Your Speech Coach

That fact that women speak differently than men is not surprise. What is enlightening is to discover how those differences effect the way women’s messages are perceived. Unfortunately they are often perceived as less credible and less persuasive. My first paid speech 26 years ago was on gender differences in nonverbal communication and I remember women in my audience being upset with that finding. If you have read any of John Gray’s Mars and Venus books you know that men often see women as being too emotional and that aspect of our voices is one of the factors that reduce our vocal credibility.

I coach women in my public speaking workshops and my women and leadership programs to hone their voices on certain factors that will affect their persuasiveness and credibility. Recently I read research that indicates there is another reason that men perceive female voices as emotional.

Dr. Michael Hunter, of Professor Peter Woodruff´s group in the Department of Psychiatry and Division of Genomic Medicine at the University of Sheffield studied the differences in the way men’s brains interpret voices and found that, “The female voice is actually more complex than the male voice, due to differences in the size and shape of the vocal cords and larynx between women and men, and also due to women having greater natural `melody´ in their voices.. This causes a more complex range of sound frequencies than in a male voice.” What is interesting is that when a man hears a female voice, the auditory section of his brain, that is in his emotional right hemisphere, is activated so he hears the voice as being more emotional rather than rational and when he hears a male voice the part of the brain, sometimes called the mind’s eye, that compares current experiences to one’s self is activated. Female voices sound more emotional to men than their own based purely on where they are processed in his head!!

I will be blogging about other factors like breathiness, up endings, vocal qualifiers, and pitch that effects our perception of voices. I would love to hear how you think Hilary Clinton’s vocal characteristics effect her credibility. In the meantime, listen to some of the voices of the women speaking here ( This site is a great source for both written transcripts of speeches and well as audio recordings) and tell me what you think.

At CEOgo.com you can read about CEO Capital: A Guide to Building CEO Reputation and Success (John Wiley & Sons). The book describes the inextricable link between CEO and corporate reputation. The author of the book has a great blog called Reputation Watch.
One blog entry talks about research done by Standford and Wharton professors on the effect of public knowledge of CEO salaries. Surprisingly the researchers found that, “…negative press attention about CEO salary had little or no effect on how much chief executives get paid. The authors examined 15,000 press articles on CEO compensation between 1994 to 2002 and found little change in how much companies paid their chieftains despite harsh criticism from journalists.”

It is important to know that in whatever job you have, every time you communicate, you want to be you, the very best you, but truly you. I agree with the article’s recommendation for transparency… showing some vulnerability and admitting your mistakes is part of being an honest human being. Though I, like many others have a problem with people who do horrendously ugly and or unethical things… think Martha Stewart, Ken Lay, Hugh Grant, and recently Alec Baldwin, and act as if an apology on a TV talk show should absolve them of their sins. Read the Wired article and let me know your opinion.

I just finished reading a fascinating article in Wired Magazine called The Transparent CEO. Some of you know that I coach CEO’s and other high level executives on their interpersonal skills.

 The article shares stories that show the importance of a CEO having a presence online and the shift in our media driven culture from a “keep it secret” corporate PR mentality, to “tell them the truth and they will love you” mentality.

When I coach CEO’s and other high level executives I work on their  interpersonal, speaking, and media interviewing skills. One of the most important attributes of a CEO is integrity. 96% of CEO’s believe that a good corporate reputation is important to their companies, but how many know how much their behavior reflects on that reputation and do anything to improve it?

Last week I was asked by Psychology Today to study tapes of the speeches and
interviews of the top presidential candidates. Over the next few weeks I will
be posting the detailed notes I took as I read over 12 hours of tapes on the
candidates. As you read these notes I want you to be thinking of what you do
nonverbally during your speeches and how it may be “read” by your audiences.

Body language analysis of Presidential candidate  Barack Obama.
One of the most interesting and dramatic aspects of Obama’s body and para
language is that it changes so much from speech to speech and location to
location. While many candidates slow down their speech slightly to charm
their southern audiences and increase their rate for New York news shows,
Obama transforms. For example, if you had never heard him speak before and
watched him give his Selma Alabama speech you would note his voice is
extremely slow and takes on the relaxed consonants and cadence of Alabama.
When he is interviewed on1/10/2007 concerning his response to the Bush
Speech his voice pace is face, his speech is clipped, and his consonants are
crisp.
When he is out in crowds he stops to talk to someone, he laser focuses on
them. He gives them significant extended eye contact, leans forward and
stays in their intimate zone of space. These behaviors we observed in the
“charismatic” Clinton.
Remember what makes a candidate look honest and powerful to us when we view
him or her on the small screen, may be counter to what may look appropriate
to the audience he or she is speaking to when they are taped live.

When speaking, behind a podium or on a stage without one,  he does
something rather unusual…  he turns his face and body to either side or moves his
entire body towards the audience to shows his desire to empathize and
connect with them. However, when we view that on video, we may read it
differently subconsciously. For example, In the Selma speech he turns his
face and body to his right side then left again and again, rather than focus
to the front and center. Front and center speaking is read as more honest,
more forthright and powerful. On the tapes,  heactually leans his  body from the waist up out towards the audience of  students as he makes each point. Typically candidates stay straight up and down to show they are “straight” and strong on issues.
Obama’s body language cues are different in debates and interviews than in
speeches. In his third televised debate with Alan Keys, Obama becomes visibly angry:

he jabs out his finger at the interviewer in a symbolic weapon even a one time at
the end of the interview. At one point he even puts up both hands with the
forefingers out, symbolically firing as if there were guns in each hand. He
pushes his hand out toward, not just in a symbolic stop sign, but a more
aggressive pushing away motion. Nonverbally we can see he is an emotional
man. Look for interviews like his response to Bush speech. Watch his mouth
goes up more on his left side. Our emotional right hemisphere controls the
left side of he face  and when there is a split face and one side shows more than
the other,  note which side. The mouth twisting up to his left says he was
feeling very emotional, and though he wished to control it, he couldn’t.