How You Sound

What a voice carries

Some evaluators read a job candidate's pitch, and others listened to the same pitch. Those who heard it rated the candidate as more intelligent, more thoughtful and more likeable, and were more interested in hiring them.

The words were the same. The difference was whether people could hear a mind behind them.

What to do

Say it, do not write it

When you have something thoughtful to tell someone, tell them out loud. The instinct is to write it down, and writing loses the very thing the study measured.

Some evaluators heard a job candidate give a short pitch, and others read the same words. Those who heard it rated the candidate as more intelligent, more thoughtful and more likeable, and were more interested in hiring them.

Limits of the study: These were job pitches judged by recruiters and by untrained people. We are borrowing the explanation: a voice shows that there is a mind behind the words.

Step 1

Anxious speech starts without enough air. That is what makes it fast, high and thin.

The fix comes before the voice. Here the breath is not a way to relax. It is the air your sentence needs.

What to do

Breathe before you speak, not while you speak

Take one breath outside the door, and one before you speak in a group. People can hear a breath taken in the middle of a sentence. They cannot hear one taken before it, and that is the whole difference.

In the standard model of social anxiety, physical symptoms and watching yourself make each other worse. Your attention turns to how you are coming across, and that makes you come across worse.

Step 2

End your sentences with your voice going down, not up. Say one out loud both ways, and the difference is obvious.

When your voice rises at the end, it sounds as if you are asking permission to have spoken. Most people do it most when they say their own name, which is the sentence they least want to sound unsure about.

What to do

Start with your name

Say your own name out loud, with your voice going down at the end. It is the shortest sentence you have, and the one you will say most often to strangers, so fix it first.

This is our own view. Research on intonation exists, but we found nothing clear enough to cite for this instruction, and we prefer to say so.

Step 3

When you are about to say “um”, pause for that moment.

A pause sounds like thinking. An “um” sounds like a fear of being interrupted, and nobody interrupts you.

What to do

The pause belongs inside the sentence

The warning below is about exactly this. A pause in the middle of your thought sounds calm. A gap before you answer someone is a different thing, and the evidence says it costs you.

This is our own view. It is a technique from people who speak for a living, and we have no controlled evidence that it carries over to conversation.

Pause inside your sentences, not before your answers. In conversations between strangers and between friends, shorter gaps between turns went with feeling more connected. People listening from outside could hear the difference too.

That effect is measured in milliseconds between turns, not in whether you take a second to think about something worth thinking about. It shows that a long gap has a cost. It does not tell you to hurry.

The bigger warning is about this whole topic. Half of its exercises are labelled as our judgement and not as findings, because most research on voice is about job candidates and advertising. We prefer to give you three physical habits and tell you plainly which ones have no evidence behind them.