SPOKEN VOICE COACHING
&
PUBLIC SPEAKING

The Spoken Voice

In Spoken Voice work, you will explore how the voice expresses itself and its connection to the body, the emotions, mentation, reactions, and the text you wish to communicate.

At the beginning of each term, I introduce a simple yet revealing activity to new voice students: ‘the name game’. A familiar staple in drama training, this exercise involves students standing in a circle, calling out the name of the person they are about to walk towards. It is a great way to sharpen listening skills and for me, a helpful tool for learning names, a task I have always found challenging. But beyond its surface, the game offers a rich opportunity to observe behaviour.

The game begins thus with one student making eye contact with another and calling out their name before walking towards them. That second student then selects someone else, calls out their name, and moves in their direction. Once the rhythm is smooth and the transitions are confident, I introduce a twist: instead of using names, students now say “you” and point to the person they are addressing. The activity unfolds with intermittent shifts in tempo and rhythm, continuing until I am confident that each student has fulfilled the aims of the exercise, at which point, I bring it to a close.

Throughout, I watch for two key things: how students respond when their name is called, and how their vocal clarity shifts when “you” replaces the name. In the first case, reactions often include vocal strain, raised shoulders, rushed speech, filler sounds like “uh” or “er”, physical ticks, and moments of embarrassment. In the second case, something changes. The voice relaxes, shoulders drop, pitch lowers, tempo steadies, and confidence grows, even when mistakes occur. When the word “you” becomes familiar, almost like a line in a script, the performer steps into ease and vocalises more naturally. To the untrained eye, this may seem like a quirky warm-up, but to a voice coach, it becomes a window into how individuals emotionally and physically respond to unfamiliar stimuli, revealing patterns of behaviour, tension and release through the body and voice.

At the outset of our work together, I place the responsibility in your hands. Your first task is straightforward: to notice how you respond mentally, physically, and emotionally, when speaking to an audience. The size of the audience is irrelevant; what matters is the awareness on your behaviour. Start by noticing the small changes in your audience, how a shift in posture, a glance, or a gesture might influence your response. Are you aware of any movement in you that alters your breathing, your mentation, your vocal tone, or the way you present yourself? If so, you have become consiously aware of a reaction in you to a stimuli, and with this awareness in the moment, you can now make a conscious choice how to respond.

All spoken voice work begins with you and a choice to respond to stimuli consciously. From here, we can move into the areas of phonation, support, resonance, pitch, tone, articulation and presence.

Public Speaking

In Public Speaking, you will learn to deliver content clearly and persuasively, using rhetorical and structural devices, for the use in pitches, presentations, or speeches.

The ability to stand before an audience and speak with confidence depends not only on spoken vocal technique, but also on knowing the material you wish to present. The way in which you present yourself with a point of view speaks volumes, and someone who is confident of their content and structure, and their ability to listen and respond in the moment, will communicate with presence. An actor once told me when I asked him why he never looked nervous before a performance said that it was the difference between knowing his lines and really knowing them. This was a telling moment for me as an actor. It forced me to ask the uncomfortable question: how well did I know my content?

Just as actors must learn their lines until they become second nature, the public speaker is no different. Still, it’s widespread belief that speeches, whether at weddings, boardrooms, auditoriums, or concert halls, can be simply improvised on the spot in common place. I have asked many public speakers if they learn their scripts exhaustively before they speak and most answer that they do not. “Why would you need to?” a few have asked. If it’s written down in front of them, or they have cue cards to prompt them if they should get stuck, why indeed? It does seem a little unnecessary. The rebuttle to that is simple; no cue card, words on a page, or half-memorised speech will communcate confidence to a listener. The responsibility of any public speaker is to engage the audience and keep them engaged. It is important to remember that modern audiences are more receptive to visual stimuli than ever before, and less so to aural stimuli. Andrew Vorster’s recent research has indicated that an audience forms an impression of the speaker within the first seven seconds. Additionally, TrueGeometry’s Blog research suggests that audience attention begins to decay if the speaker doesn’t establish clear purpose or connection within the first thirty to sixty seconds. Just imagine then, you stepping out on a stage and becoming so nervous that you forget your poorly rehearsed speech. You fumble with pieces of paper, desperately trying to find the relevant page with the dynamic opener, and mumble some words of apology in response to the ever growing frustration and boredom of the crowd, before finally finding the page, and begin to speak. What impression do you think will have been made? What can you do about it? The answer is to create structure in your speech and to rep it until you cannot forget it. The Public Speaker must elevate themselves to the technical level of the musician, tight-rope walker, dancer, or singer. None would dare to carry out their trade without craft behind them. Structure provides you with a foundation on which you can improvise. 

What does structure comprise? How should your speech unfold? What tone suits the occasion? Can humour be used? Should you include metaphor, visual aids, or rhetorical devices? Begin by imagining yourself as the audience and ask how you would I want this information delivered. The answer will guide your choices.

For marketing pitches, visuals and comparisons are key. For board meetings, clarity and brevity matter most. For weddings, storytelling and warmth take centre stage. Your voice can serve many stages, but its confidence will always stem from how well you know your material. Strengthening the respiratory, phonatory, and articulatory systems is essential, but so is knowing what you want to say, and how. Arnold Schwarzenegger said of his time as Governor of California, that he would never speak publicly unless he had memorised his speech word for word and rehearsed it twenty times. Listen to his speeches, they are dynamic, powerful and engaging.

My services are designed for anyone who speaks in public—whether you are a lawyer, politician, actor, presenter, teacher, student, business leader, or toastmaster. If your voice is part of your work, I can help you use it with greater clarity, confidence, and ease.

Drawing on my background in acting, dialects, anatomy, phonetics, performance research, and text analysis, I create tailored programmes that align with your personal goals and professional demands.

This work is informed by my experience across business, theatre, and education, and is supported by holistic practices. I have studied the Alexander Technique for twenty years and hold a 2^nd Dan black belt in Karate, disciplines that both inform my understanding of breath and presence.

My approach follows a four-point path to success…