voice tone

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Recap: Verbal Communication

Excellent communication is a cornerstone of any good relationship. We all know this. The problem is that most people would interpret “better communication” as “more talking.”

Fixing this troublesome misconception was our mission over the past week. 

The checklist

  1. Understand the importance of body language and voice tone.
    • A common breakdown of importance is 55% body language, 38% voice tone, and 7% words.
    • Poor body language and voice tone can make your words worthless or even harmful.
  2. Body language: the core of communication. 
    • The most important body language signals are those conveying an open or closed attitude. 
    • Learning how to unravel defensiveness through open body language can make you a much better communicator. 
  3. Voice tone: more than words. 
    • A deep and engaging voice tone is the emotional glue that makes your words stick.
    • Conscious control of voice tone can also help to keep negative emotions from ruining your communication.   
  4. Words: less is more. 
    • If you want people to like you and/or take your message to heart, use fewer words, not more. 
    • Effective communicators concentrate as much goodness and insight into as few words as possible. 

Our modern world has many complex problems. Solving these problems will require many minds to work together. And verbal communication is the best way of connecting all these minds. 

But we often fail to see verbal communication as the full-body exercise it is. Hence, most of the words we exchange have little (or even negative) impact. 

Better communication can make the world a better place. So, let’s stop talking and start communicating 🙂

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Voice Tone: More than Words

In communication, the second in command after body language is voice tone. The voice conveys our words in verbal communication, but it’s the voice tone carrying those words that makes the impact. 

Let’s see how this works. 

Emotional undertones

Humans are not robots. This means we’re better suited to process (and remember) feelings than facts. 

Voice tone is particularly good at conveying feeling. For example, if you listen to people speaking in a language you don’t understand, you’ll still be able to tell what they are feeling. 

This emotional undertone is the glue that makes words stick in our minds.  Without it, very little of the message will be retained. 

Not always a good thing

If you want your message to be well received, your voice tone should carry positive emotional undertones.

Negative undertones like anger, anxiety, frustration, or boredom will often hurt more than they help by putting your listener into a defensive or distracted state. 

Awareness of the importance of voice tone can also help you manage your own emotions during a conversation.

For example, focussing on producing a calm and relaxed tone of voice helps me control my stuttering problem. Stuttering comes from a place of fear and is simply incompatible with a calm and confident voice tone. 

This can be applied to any negative emotion you might experience during a conversation. Just focus on producing a voice tone that is completely incompatible with the negative emotion you’re experiencing and watch what happens in your mind. 

Deep and engaging

In general, deeper voice tones resonating from the chest are better received than higher tones resonating in the mouth or nasal cavities. 

That doesn’t mean that people with a naturally high voice cannot communicate effectively. It just means that speaking in the lower registers of your natural voice is a good idea. 

But don’t just emit a monotone low drone. To achieve engagement, there needs to be plenty of life in your voice. Luckily, this happens naturally whenever you can call on some positive emotions to carry your words. 

Practice makes perfect

Voice tone is deeply habitual. You cannot just decide to instantly control negative emotions with your tone or to always speak in a deep and engaging voice. 

Achieving the ideal voice tone in all situations requires plenty of repetition. 

For example, I practice reading out loud in my morning reading sessions. Aside from helping me build a better speaking voice, it also increases information retention.

Try recording yourself on your phone during a number of different conversations, especially when you’re under some pressure.

If you don’t like what you hear, putting in a bit of work on improving your voice tone could be a very smart move 🙂

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Communication: Words, Voice, and Body

Our final week of Supermorning Relationships will delve a little deeper into the science of communication.

The main theme this week will be that words are a surprisingly minor part of our conversations; voice tone and body language matter much more. 

Only 7%?

The most often quoted breakdown of verbal communication looks like this: 

  • Words: 7%
  • Voice tone: 38%
  • Body language: 55%

It seems impossible that words can be such a small fraction of the total message. And yes, when things sound impossible, it’s often because they are. 

But the accuracy of the 7% figure is not the point. The point is that voice tone and body language are critical elements of communication that are often neglected. 

Why the voice and body matter

Humans are not robots. We don’t emit and receive audio signals with the logic and efficiency of a computer. Instead, both the emission (talking) and reception (listening) of audio signals go through a wide array of emotional filters, massively affecting the efficiency at which the message is transferred. 

Maximizing the efficiency of communication is the role of voice tone and body language.

If everything lines up perfectly, we can transfer abstract ideas between each other’s minds with ease. This is crucial in our modern world where progress requires many minds to work together. 

On the other hand, if body language and voice tone are all wrong, our words quickly become useless. In some cases, they can even have the direct opposite effect to what we intended. 

A shift in focus

We often obsess over what we say in conversations. However, the smarter approach is to focus on three other areas. Here they are in order of priority:

  1. What you do with your body
  2. The tone of your voice
  3. How much you speak relative to others

The actual words you use only come in fourth. In fact, word selection and sentence construction, being mainly subconscious processes, are greatly influenced by these three elements. 

Over the next three days, we’ll cover these three crucial communication avenues in more detail.