I’m sure many of you, like me, are currently spending much of your working and indeed some of our social lives on video calls. I’ve seen a lot of content out there to help people with the technical and visual aspects for video but not much on what is perhaps the most essential ingredient of all, effective use of the voice.
So how do you generate the same presence on a Zoom call that you could get in a face to face meeting or on a conference stage? Well, my guest this week is the perfect person to help. Caroline Goyder is an internationally renowned voice coach who works actors, broadcasters and business professionals. She is the author two books and her TED talk on speaking with confidence as been view over 7 million times.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The voice as an instrument and the importance of presence
• The difference between talking face to face and via a Zoom call
• Being confident without being self-conscious
• The importance of voice in leadership
• Lessons to learn from professional performers
Caroline’s book is available here, and if you send your receipt to info@gravitasmethod.com you can receive the audio course she mentioned free of charge.
Subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:04]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 269 of the Recruiting Future podcast. I’m sure many of you, like me, are currently spending much of your working, and indeed some of your social lives, on video calls. I’ve seen a lot of content out there to help people with the technical and visual aspects of video, but not much on what is perhaps the most important ingredient of all, effective use of the voice. So how do you generate the same presence on a zoom call that you could get in a face to face meeting or on a conference stage? Well, my guest this week is the perfect person to help. Caroline Goyder is an internationally renowned voice coach who works with actors, broadcasters and business professionals. She’s the author of two books and her TED talk on speaking with confidence has been viewed over 7 million times. Hi Caroline and welcome to the podcast.
Caroline Goyder [00:02:09]:
Hi Matt, lovely to be here.
Matt Alder [00:02:10]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Caroline Goyder [00:02:16]:
Hello, I’m Caroline Goyder. I am a writer, a voice expert and a speaker in times when stages happened and speeches happened.
Matt Alder [00:02:24]:
Fantastic. So want to talk a lot about voice in this conversation. Unsurprisingly, before we do, maybe a bit more about your background. So you’ve just published a book called Find you’d voice the to Talking with Confidence in any Situation. What inspired you to write this book and tell us a little bit about your story?
Caroline Goyder [00:02:43]:
Well, this book really exists because in 2014 I did a TEDx talk which has gone on to be viewed seven and a half plus million times. And the talk happened because I wanted to share with a wider audience the idea that, you know, we can all overcome feelings of fear about speaking to big audiences and that we can all become good speakers when we practice. Because when I got to drama school about 100 years ago, they said to me, you have no presence, you have no resonance, you have no charisma. Your voice is thin. You know that I received so much negative feedback and I remember thinking, I can’t change this. And actually that’s not true. If someone says to you at work, which your audience will hear a lot about people they’re working with, he or she has no gravitas, that’s entirely changeable. And so my work, my talks, my books are about helping people have a growth mindset around presence. Gravitas impact all those things that, you know, your audience know how important they are in the work world. They’re crucial.
Matt Alder [00:03:57]:
Now, in your TED Talk, you talk about the voice as an instrument. And it’s really interesting to, you know, to watch that and think about it in that way. Perhaps as a starting point. Tell us about that. How is a voice like an instrument?
Caroline Goyder [00:04:13]:
Well, if I think about, if I go back to, you know, my problem and being told I had no presence. The route to unlocking presence is to get out of your head and into your body. And the reason that’s so important is that we hear the voice coming out of people’s heads. And so we kind of assume that that’s where it’s happening. But when you think about it, the voice is really about the body because it’s about the lungs, the diaphragm. The lungs, if you think about it as a guitar, are the hitter, because air produces voice, exhaled air. The larynx, which is in your throat, is a set of muscles which really function as the string of your voice. And the body, your body, particularly above your larynx, but also the, you know, the bones of your body, that’s the. What resonates the sound. So you’ve got the larynx as the string, the breath as the hitter, and your body as the resonator. So it’s so close to, you know, any musical instrument that you can think of, a guitar, a saxophone. And I think the more we understand the importance of the body, the more we learn to inhabit our voices and the more presence we have at work.
Matt Alder [00:05:25]:
Absolutely. And presence at work is a. Is obviously something that’s really interesting at the moment because very, very large amount of people, particularly people who have to be on lots of calls and do lots of presentations, are working from home. So meetings and presentations are via. Via zoom. Zoom appears to become, appears to have become the word for any type of video call. Now, not just ones done on that platform, but obviously other platforms are available. What is the difference between someone speaking someone to someone face to face, or presenting to a room of people Face to face and doing the same thing over a video platform like Zoom.
