“I Hate The Sound of My Voice”
December 13, 2009
Many of the people I talk with about creating audio or video content for their personal brands are concerned about how their voice sounds when recorded. While many of these individuals are very confident when interacting with other people, they’re surprisingly insecure when they listen or watch any recordings of themselves. I was was one of these people a few years ago until Justin Robert Young and Andrew Mayne encouraged me to podcast for www.iTricks.com. Without their guidance and encouragement, I never would have worked on developing a voice and delivery style I was comfortable sharing with other people. It used to be that listening to my voice after recording a podcast was like thinking about people seeing me naked on a beach - I wasn’t comfortable with putting myself in such an ‘exposing’ position.
The rest of this article is an excerpt from Owning YOU where I talk about how nervous I was about creating a 30-second audio recording for iTricks.com - the first piece of content I created for the Internet.
Nervousness (My Start in Content Creation)
I imagine there may be a little nervousness or apprehension about what you’re about to embark upon - and that’s absolutely ok. I was in that position myself. Perhaps the idea of baring your soul to the world is a little scary and makes you feel vulner- able; unfortunately openness and radical transpar- ency is how business relationships are being made today. It doesn’t matter what line of work you’re in, whether you’re a teacher, or a doctor, or an entrepreneur: the people who work with you tomorrow are likely to know personal details about you including your hobbies and interests in addition to your educational and professional credentials. It’s how we dif- ferentiate and stand out. The old resume is dead. Letting people know what gets you excited and makes you different is going to count big time.
I sympathize with those who are nervous about people reading their writing, listening to their voice, or seeing them on camera. But guess what? 1). That’s not what’s important (your ideas, knowledge, opinions, and enthusiasm) and 2). You can get better or get over all those things. If you don’t care what other people think and are dedicated more towards success, over time you’ll get better at these skills.
I was about 15 years old when I first got started with online content creation. I remember when I started writing product reviews for iTricks.com and the editor asked me to start recording an audio review podcast to go alongside the text-based reviews. I was fine with the writing - it’s the reason I signed on and I wanted to get better at it, but recording my voice and sharing it with people scared the *expletive* out of me. As an introverted teen, talking with other people was not my forte and I decided to do something about that. To get me started, the editor asked me to record a short, thirty-second recording saying what my favorite video was on our sister-site iTricks.TV; that little testimonial was to be played on iTricks’ next weekly podcast.
It took me two hours to record those thirty sec- onds of audio. I have no idea how many takes I did; how many times I started recording, stopped, restarted, listened in horror to my voice, and tried again. It was an intense two hours of sitting in my bedroom, door closed, nobody home, with my laptop on the floor recording my voice, again, and again, and again. Eventually I bit the bullet and submitted the audio. Gradually, I got better at recording audio and became comfortable listening to my voice with- out becoming too critical of how I sounded. A few months later, I could record several audio recordings a day with no extra takes. I subsequently graduated to video content and am now a public speaker.
What’s my point? If you want to get better at something, be persistent, keep trying and overlook your insecurities. At the end of the day, what’s the worst that can happen?
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