Strategy for Voice Improvement: Feedback from Others

00:01 I know you didn't like recording your own voice and listening to it, but this next step is even more important and you're not going to like it.

00:08 I need you to take that audio file you just created, whether one on your cell phone or on your computer.

00:15 I need you to email it to a couple of friends now.

00:19 Pick friends of yours that you know will give you some honest feedback.

00:24 Not people who are just always so happy telling you how wonderful you are, how great you are. Let's face it, most of us have somebody in our life.

00:32 We could just splatter our face with mud, put a pillow under our our shirt, and they would say, well, you look great and you've lost weight.

00:41 I need you to find somebody who will give you honest feedback and ask them to tell you what they don't like about your voice. Any weaknesses, any areas for improvement? I need you to get some kind of objective feedback from others, because it may be there's ten things you absolutely hate about your voice and everyone else completely agrees with you.

01:07 But in my experience in helping people with their voices and voice issues for the last 30 years that I've been doing, presentation coaching is the vast majority of the time 99.5% of the time, roughly, the problems we hear in our own voice are not the problems other people hear.

01:30 In fact, they don't notice that.

01:32 So I'm not prejudging you.

01:35 You may have very specific real problems with your voice, and everyone else agrees, but we don't know until we ask.

01:43 So I need you to take that audio file and I need you to send it to others. Ask them for their feedback.