Speaking is complicated - Hearing is complicated
Speaking is complicated. Hearing is complicated.
Oh, the English language with its rules and exceptions and history…it’s quite frightening. I teach an English as a Second Language (ESL) class one night a week. I am constantly reminded of how fraught with exceptions and special cases our language is. “I before E EXCEPT after C” sounds fairly straightforward. If only…leisure time didn’t exist and there were fewer than eight exceptions and no one needed caffeine, or some other weird thing. Well…you get the idea.
So much of our language and our ability to communicate with one another has nothing to do with the words or even any kind of verbal speech. In college, I took a communications class. The statistic went something like: only about 10% of our communication is in the words. Wait…what? That’s right. The other 90% give or take is comprised of the speaker’s tone of voice, facial expressions, gestures, posturing, personal spacing, how the speaker looks, etc.
There are many theories, studies, and assessment tools out there on this topic. One is the 7%-38%-55% Rule, made famous by Albert Mehrabian, which specifies words only account for 7%, tone of voice for 38%, and facial expressions for 55% of the message being communicated. On jobs, if I only read the words, I’d only be communicating 7% to 10% or so of the message. I have to consider my tone of voice. Should I say the line with a bit sarcasm or with full sincerity, or perhaps gleefully or maybe I should employ an authoritative tone? Consider the short phrase, “Yeah right.” Focusing on your tone, practice saying it with the four tones listed previously. See how it changes the complete meaning. There are dozens of possible tones at our disposal.
As voice actors, we are not speakers only. Even considering and including all the non-verbal communication mentioned above, we’re hearers, too. How we hear our clients, how we hear directors, how we hear feedback, and even how we hear our own audio, tremendously affects our final product - our delivery. And that delivery is key to our clients’ satisfaction and our success. Are we going into a new client relationship open to what they’re saying? Or are we bringing too much loud baggage from a previous client that’s going to more than taint our future ones? While certainly learning from our clients, we also need to go into each new relationship with a fresh perspective. We need to give them the respect that they DO know what they’re looking for and we CAN deliver it, if we’ll only take time to hear what they’re saying.
Speaking and hearing work in tandem, and both require our full skill set. We must work hard at the speaking and the hearing because they are complicated. We want to make the hearing as easy as possible for our clients and for their clients. In order to reach the client of our client (the potential buyer/user of the product/service) we must give our full performance - using our tones, our facial expressions, our gestures, our posturing, and our appearances (even when no one will see us; especially when no one will see us) in order to sell 100% of our message. That is the goal, after all.
