We Never Hear Ourselves The Way That Others Hear Us

Have you ever had the misfortune to hear yourself talking? Can you remember what your facial expression was as you heard your voice come out of the recording device – pain, anguish, disbelief? Almost universally we all dislike the way our voices sound and we just can’t imagine that an audience would be willing to sit through one of our speeches. What’s up with all of this?

It’s All About The Bones

So just why do we sound so weird when we listen to recording of our own voice? It turns out that the answer has to do with bones – specifically our bones. When we speak, we of course hear ourselves. However, we do this in a couple of different ways. Obviously our ears are working and we pick up the sound of our voice. However, at the same time, as we are speaking the words, the sounds that we are speaking are also traveling through the bones in our skull and reaching the inner ear. This ends up making us “hear” a deeper sound to our voice than everyone else is hearing.

Recording our voice to listen to can screw things up even more. Since every recording device is imperfect, what gets recorded is not necessarily what your audience heard. Depending on the quality of the microphone that recorded you and the speakers that you were played back through, you voice may have picked up even more of a tinniness to it.

Why Everyone Wants To Sound Like James Earl Jones

If this was a perfect world (it’s not, by the way), what would you want your voice to sound like? I don’t know about you, but I’d like it to sound like the actor James Earl Jones’s voice – you know, the one who played the lion in the movie “The Lion King”, did Darth Vador’s voice in the Star Wars movies, and who has done countless voice-overs for TV commercials around the world.

Why his voice? Simple – studies have shown that people associate deeper voices with authority. Clearly James Earl Jones has a very deep voice and that’s why he has always been in demand in the entertainment industry.

The Story Of Bitching Betty

True story: once upon a time I worked building fighter jets. The manufacturer of the jets wanted to find a way to get the pilots to pay attention when they had to immediately take an action – such as pulling up if they were flying too low to the ground. They decided to build into the aircraft a voice alert system (sorta like today’s “a door is a ajar” voice that your car has).

They searched high and low for the right voice: they needed one that would make the tough, manly pilots sit up and do what it told them to do right away. They tried men’s voices, women’s voices, sweet voices, urgent voices, sexy voices, and none of them did the trick until they found just the right voice. It happened to belong to a New Jersey housewife (yes, you can imagine what it sounded like) and it had exactly the right timber to it. For obvious reasons pilots came to refer to the voice as “Bitching Betty”.

What All Of This Means For You

So what’s a speaker to do? You really can’t change your voice – the best that you could hope for is to take some expensive voice classes and change it just a bit. Instead, the best thing to do is to become comfortable with your own voice.

This means that you need to spend time listening to (imperfect) recordings of you speaking. This will give you the ability to hear yourself as other hear you and this will be the first step in controlling how you sound. Don’t worry – no matter how bad you think you sound, you always sound better to others because they sound just as silly to themselves as you do to yourself…!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills

Question For You: Do you think that it is possible to have one voice that you use to deliver speeches in and another that you use for normal conversations?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you talk about the wrong things, then your speech will go nowhere quickly. Maybe we should have a chat about what you shouldn’t be talking about…

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The U.S. President Knows How To Prepare To Give Multiple Speeches In A Single Day

Just how much speaking can you do in a single day? We spend a lot of time talking about how to prepare for and give a good speech. However, sometimes life just comes at us like a runaway truck and we find ourselves double or triple (or more) booked to speak in a single day. Oh oh, looks like we’ve got a whole new challenge here…

Things To Do The Day Before

Dr. Caren Neile spends a lot of her time speaking to raise funds. She knows a thing or two about how you’ve got to prepare for a day in which you’ll be giving multiple speeches.

Dr. Neile points out that your whole day is going to go downhill if you don’t get enough sleep the night before. This sounds easy to do, but all too often it’s not. We rush around the day before we’re going to be speaking (writing our speech perhaps?) drinking coffee / tea / soda and then we throw ourselves into our beds, shut our eyes and hope that we’ll fall asleep.

Sorry, life doesn’t seem to work out that way. All too often when we have a big speaking day ahead of us, we will find ourselves laying in bed completely unable to get to sleep. What you need to do is to make sure that you prepare to have a good night’s sleep at the start of the day before you are going to be speaking. This means staying away from stimulants (goodbye coffee), getting some exercise in, and basically making sure that you wind things down before you hit the hay. You may still be dealing with nerves, but at least you’ll have a better chance of getting to sleep.

Can You Say Siesta?

When was the last time that you took a nap? I’m betting that the last planned nap that you had was all too long ago (kindergarten perhaps?). It’s time to rediscover the joys of napping.

On a day that you are giving multiple speeches you need to determine if you are going to be able to fit in naps in between your speeches. This may strike you as silly, I mean you’ve got a lot of things that you have to get done that day; however, it turns out that it’s one of the best things that you can do and it just might save you from slipping up and saying the wrong thing.

If you take a look at the energy that you’ll be expending during a day that you give multiple speeches, you’ll be peaking while you are giving the speeches. After you’ve exerted this much energy, you are going to need to recharge your batteries and a nap is a fantastic way to do this. Just remember to wake up before it’s time for your next speech!

Drink Heavily!

Sorry, I’m just talking about drinking water here. When we speak, the parts of our throat that form the words get dried out. Being hydrated is the key to being able to go the distance in a day in which you’ll be doing a lot of speaking.

It probably goes without saying that keeping a glass / bottle of water by your side while you are speaking is also a good idea. This will become even more important as you go through your day and your body parts start to wear out.