Caroline Goyder [00:06:08]:
I’ll give you a really specific example from last week, which is that I was working with a C suite exec who had his annual results presentation. And when we got onto the call with him, the platform, which I won’t name, he said, I’m losing my voice and it feels really sore and it feels really tight. By the end of the day I feel like I’m not communicating the way I want to. And so to unpick why that’s happening is really to unpick the difference between video conferencing and you know, face to face meetings. One is that he’d been sitting all day and when he goes into work, you know, he’s walking around the floor, he’s going into other people’s offices, he’s maybe got a client lunch or a meeting with investors, he’s probably on a plane some of the time he’s moving. But when you have back to back calls from 8am to 6pm across time zones, you’re sitting all day. And the other thing I said to him is, are you drinking water? Because we can get so glued to our desks that we don’t even take a glass of water. Whereas in the office, you know, probably someone would bring him one or he’d get a cup of tea. So we’re sitting all day, we’re talking non stop, we’re not really moving and we’re not drinking enough, not hydrating enough. And because the voices of the body, all of those things will affect it to the extent that by the end of the day you might start losing your voice. So it’s something that’s really important for us to think about that’s really interesting.
Matt Alder [00:07:37]:
And I suppose another aspect of it, about 200 years ago I did a, I did a drama degree and before that I did lots of training in singing. And one of the things that, that taught me was the importance of warming up, you know, vocal warm ups and all those kind of things. Is that valid in this situation? What’s your, what’s your, what’s your thoughts on that?
Caroline Goyder [00:08:00]:
Yes, I’m with you. I’m all about the warm up, I think. And it does, you know, what you will have learned when you train professionally, you’ll have learned to do a, you know, 20 minute physical warm up, 10 minutes of breathing and then, you know, 10, 15 minutes of resonance and articulation. Probably, you know, our corporate audience doesn’t need quite that much. But I said to him, he’s a runner. And I said to him, the running is great, but you might want to do some yoga stretches to balance it. Because as you know from a professional training, the more released muscles in the hips, muscles in the spine, muscles in the ribcage are muscles, the shoulders, the jaw, the neck, the more our voices are free and fluid, and the more our voices are free and fluid, the less we hack away at them. So the first thing I said is do five minutes of stretches when you come back from your run. And then the second thing I say really regularly to clients is put a song on that you love and sing along to it, you know, from your heart, at the top of your lungs and really enjoy letting your voice be open and free. And that for most people is enough just to get the voice warm and also to get your energy up. So in other words, you don’t have to do a full professional warm up, but five minutes of stretching and five minutes of singing or humming if you don’t want to sing is really good to do. And I do do that because it makes such a difference.
Matt Alder [00:09:27]:
We’ve talked about the sort of, the physical aspect of this. What about the confidence side of things? Because people are sitting on video calls, they’re in their own home, they may not be thinking about how they project themselves and come across as much as they would in a, in a more formal face to face environment. And at the same time, I think it’s probably very easy to be self conscious if you’re, you feel like you’re going over the top in terms of how you’re projecting yourself on a video video call. How can people stand out and, and sound confident without being self conscious about it?
Caroline Goyder [00:10:05]:
I think, Matt, this is the real problem of this Covid world and this video conference world because someone said to me recently, our worlds have collapsed. You know, we used to go to work, most of us, and then we would come home. And right now, home is work is also where you socialize over, you know, virtual martinis. It’s also where you homeschool your kids, if that’s something that you’re doing. It’s also where you work out, you know, so our different selves have suddenly all collapsed into one. But my sense is that to protect ourselves, we need to demarcate those different spaces. And so what I would say to people is that the you who shows up to a client meeting or an internal meeting at work is also the you who should show up in your work meetings on Zoom. And the question is how you take five minutes before that call just to get into that work zone and that warm up that we’ve talked about might help. It also might help you to put on a work jacket or to put on, you know, gender appropriately, the lipstick that you would wear for a work meeting. Because this is the only platform that we have right now to show our professional selves. And I think we don’t want to collapse the home self into the work self because they are different. And when you protect the work self and keep the right amount of formality, you also protect the self who at home collapses on the sofa in their pajamas. So find the version of you that you want to bring to Zoom calls and keep it separate to your work, your home self. It’s a bit like what a performer learns, how you get into character in your dressing room, in a way. We need that now, I think.
