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About this lesson
Why your voice sounds different in a recording and how to overcome a complex about how you sound.
- 00:04 Here's something I hear all the time.
- 00:07 Oh, DJ, I hate my voice.
- 00:09 I've gotta change my voice.
- 00:10 What do I do?
- 00:12 Guess what?
- 00:14 There's nothing wrong with this person's voice.
- 00:16 And I'm willing to bet there's nothing wrong with your voice.
- 00:20 It's quite common to feel like you don't like your voice,
- 00:24 your voice isn't good enough somehow.
- 00:28 That's a bunch of nonsense.
- 00:29 There are three types of voices in the world.
- 00:32 There's the sort of voice that's so distinctive,
- 00:36 interesting, fluid, attractive.
- 00:39 Those people can sleep till noon, roll out of bed, do a voice-over commercial,
- 00:43 get a million-dollar check, go home, or go to the beach the rest of the day.
- 00:47 That's like the .0001% of people.
- 00:51 Extraordinarily rare.
- 00:53 Then there's the bottom rung, the worst .0001% of people with their voices.
- 00:59 Their voices are so awful that the second someone hears their voice,
- 01:05 they're running out of the room or jumping out of windows to avoid them.
- 01:08 Extremely rare.
- 01:10 And in all my years of training people,
- 01:13 I've never had anyone with a voice like that.
- 01:15 In the more than 10,000 people I've trained over the last 30 years,
- 01:19 I can think of one person who really had kind of an annoying voice, and
- 01:25 she was a very successful, highly-paid executive who has done very well.
- 01:31 So there are bigger things to worry about than your voice.
- 01:36 Here's what's really going on.
- 01:37 We all hear our voice distorted all day long through the bones in our skull.
- 01:42 So when we hear our voice through a speaker,
- 01:47 because it was recorded on video camera or on voice mail,
- 01:51 it sounds different to us because we're hearing it relatively undistorted.
- 01:58 And yet when you think about it, if you hear another colleague speaking in person
- 02:02 versus over the phone or on video, it doesn't sound any different.
- 02:06 Somehow we think that only
- 02:09 our voices are the ones that are distorted when it's recorded.
- 02:12 No. We're simply hearing it in a much less
- 02:16 distorted way.
- 02:18 A couple of things.
- 02:19 The most common solution people have is they think, oh, my voice is awful.
- 02:23 If I just never listen to it, no one else will know.
- 02:27 And they use that as an excuse to not practice their presentations on video.
- 02:33 Horrible, horrible solution, an unmitigated disaster, and
- 02:38 they end up being awful speakers because they don't know what they're doing.
- 02:42 So don't do that.
- 02:43 Here is the second option and it's the real solution.
- 02:47 Keep practicing on video.
- 02:49 Keep listening to yourself.
- 02:52 Do that long enough, you'll get comfortable with your voice.
- 02:55 Your self-image of your voice
- 02:59 will grow to what you're hearing and it won't seem strange.
- 03:03 It won't seem jarring.
- 03:06 Keep this in mind about voices.
- 03:07 Some of the biggest Hollywood stars are wildly successful because
- 03:12 their voices are different, because their voices stand out.
- 03:19 Whether it's Ben Stein and his famous sort of nasal monotone or
- 03:24 Fran Drescher from The Nanny with her sort of screeching nasal sound,
- 03:29 Barbara Walters with a speech impediment,
- 03:33 there are a lot of wildly successful people, people more successful than you or
- 03:37 me, who have voices that aren't our standard definition of a beautiful voice.
- 03:43 It still works for them.
- 03:45 What's a lot more important is having something interesting to say,
- 03:50 memorable for your audience and useful to them.
- 03:53 That's what you should be focusing on.
- 03:55 Now, is it possible that you could spend hundreds or thousands of hours
- 04:01 with a speech therapist to make yourselves speak lower or get rid of a nasal twang?
- 04:06 It's possible.
- 04:08 I'd much rather you use that time coming up with interesting messages for
- 04:13 your presentations and actually rehearsing on video.
- 04:17 That's something your audience would appreciate.
- 04:20 The other stuff, I don't have any evidence that your audience really cares.
- 04:24 So focus on your audience, not yourself.
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