How To Project Your Voice When Talking

Have you ever been told that your voice is too soft? Or perhaps you’re in the middle of a presentation and people often ask, “What?” or “Huh?” when they can’t hear what you are saying.

Frustrating, right?

You might try to yell your words out, but that often makes things worse. It doesn’t matter if you’re speaking to an audience of hundreds or just a few people; being heard is essential to keeping the audience engaged and interested. However, it can be challenging to project your voice if you don’t know how to do it.

In this article, we will give you tips on how to project your voice so that people can hear you clearly, even when they are standing at the back of a large room. We’ll also include a free game in Yoodli’s gaming library that you can use to practice projecting your voice.

What Does It Mean To Project Your Voice?

In simple terms, projecting your voice means speaking loudly and clearly. It’s a way of speaking that allows the audience to clearly understand your message and conveys confidence.

The delivery of your words can make an enormous impact on the way the audience perceives the message.

Voice projection is a vocal technique that improves the quality of your speech by increasing clarity, diction, and volume.

Here’s a look at Tony Robbins delivering a TED Talk. His voice carries across the room so that even audience members in the back can easily hear and understand what he’s saying:

You can see that when Tony is speaking, he’s moving his lips and mouth to fully enunciate each word. In order to speak clearly so that everyone can hear him, he has to project his voice using his diaphragm.

He uses his body language as an excellent complement to his speech to create emphasis on certain ideas and words during his speech. Adding eye contact and hand gestures to your delivery is one of the most powerful ways to produce a great speech.

3 Strategies On How To Project Your Voice When Speaking

There are some simple techniques that can help you project more clearly and effectively.

Prepare Your Body

Our bodies must work hard to support the small muscles in the larynx when projecting our voices. When you prepare your body, think about letting your shoulders drop and relaxing your neck muscles, so they are not tense.

Imagine yourself delivering an important message to a large group of people. Visualize your body appearing tall, confident, and engaging. This will help you project your voice more effectively.  

Breathe From Your Diaphragm

To improve your projection, practicing breathing from the diaphragm is essential. A helpful exercise for this is the “ha” exercise. To do this, you should take a deep breath, expand your lungs and abdomen, and then exhale forcefully with a “ha” sound.

This exercise is designed to help you project your voice because it forces you to use all of your air at once on a single sound, allowing you to make it loud and carry far.

The exercise below warms up your diaphragm so that you can project your voice and don’t strain your voice:

Find Your Natural Volume

Find the right balance between speaking loudly and intelligibly. If you’re shouting, people won’t be able to concentrate on your message. On the other hand, if you speak too softly, no one will hear what you have to say either.

The best way to find your natural volume is by listening carefully to yourself while practicing different ways of projecting your voice.

Practice Projecting Your Voice Using Yoodli’s Free Games

One of the best ways to project your voice is to simply practice. Head over to Yoodli’s games module and select a game to practice.

For voice projection, “Spin a Yarn” is a great game to play. The software generates different topics that you can speak about. During your practice, keep in mind the strategies above and focus on projecting your voice by speaking loudly and clearly. Here’s an example of the game being played by our founder, Varun Puri:

The more you practice projecting your voice, the easier and more natural it becomes over time. By understanding the strategies that great speakers like Tony Robbins use to project their voice, you can deliver powerful and memorable speeches too. Yoodli’s feedback tool can analyze your speech for word choice and delivery to help you improve.

Sign up for free today so that your next speech is delivered with power, clarity, confidence and grace.