Vocal Defense

As we noted earlier, Galen, the ancient Greek philosopher, once said that it is the voice, not the eyes, that is the mirror to the soul. When you have an appealing sound to your voice, the whole world opens up to you. Thus your voice is one of your greatest weapons in the art of verbal self defense.
Unfortunately, many people do not possess pleasant sounding voices. In fact, most voices are rather annoying.
Studies have determined that if we listen to annoying voices over a period of time, we either become irritable and agitated or we tune out what is being said. This obviously puts you at a disadvantage if you plan to verbally defend yourself with a voice that sounds too soft, too harsh, too loud, too high, or too boring.
This section gives you techniques to effectively remedy these vocal ailments. Before you set forth to improve any vocal problems, however, you must be conscious of factors that might harm your voice. Following is a list of pointers that can contribute to a healthy voice box and a strong and confident sounding voice.

Marrying Your Breathing with Your Talking

To speak properly and have good vocal tones, you must sip in air through your mouth (not your nose, since you breathe through your nose only when you are listening), hold it for a second or so, and then speak on the exhalation. It is essential to flow out your tones. To coordinate your breathing with your talking, you must follow the principles of the Relaxation Breathing Technique. However, instead of exhaling air, exhale while saying the ha sound for as long as you can.

Listening Through Breathing

Because your mind is clearer after doing this breathing technique, it allows you to focus on sight and sounds around you. The next time you are listening to someone speak, take a small (not obvious) sip of air for two seconds. As you sip in the air, sip in the word they are saying. As you hold your breath for three seconds, allow what they said to resonate as you digest and clearly process what they said. As you slowly let the air out of your mouth, you'll become more focused than ever before on what they said. The more you practice this technique, the better your listening skills will become.

Mind-Clearing Breaths

One of the principles in the martial art of Aikido is called mushi, a clearing of the mind.
Aikido trains martial artists to gain control mentally over their opponent by clearing their mind of anger. It allows them to clearly assess the situation and the dangers involved and react accordingly. In fact, breath control has been used by ancient yogis as a key to inner peace and tranquility, helping them clear their minds of any negative thought, and allowing them to achieve a higher level of consciousness.

The Relaxation Breathing Technique is essential in clearing the mind and getting rid of anger or “toxic thoughts.” What happens when we get nervous or anxious or think about all the people and situations that have made us miserable? We keep taking in shallow little breaths of air that we don’t release as frequently as we do when we are not tense. This leads to a build-up of carbon dioxide, which increases anxiety, often producing headaches and light-headedness.

The Relaxation Breathing Technique can be used to clear and focus the mind. Even if only for a few moments, it allows you to have a sort of “mental vacation.” Using the principles of the Relaxation Breathing Technique, you will notice that your entire world stops for the three seconds that you hold your breath. It seems as though you are suspended in time and space, which in essence breaks your thought cycle. After doing this exercise for a series of ten times, you will find, as many of my clients have found, that you feel refreshed, re-energized, and clear-headed.

Relaxation Breathing: In—Hold—Out Control!

The Relaxation Breathing Technique is the backbone for all other breathing techniques.
These are the three basic steps for relaxation breathing:

1. Through your mouth only, sip in air for two seconds.
2. Next, hold the breath of air for three seconds without breathing.
3. Finally, exhale the breath of air through your mouth slowly and deliberately for five seconds.

While doing this exercise, you must never move your upper chest when inhaling, and your shoulders must be down, not raised or hunched. All of the movement—the sipping in of air, the holding of the air, and the release of air through exhalation—must take place in the abdominal region. Why?

The abdominal area is where we use our muscles to breathe naturally. In fact, if you observe a dog, cat, or small child, you will clearly see that their abdominal area goes in and out as they breathe. A popular but erroneous idea, passed down from singing teacher to singing teacher, is that breathing takes place in our diaphragm. This is not so. The diaphragm is a thin tissue under the lungs that separates the lungs from the stomach and intestines. Whenever you hear someone tell you that you need to breathe from your diaphragm, you will now know that they really mean the abdominal region.

How to Do Defensive Breathing?

