Question for number 38-45
IS ANYBODY LISTENING?
Long before it is born, a baby can recognize its mother’s voice. And it is said that our sense of hearing is the last to fade before we die. As unique as our fingerprint, our voice is a key component of our personality. Indeed, the word ‘personality itself comes from the Latin ‘persona’, which literally means ‘through sound’.
HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?
Is there anything we can do to hold their attention? There is some evidence to suggest that a low voice is preferred in both men and women. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously hired a voice coach to lower her voice. And, except in Japan, where higher female voices are preferred, it can be no coincidence that over the last 50 years, as women have risen to higher management positions in the workplace, their voices have measurably deepened – in the Netherlands, where women have achieved almost equal opportunity, especially so.
AN ORATOR AS PRESIDENT
The US presidential elections in both 2008 and 2012 were classic cases of the triumph of the charismatic voice, with Barack Obama putting the art of rhetoric into the spotlight. His catchphrase 'Yes, we can' has passed into American history and he has already been described as the greatest orator of his generation. But New York professor Ekaterina Haskins has a theory about that. 'I've been going through his speeches textually,' she says. "The text alone cannot tell us why they are so powerful. It is about delivery: Philip Collins, who used to be Tony Blair's speech writer, agrees. It's 'the way he slides down some words and hits others - the intonation, the emphasis, the pauses and the silences. To become leader of the western world Obama's only visual aid was himself. The rest was voice.
TRUTH, LIES AND VISUAL AIDS
It's the oldest cliché in communication training: 55% of the message is how you look, 38% is how you sound and a mere 7% is what you say. But it's wrong! The original research on which this myth is based was carried out at UCLA in the 1970s. Involving just a handful of volunteers, the experiments actually focused on how people judge others' feelings and had nothing to do with creating impact in a talk. So if your suit, slides and winning smile fail to impress, take it easy. All is not lost.
What is true is that, if your body language is saying one thing and your words another, people will believe what they see. When we're nervous or ill-prepared, our body language tends to give us away.
POWERPOINTLESS?
Of course, good visual aids do powerfully reinforce your message. In fact, according to a study by 3M, audiences shown visuals are four times more likely to remember what you said and 43% more likely to be persuaded by it.
But it depends what you show them. The typical list of bullet points, for example, can actually compete with you. At one stage, this became such a problem at Sun Microsystems that CEO Scott McNealy banned the use of PowerPoint. Images, on the other hand, are mentally processed 400,000 times faster than text and appeal to the opposite side of the brain, making them the perfect accompaniment to speech.
A WHOLE NEW IMAGE
No-one knows this better than ex-US vice-president Al Gore. Once the invisible man of American politics, after his presidential election defeat in 2000, Gore returned to his true passion and began an environmental lecture tour that literally took the world by storm. Ditching PowerPoint for Apple Keynote, he created a set of dramatic visuals, video clips and computer simulations that caused a sensation around the world. Speaking to a thousand different audiences, in what Fast Company magazine has called 'one of the most remarkable personal turnarounds of all time, Gore went on to become the champion of the green movement, the star of the Oscar-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth and winner of the Nobel Peace prize. He readily admits that he owes it all to a slide show.
Complete the summary below with NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text!
As infants we recognize maternal (38)_______ as it is a (39) ________ of our traits. To successfully hold the audience’s attention (40)_______ voice is preferred, except for the Japanese. Barack Obama utilized the method of (41) ________ in his presidential election. Ekaterina Haskins, a New York professor, points out that the success of Obama’s speech is on his voice not the (42) ________.
38. Type Your Answer