Use the Voice

Your voice is an instrument. The ancients understood this quite literally.

Cicero, writing about oratory more than two thousand years ago, says: “The voice undoubtedly contributes most to effectiveness and excellence in delivery.” He tells a remarkable story about Gaius Gracchus. When Gracchus spoke in public, a musician stood concealed behind him with a small pitch pipe. If Gracchus became too forceful and his voice climbed, the musician sounded a note to bring him back down. If his voice became too flat, the note brought him back up.

Think about that. One of Rome’s great public speakers had someone standing behind him regulating his voice while he spoke.

Because under pressure, control of the voice is one of the first things to go. The pace changes. The pitch changes. Breath becomes shorter. Pauses disappear. And very quickly, the voice begins communicating something the words did not intend.

That is why your first instrument in leadership is not rhetoric. It is control.

Imagine someone asks you a difficult question in a meeting. You know everyone is waiting. Silence suddenly feels expensive. So you begin: “Well, I think there are probably a couple of different ways we could look at this…” You are speaking, but your thoughts have not arrived yet. The sentence exists mainly to buy time for the next sentence.

Try something different. Wait. One second is enough. Then: “There are two problems. The first is cost. The second is whether we should be doing this at all.”

Almost nothing has changed in the substance. But something important has changed in the relationship between thought and speech. The thought is now leading the voice.

This is what we are trying to train. Not slowness for its own sake. There is no simple rule that a slower speaker sounds more competent. In fact, faster speech can sometimes be heard as confidence. And taken too far, deliberate slowness sounds exactly like what it is. A performance.

The point is control of pace. Under pressure, most of us accelerate beyond the pace at which we can think cleanly. So slow down enough to put thought back in front.

The same is true of pitch. Research on voice and leadership has repeatedly found that lower-pitched voices are often perceived as stronger and more competent. But do not manufacture a deep voice. That produces another kind of strain. Instead, notice what happens when pressure pushes your voice upward. Let it settle.

The difference is subtle. You are not trying to sound like a leader. You are removing the signals that appear when you lose control of the instrument.

And then there is silence. Silence is difficult because the speaker experiences it differently from the room. To you, a two-second pause can feel enormous. To the listener, it may simply feel like someone thinking.

This is one reason experienced speakers can appear to have that quality we described in the introduction. Ease. They seem to have more time. Often, they do not. They are simply less willing to surrender the time they have.

That is trainable.

Start somewhere unimportant. A status update. A question in a meeting. A two-minute explanation. Before you begin, let the breath finish. Say the first sentence. Let it land. Do not attach a second sentence merely because the first one has ended.

When someone asks you a question, do not treat immediate speech as proof that you know the answer. Think. Then speak.

And listen to yourself while you are doing it. Is the pace still yours? Has the pitch climbed? Are you finishing sentences, or escaping from them into the next one? Can you stop?

That last question matters. Because a voice under control can stop. It does not need another sentence to rescue the one before it.

Cicero’s Romans had a pitch pipe. You will have to learn to hear the note yourself.

That is the practice. Under pressure, slow the voice enough that thought can stay ahead of it. Let the pitch settle rather than climb with the pressure. Do not manufacture either one.

You are not trying to perform slowness or depth. You are learning to keep the slower, steadier, lower voice that pressure would otherwise take away from you.

Sources

• Cicero, De Oratore 3.224–227, on the voice and the story of Gaius Gracchus. Perseus.