The Stuffed-Up Nose
Just as you can sound too nasal, you can also sound too non-nasal, as though your nose is stuffed up. And your nose may very well be stuffed up, blocking your breathing passages. In this case, it is essential to consult with a qualified ear, nose, and throat doctor. He can provide you with certain medications or may even perform surgery to reduce the blockage. You may also sound this way because you unconsciously close off your own nasal passages. The following exercises help you eliminate your clogged-up sounds. Repeat each one of the following sounds five times in succession, so that it sounds like you are saying one word (mamamamama, for instance). Do this with each of these separate nasal sounds and repeat five times.

mamamamama
mo ma mu me
nananananana
no na nu ne
ung ung ung ung ung
lung hung sung rung

Whining No More

According to a Gallup Poll, 70 percent find whining annoying; it rates as one of the top five annoying talking habits.
With the exception of those who have a physical abnormality such as a cleft palate or a neurological condition, most of the nasal tones you hear are due to people not opening their jaws wide enough when they speak. In essence, they tend to clench their jaws, which makes them talk through their nose instead of through their
mouth.
If you sound nasal, never clench your jaws and never allow your back teeth to touch when you speak. I suggest that you pretend there is an imaginary dime holding your back teeth open when you speak. This technique will immediately reduce or completely eliminate your offensive tone.
The following technique is very helpful in getting your jaw and tongue muscles accustomed to opening wider when you speak.
Open your mouth as wide as you can while making a chewing motion. While chewing with your back teeth never touching, repeat the following sounds.
• Yah yah yah yah yah
• Yo yo yo yo yo
• Yu yu yu yu yu
• Ye ye ye ye ye
• yoo yoo yoo yoo yoo

Stop Putting Me to Sleep with Your Boring Voice!

There is nothing more disturbing than to be excited about something you have done, share it with another person, and have that person drone on in a boring monotonous tone how happy she is for you. It feels as though she took the wind out of your sails. She has completely turned you off.
In fact, a Gallup Poll revealed that close to 75 percent of individuals are turned off by people who have no life in their voices. People who speak in a dead voice are emotionally dead. They are not in touch with their emotions, often because they suffered some emotional trauma, repression, or early childhood conditioning.
Therefore, if you have a monotone voice I strongly recommend that you consult with a psychologist who can help you uncover and deal with underlying emotional issues.
Physical exercises can also help you reduce your monotonous drone. Make an “ah” sound as you express the following ten emotions, while you think back to an event in your life where you experienced these emotions:
• sadness
• surprise
• anger
• happiness
• fear
• disgust
• sympathy
• love
• doubt
• boredom
All of you “ah” sounds should sound different, some inflecting upward (for example, surprise, doubt, and happiness) and others inflecting downward (disgust, love, and sympathy). Singing also helps you develop your muscles so that your tones move up and down more readily.

Stop Turning Me Off!

Besides the sound of your voice, your arsenal must include knowledge of the other major speaking turn-offs discussed later in this chapter. They are monotonous, boring speech, a nasally whine, a too-loud voice, talking too fast, and mispronouncing words. You will also learn how to avoid undesirable and unattractive habits when you are speaking or listening. In this section, I address these issues and show you how to rectify any problems you might have in these areas.

I Can't Hear You!

According to a Gallup Poll I commissioned to determine the most annoying speech habits, nearly 75 percent of respondents stated that they were frustrated by a voice that is too soft or can't be heard. In order to project your voice so that you can be heard, you must use your abdominal muscles to anchor your tones. Therefore, when you speak you must put pressure on your larger and stronger abdominal muscles, not on your smaller and weaker throat muscles.
A good exercise for using these larger muscles is to place your hand on your abdomen while repeating “yes, yes, yes” three times. You should feel a slight pressure on your abdomen as it moves downward when you speak. In order to project your voice, you need to bear down on your abdominal muscles as you speak. This increases the volume of your voice so that you can be heard.

