Let me tell you about the worst habit I didn’t know I had.
It showed up on the same video I described in my last post — the one I watched in a hotel room in Salzburg, the thirty-seven-minute recording of my performance that I found increasingly painful to watch. I had already noticed the monotone problem, the flat delivery, the black-and-white voice. But there was something else. Something that made the monotone sound charming by comparison.
I was turning every statement into a question.
Not deliberately. Not as a rhetorical device. I was doing it unconsciously, compulsively, and consistently. Sentence after sentence, line after line, my voice lifted at the end. Not dramatically — not like a Valley Girl parody in an American movie. Just a slight uptick. A gentle rise in pitch on the final syllable. Barely noticeable in isolation. Devastating in aggregate.
“I’m going to show you something that nobody has ever seen before?” “This card has been in your pocket the entire time?” “There is absolutely no way I could have known that?”
Those are all statements. Declarations. Confident assertions of fact. But they didn’t sound like that on video. They sounded like I was checking. Seeking approval. Asking the audience to confirm what I was telling them.
I’m going to show you something? Is that okay? This card was in your pocket? You agree? No way I could have known? Right?
It was, without exaggeration, the most immediately fixable performance problem I have ever discovered. And it was hiding in plain sight for months.
What Upspeak Actually Is
Linguists call it High Rising Terminal, or HRT. Most people know it as upspeak, or Valley Girl inflection, or that thing your teenager does that makes everything sound uncertain. It’s the pattern of raising your pitch at the end of a declarative sentence, giving it the intonation contour of a question.
In casual conversation, upspeak is a social lubricant. It’s a way of checking in with the other person, signaling that you’re open to their response, that you’re not dictating but collaborating. Linguists have debated its function and origins for decades, and there’s good evidence that it serves important social purposes in everyday speech.
On stage, it’s poison.
Ken Weber flags it directly in Maximum Entertainment as a vocal habit that undermines authority and persuasion. Ralphie May, in his standup masterclass material, hammers the same point from a different angle — that delivery and presence require vocal certainty. And when I read both of those, I nodded along and assumed that this was advice for other people. People with weak voices. People who lack confidence. Not me. I’m a consultant. I present to boardrooms. I have presence.
The video disagreed.
Why Performers Upspeak
Here’s what I think happens, based on my own experience and the pattern I’ve noticed in other performers I’ve watched since becoming aware of this.
Upspeak in performance comes from a specific place: the desire for validation.
When you’re on stage — especially when you’re relatively new to it, as I was — there’s an ever-present low-level anxiety about whether the audience is with you. Are they engaged? Are they buying this? Do they believe me? Do they like this? And that anxiety leaks out through your voice in the form of upspeak. Your inflection turns declarative sentences into questions because, on some unconscious level, they are questions. You’re not just telling the audience what’s happening. You’re asking them to confirm that it’s okay.
This is different from the upspeak you hear in casual conversation. Conversational upspeak is a social tool. Performance upspeak is an anxiety symptom. And the audience reads it accordingly.
Think about what happens in the audience’s brain when they hear a statement delivered with questioning inflection. Their unconscious processing detects a mismatch. The words say one thing. The vocal pattern says another. Words say: “This is certain.” Voice says: “I’m not sure.” And when there’s a conflict between verbal content and vocal delivery, the voice wins. Every time. The audience may not be able to articulate what they’re hearing, but they feel it. Something is off. This person doesn’t seem entirely confident. This person seems to be asking my permission.
And the moment the audience senses that the performer is uncertain, the entire foundation of the performance weakens. Because every form of mystery entertainment depends on a basic social contract: the performer knows things the audience doesn’t. The performer is in control. The performer is leading. If your voice signals that you’re actually following — seeking approval, checking for confirmation — that contract dissolves.
The Kreskin Problem and the Blaine Solution
Once I started paying attention to this, I began noticing it everywhere. I watched videos of other performers and could immediately hear when someone was upspeaking. It was rampant among newer performers, but even some experienced ones had it in specific moments — usually during transitions, when their confidence was lowest, or during audience interactions, when they were genuinely uncertain how the other person would respond.
Then I watched performers who never did it. David Blaine, for instance. His delivery is almost aggressively flat, but it’s flat in a different way than monotone. It’s flat because it’s declarative. Everything he says sounds like a statement of fact. “Watch. Look. That was your card.” No uptick. No questioning inflection. No checking. Just declaration after declaration, delivered with the absolute certainty of someone who knows exactly what’s about to happen.
That certainty is part of what makes Blaine’s performance style so effective. You may not like his persona. You may find his laconic delivery too sparse. But you never doubt that he believes in what he’s doing. And that belief — communicated almost entirely through vocal inflection — is what creates the space for astonishment. The audience doesn’t have to wonder whether what they’re seeing is supposed to be amazing. His voice has already told them: this is a fact.
Compare that to a performer whose voice turns every statement into a question. “This was your card?” The audience hears a question and instinctively wants to answer it. They shift from reception mode to evaluation mode. Instead of experiencing the moment, they’re assessing it. Did I pick that card? Wait, was it? Let me think about it. The wonder gets interrupted by analysis because the performer’s voice invited analysis.
