If you have a monotone or flat voice, it’s probably not a voice problem. It’s a feeling problem.
Here’s an exercise I do with my clients:
Step 1: Use any text around you. It could be your speech, a book, even a children’s story.
Step 2: Use emotional pairings. These pairings come from Aristotle’s book Rhetoric (Book II, specifically). Here are three pairings: anger/contentment; happiness/sadness; fear/confidence.
Step 3: Choose one of the pairings. Start with one emotion. Close your eyes and remember a time where you felt that emotion intensely. Let that emotion fill every cell of your body.
Step 4: Open your eyes and start reading with that emotion.
Is there a difference? You should feel it in your body and hear it in your voice.
Ideally, you’ll do each pairing five times. Then you’ll alternate between them until it becomes muscle memory.
When I first explain this exercise, people laugh. Then they start to feel what it’s like to push air, engage the diaphragm, and let the voice carry emotion.
Once you feel it, you can control it.
Thankfully, a monotone voice isn’t a permanent condition. It just feels like it.