Yawning—Opening Up the Throat for a Smooth Voice

To have a rich and resonant voice, it is essential to open the back of your throat as though you were yawning.
Try this as you sip in a breath of air. Hold the air for two seconds, open up the back muscles of your throat, and slowly and gently say the ha sound for as long as you can. This exercise is also very helpful for those who have rough and gravely voices or who suffer from vocal nodes, because it encourages the voice to flow smoothly through the exhaled air stream.
This exercise can also help to soften a harsh voice.

Speak—Don't Squeak!

If you wish to lower the pitch of your voice, take a small sip of air through your mouth, hold it, bear down on your stomach muscles, like you are going to the bathroom, and speak. You will be surprised at how much lower the pitch of your voice will sound.
Over 60 percent of Gallup Poll respondents found a high-pitched voice to be one of the most annoying speech habits. To ensure a clearer, richer, deeper, and confident sounding voice, bear down on your abdominal muscles while opening up the back of your throat muscles while you speak. You'll learn this next.

Your Most Overlooked Organ—Your Voice Box.

Most of us hardly ever think about our voice box, unless we read about a major singer who can no longer sing or speak because she has injured hers.
Your voice box consists of a little muscle the size of an adult thumbnail. It looks like an inverted V, covered with a layer called a mucous membrane.
The V shape is formed by two separate muscles located side by side and facing one another. They open and close, depending on whether you are talking. When you listen and are silent, this V is supposed to be open; it is connected to a tube, the esophagus, which branches out and connects to the lungs. When the V is open you can inhale and exhale. If the V is closed when you are silent, you will most likely turn blue, pass out, or even die.
When you talk, you speak on the air when you are exhaling. You cannot speak when you are inhaling. The V closes and the muscle vibrates. That is how you make audible tones. The muscles come together and touch in the middle of the V in order to create pleasant and clear speech.
If you use your voice improperly by overly pushing on this muscle when you speak, you produce a hoarse sound. If the muscle swells—for example, when you have a cold—you also sound hoarse, as the two sides of the muscle have trouble coming together and vibrating. If you push these muscles too hard over a long period of time or you put too much pressure on the top part of the muscle when you speak, you will also sound hoarse or raspy. This is cause by two calluses, or nodes, that grow on the top of the muscle. When an actor or singer overstrains her muscle continuously, she develops these nodes and has difficulty singing and speaking.
Non-actors and non-speakers who talk a lot also develop this problem. Even children develop these nodes if they scream and yell a lot.
Additionally, if one of the vocal cords is paralyzed due to trauma or stroke, the voice may sound very breathy, and it may be difficult to make oneself understood. If you apply constant pressure to your voice box by speaking on the lower end of the V, you may develop what is known as contact ulcers.
A speech therapist or speech pathologist who specializes in voice therapy can usually help you. Before you engage in speech therapy, you must ask the therapist if her specialty is voice therapy and how many voice cases she has seen over the past year. If she has seen fewer than 50 cases throughout the year, or does not have a master’s or Ph.D. in speech pathology or speech and hearing sciences, and is not licensed by the state, don’t see her!
If therapy doesn’t help, you may need surgery to remove these growths on your vocal cords and additional voice therapy to learn how to properly use your voice so growths don’t appear again. Coming up, you learn how to care for your voice and how to use it properly, so that you don’t have any problems.
The following list gives some rules to follow so you don’t damage your voice. The next section of this chapter helps you remedy any speech and voice problems you might have.
Rules for Vocal Health:
• No smoking
• No drugs (except prescription)
• No alcohol
• Don’t sleep with your mouth open
• Don’t yell or scream
• Don’t talk over loud noise
• Don’t clear your throat
• Don’t talk too loud
• Don’t talk too much
• Limit consumption of dairy products
• Use throat lozenges whenever needed
• Drink lots of water
• Avoid spicy foods