You're going to hear me stress throughout this course the need the imperative to practice on video, watch yourself, critique yourself, figure out what's working, what isn't working. But I do want to caution you on a very, very common false diagnosis. And this is something I see much more frequently with women, rather than men. Although it does happen with men too. The false diagnosis is this, you record yourself, you watch it, you listen to it, and you conclude, Wow, my voice is too high. People will take me seriously.

I need to sound more authoritative. So I'll lower my voice. It's just not true. Ladies and gentlemen, and there are a number of so called experts who give advice to women. Oh, you must Lower your voice to octaves and you'll be treated more. That's a bunch of baloney.

I train women and men all over the world. I asked audience members All the time I test them What are they remember? What are they like? Audience members, men and women, like speakers who talk like real human beings who sound conversational? Well, what makes somebody conversational? It's when their voice goes up and down fast and slow, loud and soft.

It's constant variation in your voice. That's what makes someone interesting to listen to. That's what makes someone sound believable. That's what makes someone not sound boring. And the opposite is when someone is sort of reading a script and everything is sort of the same tone and the same volume and the same speed and you're asleep already. Or they're following as you can see now on my PowerPoint slide and the 18th bullet, reading monotony, it's awful.

And that's the problem with trying it's one of many problems of trying to lower your voice and speak with a deeper voice than is natural. If you're acting to bring your voice down, well then you're acting. And here's the problem unless you are a full time professional actor and you've been to Juilliard, and you've been on Broadway, people are going to spot your acting as bad acting because most people have seen 10s of thousands of hours of good acting. They've seen Martin Scorsese movies, they've seen Tom Hanks, people who have been exposed to good acting, so when they see bad acting, they instantly spot it. So if you try to use a deep voice, it just comes across as phony like you're acting. Hi, I'm Ted Baxter.

I want to make everyone think I'm very important. Now, you might not do it to that extent, but changing it even a little trying to lower your voice is gonna seem like acting. And it's going to seem phony, and it's going to seem contrived. Another problem with trying to lower your voice is it destroys the range in your voice, and it makes you monitor. People don't like to listen to monotone speakers, except for ben stein. And I guess that's an example of one of the unfairness between men and women is there are some men, ben stein, the comedian Steven Wright, who've made fabulous Careers Out of being incredibly monotone.

I'm not aware of women have been able to do that, but let's not use them as our role model. Do what you naturally do. When you are talking to your colleagues in your office, your friends, your family, and you're comfortable and relaxed. You use the full range of your voice high, low, fast, slow, that's what's going to make you interesting. The other problem with speaking in a low voice is it tends to lower your energy level makes it harder to hear. If people can't hear you They can't understand you, and how are they going to remember your messages.

So I'm begging you don't try to artificially Lower your voice. It's not what's causing your problems. And it's only going to make problems worse. So use the full range of your voice and you'll come across, more believable, more likeable or interesting and people will want to listen to you