A Charismatic Voice? No Problem!
For people who are used to work with other people (on the phone or face to face, it does no t matter) communication skills come to be the most important skills ever. We can go to workshops, read a book or put together our all experiences we have had in order to be effective and in order to solve possible conflicts and avoid misunderstandings.
But there are things that sometimes we are not aware of, and as a consequence they can be very difficult to control and to change. Mehrabian called them “implicit messages”. They can be unconscious. They can be transmitted through our voice sound.
It doesn’t matter what we say, if we say it in a manner that is not congruent with our message, it has no effect. Let’t think of sentences that expresses irony or sarcasm. In these cases people orientate to the sound of our voice (and not to the message) when it comes to interprete the message itself. Exactly the same thing happens in other cases of incongruency.
Our voice pitch can be interpreted in different manner, it depends if it is high or low. A higher voice pitch can express submission, and so trying to be hard and dominant with this kind of pitch may have no desired outcome. Imagine a woman with a very high pitch screaming something like “Stop talking!”. Now imagine another woman with a lower pitch shouting the same sentence. The result is very different, right? A charismatic voice would be different…
Maybe you think that it is not possible to change your voice pitch or you may think that this could be very difficoult. Well, if it was so, there would not exist any singer. You can learn how to control your voice.
With easy exercises it is not only possible to change the pitch, but also to learn how to be aware of situations that require another pitch as well. If a specific pitch comes easily, it is not always because it is “right” (thinking it is simply “the human nature”), as there are different reasons responsible for the wrong use at that specific time, for example bad habits or cultural environment. If a person for example was not allowed to talk at the table with her parents when she was little, this person may develop a soft voice at business meetings (this was a coaching case I have had some years ago). As well women who think are not feminine enough, develop a higher voice pitch in different phases of their life, as higher voice pitch is seen by men instinctively as more attractive than a lower one.
Try to listen to other people talking, to the changes they have in their pitch, observe the impression that you have of these voices and listen to yours when you talk. Observing and comparing is the first step to learn how to optimize the effect of your voice in your communication setting. It will take a while until it will come naturally, but it is worth studying it! Don’t forget: Voice is one of the 12 Charismatic Leadership Tactics by Antonakis!