Make your voice more impressive by shutting up! Here’s how

How important is your voice in a presentation? That’s like asking how important your car is on a road-trip. Sure, you still need a map, a plan, money etc. for your adventure, but the actual vehicle that carries you around is critical. If it is not in good condition, it won’t carry you there and back. It will frustrate your plans and you will never arrive. Even if you somehow scraped through, you definitely will not enjoy yourself very much.

Your voice is like the vehicle for your message—it literally carries your message as sound to the audience. The better tuned the vehicle, the better the transmission and the more easily the reception.

In a previous article, I spoke about how to make your voice less boring. You can review that article here. In this installment, I want to share how you can improve your voice not by talking, but by listening.  

Shut up and listen

I know this sounds counter-intuitive. We are talking about your voice here, right? What does listening have to do with it? Shouldn’t you be joining a choir, or learning to yodel?

Joining a choir is nice and can be very good for bringing awareness to your voice and even strengthening it. Yodeling is fine too I guess, as long as it is in private. But neither (especially yodeling) is the most efficient thing to do first if you are trying to immediately improve your speaking voice.

There is a more direct way. And it involves learning to listen. What you need to do to get started is straightforward enough—start paying attention to people’s voices.

You will find it easier to inject any qualities you desire into your voice if you first discover what those qualities sound like. And you find that by listening, not by speaking.

Noticing the effects people’s voices have on you is priceless for this. What voices do you find pleasant, authoritative, reassuring, calming, quirky etc.?

Also, noticing when a voice rubs you the wrong way or makes you doubt the credibility of the speaker is useful in identifying what not to do. That is, paying attention to what it is about the voice that is shifty. This will be easy in the drunk that stumbles on the train and asks for spare change, but it might be harder to pinpoint in the polished con-man or woman.

Now, I don’t recommend you go looking for drunks on trains or sketchy types in suits to analyze their voices for tracers of mistrust. There are likely plenty of people around you already that will furnish plenty of material for you to have a lot of fun analyzing. And all without the risk of being swung at or swindled.

Image by Couleur from Pixabay

Listen around you

In the excellent film August Rush, the main character—an orphaned musical child prodigy named August—famously said “The music is all around you. All you have to do… is listen”. This character had a special gift of finding music in everyday sounds like whistling winds, sirens, footsteps, wind chimes, rain drops etc. The movie culminates in a dazzling orchestral performance of the child’s composition—August’s Rhapsody—that incorporates everyday sounds with different genres of music to create something truly beautiful. 

Well, when it comes to voices, unlike music, you don’t need to be a savant to find that they are literally all around you. And you don’t need an orchestra to create something beautiful with your own instrument. But like August said, you do have to learn to listen.  

The problem is that we don’t pay attention. Human voices are ubiquitous so we take them for granted. But the voices of others are packed full of information and instruction if we want to improve our own voices. So, on whom do you turn your listening gaze?

Well, if you have friends, colleagues, bosses, family members etc., then start listening, really listening, to them when they speak to you. Better still, listen when they speak to each other. Appropriately, of course. I call it ethical eaves-dropping.

Listen for technical qualities like timbre, volume, pitch etc. Learn more about those qualities in this article. Listen for those, and notice how the qualities translate to how the voice feels and what kind of effect it produces.

For example, how does the pitch of the voice (a technical quality) affect how you perceive the person (a feeling effect).

Next, you will turn that information you get as a searchlight on your own voice. 

Side note: Children can be especially instructive here. It is unlikely you want to sound like a child when you speak, but you can learn from their expressiveness, playfulness and variety—useful qualities when used well in persuasive speaking. 

Listen to your gob

I am all for introspection and I am a firm believer in reflection. Listening to your heart is great, as is listening to your gut. But how often do you hear advice to listen to your gob?

Yet, rare as that advice is to listen to your own mouth—with good reason—that is exactly what you will do next. Albeit without being a complete jerk-hole.

With all the data from your observations of people’s voices, it is now time to start to listen to your own voice. I recommend using your cell-phone to record yourself in conversations. This way, the phone can work away quietly in the background and you can be present and natural in the conversation. You don’t need to do this all day. Just a few minutes a day in casual conversation should be OK.

Caveat: This goes without saying, but it is probably not a good idea to record sensitive conversations, especially work-related ones, especially without permission. It is hard to overestimate the value of common-sense here, so I won’t even try.

Moving on.

The next thing to do is imminent—listen to the recordings of yourself. Try not to think too much about the content of the conversation, hard as it might be, but just focus on how you sound.

Do any of the qualities you liked from the people’s voices you listened to show up? What about the ones you disliked in others? Is this humbling or sobering?  Notice what really stands out—what really impresses you about your voice. Also, notice one thing that you really do not like. Is your pitch too high or too low? Do you speak too fast or too slow? Are you dry and monotonous? Or are you loud and rancorous? Notice.

That is all you have to do for now. Notice. In the next article, I will recommend simple, actionable and fun exercises to help you improve based on your observations.

Until then, be your best and listen.