Book and CD release: "Grow your voice to speak with confidence"
- find a good posture that helps you relax and communicate confidence
- use your breath to control your voice and your nerves
- produce a rich warm voice that invites attention and instils trust
- shape sounds skilfully so that every word is heard without strain
- create emotional engagement by enticing the listener to keep on listening.
- actors in training who found voice work boring and old fashioned
- performers who wanted to move their audiences to both tears and laughter
- lay preachers from the Lutheran Seminary who needed to speak with authority and interest
- professors of microbiology who needed to keep their students interested and awake
- environmentalists from CEED who had to present policy-altering proposals
- rap artists from Western Cape band RIP who needed lang longe and the ability to present themselves with vocal confidence
- radio DJs who wanted to engage their audiences to keep on listening.
Do you appear confident and competent as you speak?
Do you sound inviting and engaging?
Does your audience experience that you care both about your message and about them?
There are only two things that can interfere with your ability to answer yes to all three these questions: tension in your body and fear in your heart. When your body knows what to do, it can help you control your feelings and focus your mind.
As with training for a marathon, your body needs to unlearn bad habits and relearn new ones so that speaking invitingly and confidently becomes automatic. When you train for a marathon, you need to teach your muscles to persist working under strain. You have to condition them so that adjusting to the road and the conditions becomes automatic and you can keep your mind on your goal.
Similarly, speaking invitingly and confidently with a trained voice can become automatic so that you can keep your mind on the message and the audience.
To replace unwanted habits with new ones takes at least six weeks of dedicated hard work. This course is designed to lead you through such a six-week training programme so that the vocal habits you need for confident, inviting communication become automatic.
"Grow your voice to speak with confidence"
is a six-week course designed to help you automatically
Read a review by Top Toastmaster Craig Strachan
Petro Janse van Vuuren (PhD) has been training and coaching voice work for the last 18 years, both as a trainer of actors and presentation-skills teacher. She received her initial training at the Academy for Drama Arts in Cape Town under guidance of the acclaimed actress and drama teacher Babs Laker. She honed her skills first as school drama teacher and then as actor and director at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Here she reinterpreted her classical training for the more contemporary performer.
She has taught confident voice to a variety of people, including