It’s 9 A.M. and I’m surprised the neighbors haven’t called the cops on me yet. For the past hour I’ve been blasting away at the walls doing vocal projection exercises. This particular exercise involves reciting famous passages like Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech, and Patrick Henry’s Call to Action, “Give me liberty or give me death.”

As hypnotists we should be always improving ourselves, and if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I am an advocate of “CANI” or Constant And Never-Ending Improvement. Your voice is one thing that you should be practicing to improve at least once in a while, and one of the ways is by doing voice training exercises.

If you have studied NLP at all, you know that some people are primarily auditory, and making this type of person happy means that you will need to sound pleasant to the ears. I have a friend who is very auditory, and he’s a musician out in LA. I’ve hypnotized him quite a few times, and he’s been hypnotized by others as well, and he will always mention to me how the quality of a person’s voice can make or break the experience.

With that in mind, here is a powerful exercise that you will want to do, to enhance the depth of your voice, and it has to do with finding your optimum pitch.

In the “Voicing It” program, Nancy Daniels talks about doing “doughnut O’s” which helps you to find the optimum center of where you should be speaking and to speak at the correct pitch. Here is how you do it:

Put your hand on your diaphragm, which is going to be in the lower part of your chest, about 2-3 inches above the solar plexus. Then, as deeply as you can, and keeping your head in a neutral position (don’t lower the head down too much), say “HO HO HO” like Santa Claus, and say it as deep as you possibly can. You should feel vibrations in the lower part of your chest and around the rib cage, which will tell you that your voice is reverberating. That is what you want!

Once you get that, hold the “O” sound and begin speaking at that same exact pitch (pitch is the relative highness or lowness of a note – in this example we are reverberating a very low pitch).

Now, since some of the readers of this blog are women, they might be thinking, “But Taylor, I don’t want to sound like Santa Claus.” This is a good point to bring up. What you have to remember is that a deeper voice, even in women, is very attractive. Super-high voices are usually associated with nagging and are not that pleasant. If you want someone to ignore what you have to say, just talk with a very high pitch and speak quickly. If you want them to listen to you and for you to be more hypnotic, lower the voice down.

You’re going to get better results by developing a smooth, deep, resonant voice.

What this exercise does is it allows you to find the optimum pitch that you should be resonating at. This is the pitch range at which you will have the most power in projecting, and it will be much easier to vibrate at that range.

This brings me to a funny exercise that Bandler does with his students, where he has them put their finger on their nose, speaking through the nose, and saying “This is my nose…” and of course they sound very nasal. Then they go “This is my mouth” and they speak through that area, then “This is my chest” … and then finally, “This is my diaphragm… and when I talk from here, I will make millions of dollars and have lots of steamy sex.”

If those things are attractive to you, do this voice training exercise! I promise it will pay off.

I made a video to show you how to do this technique. Check it out:

Check out this clip of Bill Clinton responding to a heckler. Notice his congruency. I love it.

0:05 – Clinton: “That’s not true!” (this is perfect. he interrupts it right as it comes in.)

0:11 – Heckler: “You know it’s true!”

0:14 – Clinton stretches out his arm slowly, with his palm facing down, and says in a parental tone, “Now will you just calm down.”

0:26 – Clinton: “Now let me tell you somethin… If I were dying of ambition…”

0:38 – Clinton: “And let me tell ya somethin else! Let me tell ya something else!” — He’s tapping into this urge for people to have “real” politicians who have normal emotions, and are -upset- just like they are, at certain “ills” of society. Clinton frames the Heckler this way:

0:45 – Clinton: “If you can find a better way to treat any human being including myself …

0:50 – Clinton: “I did not cause it, I’ve been tryin to do something about it, I’ve treated you and all the other people who have interrupted my rallys, with a hell of a lot more respect than you’ve treated me, and <inaudible>”

Notice his body language at different points… initially it catches him off-guard, but he gets more confident at every step. I really like his technique here.

This video, about reaction at a Tony Robbins event about the terrorist attacks on 9/11, I’m sure, has made it around the internet because it’s pretty old. And I’ve actually seen this seminar tape and was really struck by it, but today I came across a clip of it, and I wanted to share it here.

As a person who leads events, I wonder what it would be like to navigate through a landscape like that. Tony did an incredible job at utilizing the situation, something that obviously came from a lot of experience being on stage and being able to think on his feet.

What would you have done in Tony’s situation, here?

As you answer that question, remember that the map is not the territory. The muslim man is not “wrong” for his beliefs and I applaud him for being able to say that freely. Dogmatism just isn’t enough fun. How do we reconcile the opinions?

To me that’s a challenge worth looking into.