Eat!

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen speakers make one of two different mistakes when it comes to eating: either they don’t eat at all or they eat too much. Not eating at all is a no-no because you are going to be exerting yourself while you are speaking and if you do this on an empty stomach, you are going to feel the effects. These can range from being distracted by a rumbling stomach to passing out because of low blood sugar. You don’t want to do either of these.

Eating too much can cause similar issues. One problem is indigestion — who wants to listen to a speaker who keeps burping? The other is that as your body goes to work on all of that food, it’s going to boost your body temperature and that’s going to slow you down and make you sleepy.

What All Of This Means For You

It would be great if we ran the world, but we don’t. This means that sometimes we will find ourselves with commitments to speak multiple times on a single day. It can be challenging enough to do a good job giving just one speech, giving multiple speeches in a single day make life even harder.

The key to doing this well is to make sure that you prepare to succeed. This includes getting enough sleep the night before your speeches and then doing the right things as you go through the day of the speeches. Take your time and take care of your body and just like a marathon runner you’ll eventually reach the finish line — then you can stop talking!

What is the most important thing that you think needs to be done in order to prepare to give back-to-back-to-back speeches?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

We can talk about how to give great speeches until we are blue in the face; however, it ultimately comes down to just how well all of the things that we’ve discussed are put into practice that will determine how effective our talks are…

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When Speakers Hear Their Own Voice, They Need To Make A Decision...

We’ve all had that moment of disbelief – you know the one, when someone recorded you saying something and then played it back to you. You listened to the voice coming out of the speaker and you did what we all do – you winced and said “No way that’s me!” However, yes it was you – as you sound to everyone but yourself. Ouch!

From that moment on, you were forever changed. Just like in that move “The Matrix“, you had taken the red pill and now you couldn’t ever turn back – you now know how your voice sounds to others.

Nancy Meyer is a national speaker and author who has spent a lot of time looking into why we sound different to ourselves than we do to others. I think that she’s solved this mystery.

Nancy says that the reason that we sound so different to ourselves has three reasons: your inner ear, your outer ear, and where your voice comes from. Of course, that’s not quite enough info for you to do anything about it. So lets dive in just a bit deeper and find out what all of this means.

• Your Inner Ear: Your speaking voice originates in the middle of your neck. You expel air which then passes through your vocal cords, gets magnified in your voice box, resonates in the cavities in your head and then the sound exits out your nose and / or  mouth. Your inner ear (the part that actually “hears” sounds) is located quite close to all of this so only you get to hear your voice as it starts out.
• Your Outer Ear: So here’s something that you may not have thought of – you don’t actually hear the sounds coming out of your mouth. If you think about this, your ears are in the wrong place to hear what’s coming out of your mouth. Instead, what happens is that the sounds that come out of your mouth shoot out, bounce off of something, and then get picked up by your ears. This means that what you are actually hearing is really the sound of your voice plus a lot of extra noises.
• Where Your Voice Comes From: Since you are creating the sounds that you speak in your throat, these vibrations end up rattling your entire head. This means that the parts of your ear that pick up sound are getting bounced around just by the very fact that you are speaking. This changes what you hear.

So this all leads to the big question: what if you don’t like the voice that others are hearing coming out of your mouth? In all honesty, there’s not a lot that you can do.

The key recommendation is that you don’t change your voice drastically – small changes are the best. You can practice with a tape recorder making changes and then playing them back. If you still don’t like what you are hearing then it may be time to go out an invest in a vocal coach. You should hear what you’ve been missing!

Have you ever hear a recording of your voice? How did it sound to you? Do you wish that you sounded different? Have you ever tried to change how your voice sounds to other? Did it work? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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A Speaker's Voice Contains Many Tools Than Can Be Used During A Speech

When you find yourself giving a speech, you quickly realize that what you are missing is any sort of tools with which to give the speech. If you were a painter, you’d have a canvas, brushes, paints, thinners, etc. with which to make your creation. However, when you are giving a speech it’s just you and your audience. Make you feel sorta naked, doesn’t it?

It turns out that you actually do have a toolbox with which to create your speech – the words that you’ll be using. It turns out that not only the words that you choose to use, but the way in which you speak these words can cause a powerful reaction in your audience. Debra Johanyak is a professor of English at the University of Akron and she has come up with a list of different ways that we can use our voice to make our point during a speech.

Let’s take a look at the different verbal delivery “tools” that Dr. Johanyak has come up with:

• Words That You Accent: It turns out that not all words are created equal – you have the ability to emphasize certain words. As an example, consider the sentence “After cutting the green wire, a sudden silence descended over the entire bomb squad.” Simply by pronouncing the word “green” differently, you can draw your audience’s attention to it.
• Slow Pitch Speaking: The pitch of your voice controls how high and how low your voice goes. This is a powerful way to communicate emotion during your speech: “Once I saw that the cage was empty, I knew that the 6′ snake could be anywhere in the house.” The word “anywhere” can be said in a higher pitch than the other words in order to draw attention to it.
• Just Be Quiet: The most powerful speaking tool is also the simplest – just be quiet. When we add periods of silence to our speeches, it adds emphasis to the words that came before and sets the stage for the words that are to come next.

There you have it – now your speaking toolbox is actually looking rather full!

When you give a speech do you use your voice to its fullest? Have you ever ever accented words or varied your pitch to make a point? Are you able to remember to use quiet pauses to make a point? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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