This brief article was originally run in an online “newspaper” based in my part of the UK – hence the rather choppy style – and I’ve posted it here because it’s good advice, even though it reads badly…. :)
Check for a moment, how you breathe and see if there’s a pattern. A pattern other than the obvious one of in, then out, and then in again! I’m talking about a pattern to how quickly you breathe or if you occasionally take a breath of a different length or depth.
Most of us are conditioned to think-and-speak almost as one and that’s related to the question of how you breathe – the pattern of how you speak is very largely built into the pattern of how you breathe. Without meaning to – or even realising it – you’ll convert your sentences or phrases to the length of time you can talk for without taking a breath.
That’s just common sense.
Over the length of a presentation, however, that can become the kind of pattern which begins to irritate your audience – particularly if it means you have to sometimes (or even often!) break up something that-should-be-kept-together into smaller parts. Because that’s how you breathe. And you find yourself. Always having sentences of. About the same length which. Can become very annoying. For anyone listening.
A bit of variety is crucial to being interesting – and the key to being able to have that variety lies in making sure you’re breathing with your diaphragm, not your chest.
That’s easier said than done, but it’s possible with practice!
I fully agree. Being a facilitator I know how important this is. If you are not relaxed your audience will be restless too.
I know exactly what he’s talking about with regard to the choppy, short sentences that stop you from finishing what you meant to say in a single sentence. It’s actually one of the social anxiety symptoms that got me interested in helping people that have intense social anxiety. If you get this feeling only when giving a speech, work on it with the methods that curved vision recommends. But if you get this all the time, even when you’re trying to tell a teacher you didn’t cheat, or trying to ask the waiter to take back an underdone steak, you may have social anxiety disorder. It’s for people like you that I created the Social Anxiety Secrets system. Check it out at http://www.socialanxietysecrets.com if you need help with more than public speaking.
Dr. Todd Snyder
clinical psychologist