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So what should you do if you hate your voice?
For starters, realize everybody hates their voice. Here's why. When you hear your voice
coming out of a TV, or a voice recorder, or voicemail, you're hearing your voice in a
non-distorted way. Whereas all day long when you hear your voice, when you hear yourself
talking, you're hearing your voice distorted through the bones in your skull. It's distorting
the sound.
So when you hear your voice coming out of a TV, or coming out of a loud speaker, you're
hearing it for the first time in an undistorted way. It's not your image of your own voice.
That's what's disorienting. So it's not that you have an awful voice. It's just jarring
because that's not the image you have of your own voice.
Here's the reality of voices. There are three types of voices in the world. There's the
bottom point 0.0001% of voices, and their voices are so awful, so bad. They open their
mouth, people leave the room. Take it from me, that's not what your voice sounds like.
I've trained tens of thousands of executives all over the world, for nearly thirty years,
and I've had exactly one person with a voice that bad.
Now, there's another type of voice. This is the top 0.00001% of people. Their voices are
so distinctive, so honeyed, so memorable that all they have to do is roll out of bed in
the morning, tape one radio commercial or TV commercial, get their million dollar check,
and go back to bed. That's rare. I don't have that voice. Chances are, you don't have that
voice.
Then there's everyone else. The 99.999% of us, where our voices are perfectly fine. Nobody
listens to our voice and instantly loves it, or instantly hates it. It's simply a method
for communicating. So you've got to just get over it. Just get over it. You've got bigger
problems than your voice.
Chances are your voice is fine, but your speech might actually be boring or unmemorable. So
let's focus on bigger challenges. Let's actually make sure we have an interesting, memorable
speech, and your voice will take care of itself. The other way of dealing with this, is if
you practice enough on video, you will get used to hearing your voice, and it will no
longer bother you.