Did you ever wonder how the world’s greatest singers such as Barbra Streisand or Luciano Pavarotti are able to hold those powerful tones for such a long time and still continue to sing so effortlessly? Did you ever watch a pregnant woman use the Lamaze Technique, using her controlled and repeated forceful mouth breathing to cope with the pain of childbirth? Have you ever heard the loud gut-level grunt when a professional tennis player serves a ball or a weight lifter lifts the barbell over his head?
Have you ever become completely mesmerized by a professional speaker, unaware that her melodic and effortlessly flowing tones were responsible for your added interest in what she was saying? How they breathe allows the professional singer to hold that note, the mother to deliver the baby, the athlete to hit the ball or lift the weight, and the speaker’s information to glide smoothly into your ears.
Most of us take our breathing for granted. We just know that without it we are dead. It is during times of extreme excitement or stress, however, that we become conscious of how we breathe.
When we are nervous—or, more commonly, when we don’t know how to breathe properly—several things can happen.

1. Our inability to focus and think calmly is impaired.
2. We begin to gasp for air because we have difficulty catching our breath as we speak, causing our opponent to perceive us as uncontrolled and desperate.
3. Without proper breath control, our voice sounds shaky and tremulous, giving our adversaries ammunition to perceive us as nervous, tentative, or unsure.
4. Finally, improper breath control can maintain or escalate increased heart rate and blood flow, which can affect the overall status of your health.

The following section on breathing will show you how to breathe to calm down and gain control of your inner being, your listening, and your talking.
If you don’t breathe properly the following things may happen:
• You may have trouble focusing and concentrating.
• You may be perceived as sounding desperate.
• You may be perceived as sounding nervous or tentative.
• Your heart rate may increase, thereby placing you in a more agitated state.

Gaining the Verbal Advantage

You’re at a party. You spot a gorgeous woman or man at the other end of the room. With every ounce of courage you can muster, you coolly saunter over and flash your radiant smile. Your heart beats wildly, your head pounding like an African drum. You confidently stick out your hand and introduce yourself. The person reciprocates with a handshake and an introduction, saying “Hi, I’m ___.” The moment you hear “Hi, I’m ___,” you don’t care who they are. You don’t want to know. Your ears are deafened by a high-pitched, sickening tone that shocks you right back into reality, with your pulse rate returning to normal.
The way a person sounds says it all. Research in psycho-social perception shows that people judge you more by the way you speak than by the way you look. In fact, people who sound good are judged to be more intelligent, sexually exciting, and successful, and less likely to commit a crime than their poor-sounding counterparts.
Those who have poor speaking voices are perceived as weak, defenseless, less intelligent, and more victim-like than those who don’t have this voice.
Research in criminal justice indicates that if one walks like a victim, one is more likely to be victimized. The same holds true for talking. If one sounds like a victim, one is more likely to be victimized in one’s personal and social life. To verbally defend yourself and have the maximum effect on your verbally abusive opponent, you have to speak in confident and audible tones.
To speak in confident powerful tones to convey your points effectively, you must use your speaking mechanism properly. This mechanism consists of breathing, voice-producing, and speech and pronunciation mechanisms. This chapter will show you how to use these mechanisms to converse with others effectively. You will then learn how to incorporate your new-found speaking skills into confident conversation. Finally, you will learn how to start, maintain, and end a conversation with grace and aplomb.

Slipping Up or Messing Up? It All Adds Up and You End Up…!

You should always be conscious of how you come across. You can't slip up on the little things or you will certainly mess up everything. Mindfulness is the key. You need to maintain a constant vigil in terms of what you are doing.
Everything adds up if you want to have the physical advantage over your opponent. You need to have every component of your physical being working in your favor. Not even one part can be missing. You always need to be conscious of how you stand, sit, walk, hold your head, look at people, shake their hands, and how you touch or even kiss them. If you ignore any of these components, you are giving your opponent more of an upper hand in the war of the words.
Step away from yourself consistently and pretend that you are observing yourself outside of your body or from above. You can even imagine that there is an angel hovering over you, watching every move you make. Doing this visualization will make you more conscious of your behavior and comportment and its effect upon others.

