These days I do more than my fair share of delivering speeches to large groups of people. In fact, I’ve studied the art of giving powerful presentations for decades. However, I never once thought about applying the lessons learned to my role as a mother.
Until this week, when my son took some of my tried-and-true advice and threw it back in my face. And it hurt.
You see, one way to make sure you give a stellar speech is to use a technique that’s referred to as vocal variety — meaning: using the tone of your voice to add extra meaning to the words that are coming out of your mouth.
Let me give you an example and you give it a whirl. Take a look at the following sentence and decide how you’d say each one out loud based on the various underlying meanings.