Triple Take #9: Find your diaphragm, speaking too fast, eyes for calm

Voice Confident's Triple Take - your fortnightly trio of tips!

In this issue, an exercise to engage your diaphragm for better breathing, a technique to slow down your rate of speech, and an eye movement that will calm your nervous system.

Voice: engage your diaphragm for better breathing

The FFF exercise is a great technique for engaging the diaphragm and developing proper breath support for speaking and singing. To perform this exercise, stand with good posture and place one hand on your abdomen. Take a deep breath, feeling your belly expand, then make a forceful, repeated "fff" sound, with top teeth loosely against bottom lip, while keeping your jaw relaxed and teeth slightly apart.

This engages your diaphragm and core muscles and you should feel your abdominal muscles gradually contracting as you continue the sound. When it feels like you have nothing left to breathe out you can feel a slight stab of discomfort in the middle at the bottom of your rib cage.

This exercise helps us to:

• Build awareness of proper diaphragmatic breathing

• Strengthen the connection between breath and vocal production

• Develop consistent breath support for sustained speaking

• Reduce tension in the throat and upper chest

Regular practice of the FFF exercise helps establish muscle memory for engaging the diaphragm, leading to more powerful, controlled, and confident voice production.

The diaphragm that controls breathing

Presence: do you speak too fast?

Speaking at a measured pace is crucial when presenting or chairing meetings. Humans process language at 400-800 words per minute but typically speak at 125-150 words per minute. This gap means your audience has plenty of mental capacity to become distracted if your delivery isn't engaging.

A controlled pace allows your audience to:

• Process and retain information more effectively

• Form their own views and emotional connections with your content

• Build trust in you as a speaker

  
  

A great way to achieve a measured pace is to use the Phrase'n'Pause method:

• Break your content into short, meaningful phrases

• Emphasise key words within each phrase

• Insert deliberate pauses between phrases

  
  

Remember that simply "speaking slowly" often leads to monotone delivery. Instead, maintain your natural speech patterns while introducing strategic pauses. This approach helps you stay articulate and engaging while giving your audience time to absorb your message.

People who work with me know I speak quickly myself, my thoughts go fast and I’m one of those enthusiastic types that likes to get it all out there! So this isn’t about changing the way you speak all the time. I’m a firm believer that in social situations we should feel free to ‘be ourselves’. But in a situation where you need your message to be processed, understood and remembered, being able to ‘turn on’ the Phrase’n’Pause technique is really useful.

There's a short video of me explaining how this works here.

Confidence: an eye exercise to calm the nervous system

A simple but effective technique for calming your nervous system involves deliberate eye movements. When experiencing anxiety or stress, our vision tends to narrow into tunnel vision, focusing only on what's directly ahead. By consciously moving your eyes, you can help reverse this stress response.

Here's how to perform the technique:

• Keep your head still and move only your eyes

• Look as far to the right as possible and hold for 15-20 seconds

• Come back to centre and relax a while

• Then move your eyes as far to the left as possible and hold

• Repeat this movement a couple of times

  
  

This exercise works because it signals to your brain that there is no immediate threat requiring focused attention. When your brain registers this wider field of vision, it begins to shift from the sympathetic (fight-or-flight) to the parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) nervous system, helping you feel more calm and centered.