How to kiss and to be kissed properly?

In this age of sexual harassment suits, you should think twice about whom you kiss hello or goodbye. Like the cupped handshake mentioned earlier in this chapter, a kiss—especially a final kiss after a wonderful interaction—cements a bond and expresses what a special interaction it was. In film, television, or other parts of the entertainment business, kissing or hugging someone hello or goodbye is the norm. With so many fragile egos and insecurities, and sad feelings due to constant rejection, hugging and kissing help show biz people feel good about themselves and closer to the person they are hugging and or kissing.
Many people outside the entertainment industry, however, don’t know how to kiss or don’t feel comfortable kissing others as a hello or good-by greeting. These kisses are not as serious as sticking your tongue down a person’s throat. But they’re more than a boring flat-lipped light touch of the cheek or the phony socialite “air kiss.” This is not kissing. A kiss is when you pucker up and actually place your lips on a person’s cheek or lips, create suction, and then release the suction a few seconds later. It may seem ridiculous that I am teaching you
It’s very hard not to let down your guard toward an adversary who comes up to you and kisses you. You might even end up liking them. Try doing this after a tense conversation or a heated discussion. Give them a buss on the cheek or a hug, and watch what happens as their tense body and angry face relax.
This is an excellent and very powerful technique to use in the following situations:
• You know someone dislikes you for no good reason that you can think of.
• They’re jealous of you.
• You have just been in an adversarial conversation or heated discussion.
You can’t help but smile afterwards as you see how love and your positive attitude can diffuse the most negative energy. That is power! That power contributes to your self-esteem, which in turn translates into self confidence.

Charming, Disarming Smile

We have all heard the expression “a smile speaks a thousand words.” It’s true. A smile can often disarm the most verbally belligerent person. Don’t be afraid to be the first to smile at the other person. And don’t be put off if they don’t return your smile. Many people are so self-consumed or preoccupied that they will not notice you or your smile.
Don’t be reactive to others, just smile sincerely. If you think of all the wonderful things in your life, the people who really love you and the people whom you really love, you will always have a true and radiant smile; your eyes will sparkle.
Oftentimes you can use a smile to defuse a verbal zinger that you will have to retort. Somehow, a smile makes what you are saying a lot less biting and stinging, but also more memorable.
The incongruity of your unpleasant, but strong, words and your soft and pleasant facial expression might throw your opponent off balance.

Look Straight to the Eye

Remember how when you were growing up, you were told that you should look into a person’s eyes when you talk to him? You were told that only honest people can look you in the eye.
This is nonsense. In reality, research has shown that people who constantly look you in the eye without breaking their gaze might not be very honest at all; in fact, they might be lying to you.
You don’t need to gaze directly into a person’s eyes when you speak to her (unless of course you are in love with her). Doing so can be disconcerting and might indicate that you are taking a hostile or adversarial position against the person.
What you need is not just eye contact but “face contact.” If you don’t look at the person’s entire face along with specific components of the face, how are you going to read all the facial cues of your verbal adversary or potentially toxic opponent?
In order to give someone the impression that she has your undivided attention, follow these steps religiously:

1. Look at the person’s entire face for approximately two seconds.
2. Next, look at the person’s eyes for approximately two seconds.
3. Switch your gaze over to her nose and look at it for two seconds.
4. Now look at the person’s mouth for two seconds.
5. Go back to step 1 and look at the person’s entire face for approximately two seconds, continuing on to steps 2 to 4.

You need to repeat these steps for as long as you are speaking and listening to the person in front of you.
People will not think you look weird as they notice you looking at their eyes, then their nose, mouth, and entire face. They won’t even notice what you are doing. First, it’s only a two-second glance on each of the facial components. Second, the distance from their eyes to their nose to their lips is minimal. It’s not a huge football field you are looking at; it’s a person’s little face.
Most likely, in fact, people will perceive you as being really interested in them and in what they are saying.
This technique also tends to soften your gaze, which makes you appear more approachable, more compassionate, and less intense.