Matt Alder [00:11:52]:
Absolutely. And what about from a leadership perspective? So obviously, lots of people who listen to the show are leading teams. They’re now having to do that remotely. They may well be on more Zoom calls than the rest of their team are on a daily basis. How important is voice in terms of leadership, and what can leaders think about in this area?
Caroline Goyder [00:12:15]:
Your voice is massive. It’s so important. And the best metaphor to explain why is to think about the last flight you got, where the plane hit turbulence, and to think about when the pilot’s voice came over the intercom, what you listened for in terms of their calm. Because as we’ve said, the voice is exhaled air. And exhaled air tells you all about someone’s nervous system. Now, in crisis communications, which all leaders are in, you know, now and for the next few months, unless you work in certain tech businesses, which are Amazon, maybe that’s not so true for. But most businesses, we’re in a degree of crisis comms, aren’t we? What your audience are listening for is not what you’re saying. They’re listening for how you say it. And they’re listening for your comfort in uncertainty and your comfort in your vision, in how you get them out of this problem. So your voice is communicating that. Now, the problem with the voice is that so much of it is unconscious. But what you’ve touched on and what performers know is that you can warm up to get yourself into a calm place where when you speak, your system communicates calm. And I’m a big fan of things like meditation, yoga, singing, because all of those disciplines get the nervous system to a place of calm, a place where you can operate from the parasympathetic nervous system, rest or Digest. And that’s what will give you pilot of the plane, calm in a turbulent situation. So, yes, voice is massive for leadership. I’d go as far to say as it’s the most important thing you have going for you right now as a leader.
Matt Alder [00:14:06]:
So you’ve worked with lots of professional actors and broadcasters. What lessons have you learned from people who are professional at this that could easily be passed on to normal people like us?
Caroline Goyder [00:14:18]:
It’s funny because I wrote a book about 10 years ago where I interviewed a list actors about this kind of thing. And since I did those interviews, I know that I’ve used some of the tips almost every day in my life. And one of the tips came from George Clooney, who said that when he meets people, even if they’re total strangers, he imagines that he’s meeting an old friend. And what it gives you is a quality in the nervous system of enjoyment and release and ease which communicates to them and they sparkle back at you. And it also gives you vocally what’s called a happy hello, which is a sense of warmth and connection which really makes others feel good around you. So I think borrow from George Clooney would be my first tip. And treat your audiences on your video conferences as old friends. Simon Sinek is worth watching for this on his video conferences because he does it really well. The other tip I’ve used almost every day came from Bill Nighy, who said that when he’s nervous, he asks himself, how can I help? And I think that’s massive for the world we’re in right now. He said, when I worry about, you know, what I have to offer, or if I’m, you know, if I can compete with other actors, if I’m good enough, he said the focus is all on me. But he said when I think, how can I help these people, the focus goes out on his audience. And he said, at that point, you’re in service and it’s the servant leader, isn’t it? And when we’re in service, we are so much more fluid, more at ease, more compelling, more charismatic. So there are days where I feel so nervous and I just think, how can I help? And it unlocks everything so quickly.
Matt Alder [00:16:11]:
Some absolutely fantastic advice there. So final question. Where can people find you and where can they find your book?
Caroline Goyder [00:16:18]:
The new book, Find you’d Voice and the previous book, Gravitas, are all available on Amazon on Audible, because I know lots of people prefer audiobooks these days and in all good bookstores. And my website is Caroline goyder.com and what we’re doing at the moment. If people buy the book and if they send us a receipt to infogravitasmethod.com we will send them a free set of audio courses which we normally charge quite a lot of money for. So do feel free to send us a receipt and we’ll send you an audio course.
Matt Alder [00:16:54]:
Fantastic stuff Caroline. Thank you very much for talking to me.
Caroline Goyder [00:16:57]:
Pleasure. Enjoyed it.
Matt Alder [00:16:59]:
My thanks to Caroline Goyder. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for Recruiting Future. You can also listen and subscribe to the show on Spotify. You can find all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about recruiting. Working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
