Тони Бьюзен - Mind Map Handbook

The growing popularity of karaoke nights provides excellent opportunities to give your voice the workout it so desperately needs! Next time you get the chance, go along to one. If you don’t get the opportunity, make one!

Another type of event where you are positively encouraged to make a noise is in the football ground, or at other sporting venues. There you are expected to chant, sing, cheer and shout. Encourage yourself to go to these as often as you can, and give your voice a real high-powered workout.

Another area where the loud use of your voice is generally accepted is walking the dog. I am convinced that one of the main reasons people enjoy walking their dogs is not only for the fresh air, but for the opportunity to yell their heads off in nature’s wide open spaces! They can shout and bellow commands at their (usually oblivious) dogs to their heart’s content!

Practice Accents and Different Pronunciations

As you must be realizing more and more, your voice is an astonishingly flexible and trainable instrument. If you had been born anywhere in the world where one of the world’s 2,000 languages was spoken rather than your own, you would have learnt it. You still can. Learning different local and international accents gives your voice more range, while adding considerably to your ability to understand and entertain others.

Use Word Pictures

When you use word pictures you are combining the skills of your left and right brain hemispheres: words from the left and images/imagination from the right. By combining them, you create a multiplier effect in the power of your words.

Just think, for example, of simply reciting the sentence ‘I really enjoyed eating that big bowl of fruit.’

Now imagine that it was a hot summer day, you had not eaten for four days, and suddenly the most delicious bowl of fruit you had ever seen was placed in front of you. Every piece of fruit was perfectly ripe, beautifully coloured and giving off the most tempting and delicious aroma. Even more, the bowl contained every one of your own personal favourites. Imagine that you devoured it ravenously, and that it was the most gorgeous and memorable meal that you had ever had.

Now imagine saying that original sentence again, this time with full memory and full passion.

This technique, combining words with powerful, sensual images, is what all the great poets and writers, especially Shakespeare, use with such great success. When you use the technique, it will help to raise your Verbal Intelligence too.

Check Your Own Self-Talk

As well as checking the conversations you have with and the speeches you make to others, check the conversations you have and the speeches you make to yourself. Many people are wonderful conversationalists and public speakers; at the same time they often save all their worst, most depressing, negative and demotivating speeches for themselves! They are constantly telling themselves they can’t do things: that they’re ‘no good’, that they’ll ‘never succeed’. This is the worse kind of speaking/coaching!

If you notice any such tendency in yourself, including torrents of negative word use when you fail or mess things up, analyse why, put that type of demotivating vocabulary back on the shelf where it belongs, give yourself a pat on the back, and start to be a much better conversationalist with yourself!

Energize Your Voice – Improve Your Memory

Your memory works better when things are emphasized, imaginative and outstanding. If you are one of those people who constantly forgets because you have scribbled things you wanted to remember on lost scraps of paper, or repeated such things silently in a monotonous and uninspired voice, use this much better technique: whatever you want to remember, repeat it to yourself with added extra energy.

When you do this, your brain will feel more positive towards whatever it is you repeated, simply because of the extra energy with which you have said it. Additionally, the extra energy will make the statement ‘stand out’ in your mind’s eye, and when things stand out, your brain remembers much more easily.

Establish Your Personal Presentation Goals

Complete a mini Mind Map of the areas in which you specifically want to improve your speaking skills. Areas to consider should include:

One-on-one conversations with family and/or friends and colleagues

Joke-telling

Storytelling

Informal presentations on a particular subject to small groups/teams

Giving instructions/directions

Special-occasion speeches, such as Best Man and After-dinner speeches

Professional presentations to large groups

When you have established these goals, quickly re-read the chapter, and start to apply these Verbal Workout suggestions to help achieve them.

The ideas in this chapter are summarized in Plate 14.

Case Study – Think First!

Think about what you are going to say before you actually say it. If you do you will be at a considerable advantage.

That’s the finding from a study on stuttering by researchers in Finland and Germany. Riitta Salmenlin and her colleagues at the Helsinki University of Technology asked 9 long-term stutterers and 10 fluent speakers to read out individual words from a list. As they read, their brain activity was monitored by devices which identify precisely where and, crucially, when, certain regions of the brain are being activated.

The fluent speakers first activated a part of the brain that decides what to say and then, afterwards, a part that works out exactly how to say it. The stutterers’ brains did exactly the opposite. ‘Stutterers were somehow initiating their mouth muscles before they knew what they were going to say,’ said Salmenlin.

All of us have, in varying degrees, experienced this ‘Stutterers’ Syndrome’ where our mouth gets into gear before our brain and what comes out is jumbled, incorrect or incomprehensible!

Brain research now confirms that a little thought given to preparation (and Mind Maps are particularly useful in this instance) will make your message much clearer, and you more Verbally Intelligent – and intelligible!

Word Power Booster Number 7

Now that you have learnt more about the relationship of Verbal Intelligence to speaking, you will appreciate especially the following 10 words, which will allow you to wax lyrical about speaking with even more erudition!

Each word contains the Root ‘loqui’ or ‘loc’, from the Latin ‘ loquor ’, ‘ locutus ’, meaning speech. Choose the definition you think is closest to the correct meaning.

ELOQUENCE ( elló -kwence)

(a) Elongated speech

(b) Musical speech

(c) Speech full of power and imagination

(d) Low-level speech

ELOCUTION (ello- cué -shon)

(a) Elongated speech

(b) Strict education

(c) Single ‘cutting’ conversation

(d) Clear and expressive speech

LOQUACIOUS (lo- kwáy -shus)

(a) Speech from a specific area

(b) Talkative; garrulous

(c) Rhythmical speech

(d) Wave-like rhythms in speech

SOLILOQUY (so- líll -o-kwee)

(a) Talking about the sun

(b) Talking about being alone

(c) Speaking thoughts aloud when alone; monologue

(d) Speech given near boats

CIRCUMLOCUTION (sercum-lo- cúe -shun)

(a) Discussion of the geometry of circles

(b) Using many words where one will do

(c) Discussion of circumcision

(d) Medical term for stuttering

INTERLOCUTION (inter-lo- cúe -shun)

(a) Interruption

(b) Illogical interjection

(c) To talk around