Finding Your Spoken Voice: How to Become Believable

Do you talk on podcasts or in video?

Want to be more comfortable in front of the microphone?

To discover how to improve your spoken presence, I interview David Lawrence.
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The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview David H. Lawrence XVII, an actor and voice talent. You may know him as the evil Puppet Master in the Heroes TV show. David has also done extensive voice work for radio, movies and even as the voice for America Online's customer service.

David will explore how to find your spoken voice.

You'll discover tips to get comfortable speaking on-camera, as well as some of the more common mistakes people make when speaking.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Finding Your Spoken Voice
David's background

David grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, listening to both local and nearby stations on a little transistor radio hidden under his pillow.

"I just fell in love with the idea that one person can sit in a room and talk to millions of people and make each audience member feel as though he or she was the only one the person was talking to," he recalls. Technology, David's other passion, has also run through everything he has done.

David recalls his first time on a commercial radio station at WNCI in Columbus, Ohio. At the very end of "Barracuda" by Heart, he came out with "Landshark, candy gram," which was the big bit on Saturday Night Live at the time. From there he played the radio station jingle and headed into his career.

After 12 or 13 years as a disk jockey, David's radio station flipped format, and he moved over to talk radio, where he found his stride. From there he went into syndicated radio: SiriusXM. In 2007 David decided that "radio was great, it had its day and I was done with it." It was time to move to on-camera.

He says he likes the phrase, "Leap and the net will appear." David just leapt, although he had been preparing and training. Before he did anything on-camera, he learned how the business worked, as well as who the gatekeepers (but not decision-makers) were. That knowledge was helpful when David first started to audition, he says. David booked Heroes within six months of starting the full-on audition process, which is a lot faster than a lot of actors experience with the process.

David explains how his one episode of Heroes turned into many. The first day on the set, his character was supposed to get shot and killed. Toward the end of the day, the director gave David new lines. In this newer version, his character had a chair thrown at him and was sent back to prison. "I was new at this and I said, 'Wait a minute. I rehearsed my death scene all weekend. I'm not going to be able to do that?' They responded, 'Do you want to die? Because we talked to your agent and you're in the next eight episodes.'"

In addition to all of the legwork and preparation, David says the book, Secrets of Screen Acting (for which he recently finished voicing the audio book version), was also helpful.

David also teaches voiceover courses on VO2gogo.com and he created the Rehearsal app. Here's how the app came about.

David was in his agent's office and was called to audition across town with little time to prepare. His usual process is to record his lines and his partner's lines. He would then put that recording on iTunes, so he could repeat it until he learned his lines. All he had at his agent's office was his iPhone with voice memo, which did not have a repeat function.

When David got to the studio, he learned they decided to write out the part.