The Secret of Parental Tone

Most of it, probably about 90 or 95 per cent of the game is your body language and voice tone. A very small percentage are the actual words. – David DeAngelo

The greatest breakthrough I ever had was when I realized my voice didn’t change even when I get nervous. Even if I’m feeling really internally screwed up I can keep my voice now. – Tyler Durden

Everybody talks about having good voice tone, but what exactly does that mean?

This article, The Secret of Parental Tone, is excellent and has helped me particularly when I’m nervous around an amazingly hot girl or when I go to call an amazing girl after I get her number.

The Secret of the Parental Tone
By Richard Pierce

How you sound is more important than what you say! As strange as this may seem to you at first, we believe that the power to persuade at any given moment is based more on how you sound, when you are talking, than what words you are actually saying.

If you sound like a child when you’re speaking, you will not win many arguments regardless of how brilliant your rhetoric is because children almost never win arguments about important matters with adults.

To win an argument with an adult, you must not just sound like another adult; you must sound like an adult in a special role that adults sometimes play.

You must learn to sound like — A Parent.

We all pause at the end of our sentences; at the end of our phrases and at natural breath points. These natural pauses and the tonality we adopt when we pause accounts for the overall tone-of-voice that is projected toward the listener.

In effect, the listener either hears a child-like speech pattern, a neutral speech pattern or a parental speech pattern. Only the parental pattern is effective for persuasion techniques.

In fact, the child-like pattern works against the speaker in a big way. Did you ever hear a child whine and complain about something? Would anybody be inclined to follow a suggestion that sounded like that? Of course not.

And yet, when an untrained person is put into a stressful situation, the tendency to sound like a little child is pervasive because when we are nervous we tend to end our sentences with our voices up about a half tone; the way a child sounds when it’s whining. Like we were asking a question. This is the child-like tone that is deadly to persuasiveness. Children don’t convince adults about much.

Start listening to the way people speak. Listen to the news announcers on TV. They almost always use the parental tone of dropping their voices about a half tone at the end of their sentences, phrases and breath points.

The tonality sends a message of confidence, composure and competence; because it unconsciously reminds the listener of their parent’s voices when their parents were angry with them.

The tone creates the impression of an “authority figure” an expert in a field whose purpose is to help, teach and guide — The parent’s role… kindly, lovingly and firmly, the tone tells them to listen and obey (for their own good). From this ground of being, persuasion is not only possible, but likely.

It is imperative that the concept of using the Parental Tone be grooved with as much practice as it takes because stress causes the untrained voice in the child-like sounding direction.

There is a time when this concept comes heavily into play, a time when the woman does not see your body language, your eye contact, how you look. That time is on the phone. That is when I am most careful to use parental tone.

And I am most careful to use it from the beginning. Once you start off with parental tone, you feel more confident and it’s all down hill from there.

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posted in Body Language