Improve Your Voice by Recording Your Voice

• 00:04 Let's hop right in.
• 00:05 The first thing you have to do if you want to improve your voice is you have to
• 00:10 really diagnose it and make sure we know exactly what the problems are.
• 00:14 That means you're going to have to record your voice and listen to it.
• 00:17 These days it's very simple to do.
• 00:19 Every smartphone has an audio recorder, your webcam will do it, if nothing else,
• 00:24 call your own phone and leave a voicemail and you can hear it for yourself.
• 00:29 Now chances are you have heard your voice before and
• 00:32 that's what's made you decide you don't like it.
• 00:35 A word of caution,
• 00:36 most people don't like the sound of their own voice, and here's why.
• 00:42 We're used to hearing our own voice all day long,
• 00:46 filtered through the bones and flesh in our skull.
• 00:50 So we're hearing our own voice in a profoundly distorted way.
• 00:55 But when you hear your voice coming through speakers, on a cell phone,
• 00:59 on speakers on the other side of the room, you're hearing it in a way that's much
• 01:04 less distorted because it's not going through bones,
• 01:08 it's not going through flesh, it's just going through the air.
• 01:11 That's how everyone else hears your voice.
• 01:16 And again, you wouldn't be in this course if you didn't dislike your voice,
• 01:21 but I want to throw one possibility out in front of you.
• 01:25 The problem might not be that you have a bad voice,
• 01:29 the problem might actually be that you're simply not used to hearing your voice.
• 01:35 And if you simply heard it more, then you'd get used to it.
• 01:40 It wouldn't seem strange or alien.
• 01:41 So here's your first homework assignment.
• 01:44 I need you to record yourself talking.
• 01:48 Maybe just record a phone conversation with someone.
• 01:51 I wouldn't try to read from a phone book because that's likely to sound very
• 01:55 mechanical.
• 01:55 But just talk to someone, talk to a friend, family member,
• 02:00 talk to a business colleague, and record it on audio.
• 02:04 So that's the first step.
• 02:05 Just get a minute, preferably two minutes, let's really get it all down.
• 02:11 Don't listen to it yet, I'll tell you what to do in the next lecture.

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