Can you command the room with nothing more than your voice? Or do you struggle to keep the attention of your team and audience? Learn how to express yourself as a leader with “Speaking to Influence: Mastering Your Leadership Voice.” Dr. Laura Sicola, the founder of Vocal Impact Productions, Inc., teaches you tips for confidence and authentic presentation while explaining the three key channels of speech communication.
What is your book about?
When you speak, whether on stage, in a meeting or on the telephone, ask yourself:
- Do you feel confident and captivate your audience?
- Can you command the room naturally, and do you feel like you’re completely connecting with your audience?
- Do you feel like you get the full respect you deserve and the results you want?
- Are you recognized as a leader that people genuinely want to follow and support?
- Have you built a positive, sustainable corporate culture centered around loyal, cooperative and effective teams, and strong, lasting client relationships?
- Have you reached your greatest potential?
If you’re like most people, your response to many and even most of these questions is, “No, but I want to!
” If that’s the case, then this book is for you.
“Speaking to Influence” is all about helping you understand how the way you speak has a powerful effect on your ability to influence your surroundings, your relationships, your reputation and your potential to succeed. If you feel stuck or like you’ve hit a plateau in life, this book will show you how to take a step back and assess how your current style of communication is keeping you from achieving the results you want and maximizing your powers of influence.
In “Speaking to Influence,” Dr. Laura Sicola walks you through the three key channels of speech communication. These need to work together so that people can get your meaning – and get you.
You’ll explore strategies in storytelling for impact, how people can see
what you look like even when you’re talking on the telephone, hidden fillers
to avoid and how to identify and control common vocal habits that creep into your speech and undermine your credibility.
Topics include:
- Leadership, communication and influence
- Executive presence and the speech triad: verbal, vocal and visual congruence
- Authenticity, identity expansion, your “prismatic voice” and code-switching
- Influence in context: public speaking, presentations, virtual conversations, diplomacy/sensitive conversations, phone calls, etc.
- Strategic listening for influence
Why should people read it? Who is the book for?
This is for people who don’t just want to speak, they want to INSPIRE. People who currently speak, but aren’t heard; whose words make sound, but not an impact; who know the difference between being viewed as just a boss versus recognized as a true leader. People who want to master the Three Cs of Vocal Executive Presence so they can command the room, connect with the audience and close the deal with any audience, in any context, while still being authentically themselves.
Single most important takeaway:
“Yes, there are many external ‘-isms’ that create obstacles on our path. It’s not until you get clear on your own communication “blind spots” – what you say and/or how you say it that gets in your OWN way of being heard and understood – that you can unlock your true ability to achieve your true leadership potential and leave the legacy you want.
Skip to Page – Ch. 6 – Authenticity and Influence
We limit ourselves every time we resist adapting to another person/group’s way of communicating and say “that’s not me.” That means we’ve put ourselves in another box labeled “this is me.” All growth includes a learning curve, which is out of the comfort zone, but that discomfort is often misconstrued as “inauthentic.” That’s a limiting belief that keeps us from expanding our spheres of influence. Instead of the black-and-white thinking of those boxes, this section uses the analogy of your “prismatic voice” to reconcile identity, manage the learning curve and expand your sphere of influence into new and different dimensions.
Meet the author
Dr. Laura Sicola is a leadership communication and influence expert, speaker, author and host of the podcast, Speaking to Influence: Communication Secrets of the C-Suite. Her mission is to help executives become confident. She inspires leaders – whether live or virtually – to get the results they want and make a positive, lasting impact. As the founder of Vocal Impact Productions, she trained and coached executives at Comcast, IBM, the US Department of Commerce and Women Against Abuse, along with politicians, business owners and non-profit leaders from around the world.
Dr. Sicola’s TEDx talk, “Want to Sound Like a Leader? Start by Saying Your Name Right,” has over 6.5 million views. She has been featured on programs such as Fox & Friends First, NBC10 @Issue and PHL 17. She has also spoken to thousands at conferences such as the Professional BusinessWomen of California Conference and the PA Conference for Women. A linguist by training, she has a Ph.D. in educational linguistics (how people learn, cognitive processing in communication, and the power of speech) from the University of Pennsylvania, where she also taught for 13 years.
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