I decided to write about Being Yourself after I heard Julie Andrews speaking on the BBC last week about her UK concert in May 2010. As you probably remember, she had a sublime voice that all but disappeared after some botched surgery on her vocal chords. But the interview, first with Julie Andrews herself and then with a leading voice coach, centred on the fact that age in itself brings ‘something special’ to the voice and that a performer has true appeal when they learn to be comfortable in their own skin and grow into themselves and allow their true personalities to show. That is when they make a wholehearted connection with their audience.

Now, that rang bells with me. I know that I have become more myself over the years. I was often accused by nearest and dearest of being a bit over the top when I wasn’t on stage (I was an actress for over 23 years). So I learned to tone it down and became what I thought the world wanted me to be. Eventually I woke up to the fact that I do have a strong set of emotional responses and an expressive voice and turn of phrase, so I might as well use them. And now that I’m virtually 100% true to myself, I can be real with the people I work with and the audiences I speak to.

And I want my clients to short-circuit the elongated route I took.

Does any of that ring bells with you?

Lots of my clients present to me first off as a shadow of who they really are. Their perception of what is acceptable or the norm in their corporate culture has battened them down. Voices are flat and expressionless and sometimes not far off being mono-tonal. Gestures are few and awkward and facial expressions cut down to a minimum. The words are just words – sounds emitting from the face without colour or nuance. Because their personality is absent there is nothing for the audience to connect to. And when you think that the ‘message’ is so often an important one, that is a very risky place for somebody to put themselves.

The thing is, I know that these clients have got personalities because I’ve just witnessed it in their handshake, their smile, their conversation, even their banter and humour.  But when they stand up to present, all those things that make them individual and fascinating all but drain away.

But the higher up the organisation you get, the more serious you have to become, right?  No.  The higher up you get, the more impressive you have to become and the more flexible in your communicating styles. You need a skill-set of different tones of voice. You may need to be authoritative, reassuring, enthusiastic, inspiring, cajoling…..You can’t achieve what you need to achieve with a battened down voice and a hidden personality.

If you think about it, we all know how to read stories to small children and make a pretty good fist of it. We work hard to get the meaning behind the words over, because very often our little listeners don’t know the literal meaning. So we will emphasise the adjectives to bring drama to it and put life into the verbs to move the story along and linger a little on the nouns to give clarity to the story. And they are enthralled.

And we can do it because we can be ourselves in front of children, they don’t judge us and seem happy to accept us as we are and because communicating is one of our major and innate skills as human beings and we are all past masters at it – BUT- we forget that we are.

Imagine the difference to a business communication if you used a little more those skills that are just there for the using? Simply try those 3 things: emphasise the adjectives, energise the verbs and give a little more weight to the nouns and immediately you will give your business communications more ‘listenability’ and power.