Singers need to warm-up their voices and so do you. Breathing well and exercising and relaxing neck and shoulder muscles are vital to creating top quality voices.

When you are relaxed and breathing well your voice will be at its most powerful so always follow this routine before the big presentation:

1. Place one hand on your chest and one on your stomach.
   
2. Breathe in through your nose, allowing your stomach to swell and keeping the movement in your upper chest minimal. This means that you are using the diaphragm and allowing air right down into your lungs.
   
3. Slowly and evenly breathe out through your nose. Counting slowly to three or four on each inward and outward breath helps to control the pace of your breathing. Aim to take 8-12 breaths a minute: breathing in and breathing out again counts as one breath.

You can extend this exercise by voicing a soft prolonged 'Haaa' as you exhale. Now combine this with releasing tension in your shoulders. Draw your shoulders up as you inhale and then exhale in bursts bouncing your shoulders down each time as you breathe out your sustained 'Haaa'.

Voice coach Kristin Milward confirms that 'Very few voices are beyond hope' and adds that 'You don’t have to be born with a phenomenal voice in order to acquire one. With enough work we can all change our voices.'

Margaret Thatcher proved that by using a coach to help push her voice down in pitch. You may baulk at the cultural bias that leads to deeper (ie more masculine) voices carrying more authority but remember that certain voices are simply easier to hear. If you are not breathing well or your voice is naturally high or very low-pitched it will be a lot harder for any audience to hear you no matter how much you want them to celebrate diversity.

A lot of voice training is very physical. People who wish to raise or lower the pitch of their voice (are you reading this David?) are encouraged to think of their voice resonating from the top of their head to the pit of their abdomen. If your voice is deep causing chest vibrations akin to the subterranean rumblings of an underground train you need to consider moving the centre of your voice production up the way. The opposite applies if your voice is weak and high-pitched.

Many experts recommend one to one voice coaching backed up with time spent practicing exercises at home for achieving sustained changes. Ask a brave and honest friend to feedback on your performances. Read aloud to them while consciously raising or lowering the physical centre of your voice. What do you sound like reading from your belly, does it sound better if you read while imagining your voice coming from somewhere in the region of your forehead? Probably not.

A lot of voice problems are linked to talking too much and talking too fast. This reduces clarity because word endings, vowel and consonant sounds become lost or mangled in the rush to finish lengthy complex sentences. Focus on altering the pace of your speech to help with three key areas:

• Clarity
• Speed
• Emphasis

You can address this by recording yourself reading part of a simple story from a book or the newspaper or getting that trusted friend to feedback on your performance.

Listen. Is it clear, engaging, dull, monotonous, mumbled or shouted?

Try again. Experiment with speeding up and slowing down to increase clarity and impact.

Try recording yourself reading this sentence:

There’s more to swimming than just getting in the pool and thrashing your arms and swishing your legs about.

Listen carefully. Are you a g dropper? If so practice enunciating all your word endings and each syllable more clearly.

Look into a mirror as you speak. You will see the shape your mouth makes as you enunciate key sounds. Exaggerate this shape if you still need to improve your enunciation. Just five minutes in front of the mirror every day will work wonders.

Standing tall with head up, hands loosely clasped behind your back and making regular eye contact with one or two people in the audience, indicates confidence.

Also use moderate hand gestures in front of your body to emphasise what you say. And remember your body language has to mean what you say as much as your voice.

There’s no use shouting 'Viva!' with your hand flapping in the air if you look more like you’re waving Aunty Dot off at King’s Cross rather than punching the air with revolutionary zeal.

If you have to talk sitting down, for example in an interview or on a discussion panel, lean slightly forward, smile, nod and make eye contact to keep your audience engaged and feeling good about you.

Making your voice work positively for you is definitely not a case of making sure that when the rain falls in Spain it falls gently on the received English pronunciation of plain.

Celebrating diversity and ensuring equality of opportunity would be tough calls if we all had to start speaking like the Queen.

However, thousands of parents who invest in private education are generally not looking for little Chardonnay to emerge with her estuarine vowel sounds intact. Make no mistake, the British still use accent as a means of working out who is and who is not 'one of us'. Does this matter in campaigning? It might do.

According to a 2003 survey of 100 companies conducted by image consultants the Aziz Corporation businesspeople were most likely to trust a Scottish or South East English accent.

Almost half believed that other strong regional accents can be a disadvantage with Liverpool and working class London accents scoring particularly low for honesty and trustworthiness.

Fortunately there are plenty of successful highly visible campaigners whose voices defy the rules of British posh. Think Jamie Oliver, Mark Thomas and Ken Livingstone.

Work on voice quality before accent and study the skills of these rule-breaking achievers as inspiration for your own groundbreaking presentations.

Whatever else you do make sure you believe in yourself and your subject. Communicating with more impact is a skill which comes easiest when we are speaking from the heart.