiceprint will identify him/her.

The group is always amazed at how the same breathing technique creates such a different and powerful sound in each voice.  This realization is the beginning of Your Voice Power: learning to have the control of your sound and using it to project whatever meaning you choose.

Next, we teach you to sound confident, clear and credible by teaching you to pronounce your words clearly and with rhythm.  Many Americans and foreign speakers drop the ends of their words, run their words together and don’t hear that words have rhythm. It is important to be able to hear 3 degrees of stress in English words.

The group format allows you to sharpen your enunciation and get instant feedback from others in the class when you are not understood. As a voice coach, my professional opinion on accents, whether they are foreign or American, is that the listener must easily and readily understand the accent.

Finally Voice Power Studios gives you a self-practice plan to use until your new speaking skills become part of your natural speaking voice. The time this takes varies according to how much you practice with moderate practice 1 –2 months.
VPS Voice and Speech 101 course is offered every other month and the next one runs on Monday nights, August 10th through 31st. To register or for more information contact Barbara Lopez at barbaraUL@aol.com or call 1-877-783-2455.