What to Do if You Don't Like Your Voice

• 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.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.