The Fix Is Mechanical, Not Psychological
Here is the good news. Upspeak is not a deep psychological issue that requires therapy or years of vocal training to overcome. It’s a mechanical habit. Your voice is doing something specific at the end of sentences — rising in pitch — and the fix is to do something different: drop in pitch.
That’s it. Downward inflection on key statements. Period.
It sounds almost too simple, and in a way it is. But simple doesn’t mean easy. The habit is deeply ingrained, especially under performance conditions, and overriding it requires conscious effort until the new pattern becomes automatic.
Here’s the exercise I used, and it’s the same one I would recommend to anyone who suspects they have this problem.
Take five key statements from your performance. Not random lines. The important ones. The lines that carry weight. “This card was in your pocket the entire time.” “There is no possible way I could have known your choice.” “Watch closely, because this only happens once.”
Record yourself saying each one three times. The first time, say it naturally. The second time, deliberately exaggerate the downward inflection at the end. Make it sound almost aggressive — like you’re shutting down an argument. Push the last word of each sentence down in pitch until it feels like you’re planting a flag in the ground.
The third time, find the space between. Not aggressively downward. Not questioning. Just… certain. A natural descent at the end that signals “this is a statement, not a request.”
Then listen to all three versions of each line. You’ll hear the difference immediately. And you’ll hear which version sounds most like someone who knows what they’re doing.
I practiced this in hotel rooms for two weeks. Just the key statements. Five of them, three times each, every night before sleep. I would say them into my phone, listen back, adjust, repeat. It took about ten minutes per session. Within a week, the downward inflection had started to feel natural on those specific lines. Within two weeks, it was bleeding into the rest of my delivery.
The Subtleties
Once you have the basic fix in place — downward inflection on key statements — you can start getting more nuanced about when upspeak is actually useful.
Because here’s the thing: upspeak is not always wrong. There are moments in performance where a questioning inflection is exactly what you want. When you’re genuinely asking the audience something. When you’re building suspense by leaving something open. When you want to create the impression of uncertainty before a revelation that resolves it.
The difference is intentionality. A performer who upspeaks unconsciously on every sentence is leaking anxiety. A performer who strategically uses rising inflection on specific sentences is creating a deliberate emotional effect. The first undermines authority. The second demonstrates it.
Think about the difference between these two deliveries:
Version one, unconscious upspeak: “You chose a card? And you put it back in the deck? And I never touched it? And yet… your card is right here?”
Version two, strategic inflection: “You chose a card.” (Down.) “You put it back in the deck.” (Down.) “I never touched it.” (Down.) Then, leaning in, voice rising: “So how is it possible…” — and the rising inflection here is deliberate, creating a question that the audience wants answered — “…that your card is right here.” (Down. Hard.)
Same words. Completely different experience. In the first version, everything is tentative. In the second version, the performer builds a chain of certainties, introduces one deliberate question, and resolves it with a final, emphatic declaration. The upspeak on “how is it possible” works because it’s surrounded by downward inflection. It’s a strategic departure from the pattern, not the pattern itself.
The Confidence Loop
There’s a secondary effect of fixing upspeak that I didn’t expect. When you start making deliberate downward inflections, you actually start feeling more confident. Not just sounding more confident — feeling it.
This makes sense if you think about the feedback loop between voice and emotional state. Your voice doesn’t just reflect how you feel. It also shapes how you feel. When your voice rises at the end of sentences, your brain interprets that as uncertainty, which generates more anxiety, which produces more upspeak. When your voice drops at the end of sentences, your brain interprets that as certainty, which generates more confidence, which produces more downward inflection.
I noticed this within the first few days of deliberate practice. The statements I was practicing started to feel different in my body. Not just in my throat and mouth — in my posture, my breathing, my overall sense of groundedness. By forcing my voice into patterns of certainty, I was teaching my nervous system to believe that I was, in fact, certain.
This is not pseudoscience. The relationship between vocal production and emotional state is well-documented. Actors use this technique constantly — they know that changing how you speak changes how you feel, and changing how you feel changes how you perform. It’s a loop, and you can enter it from either direction. If you can’t will yourself into confidence, you can voice yourself into it.
What I Hear Now
Nowadays, when I watch recordings of my performances, upspeak is one of the first things I check for. It’s become a diagnostic tool. If I hear my inflection rising on declarative statements, I know something was wrong in that moment — usually anxiety, sometimes fatigue, occasionally a section of the script I’m not fully comfortable with yet.
And I hear it everywhere else too. In other performers. In TED talks. In podcast interviews. In business presentations. Once you become attuned to upspeak, you can’t unhear it. You start noticing who sounds certain and who sounds like they’re asking for permission, and you notice how your own trust and engagement shift accordingly.
The fix took two weeks of deliberate practice. The awareness will last the rest of my performing life.
Your statements are not questions. Stop letting your voice pretend they are.