***Your Soft-Spoken Voice Is Impressing No One!

One of the most frustrating things for a listener is not hearing what the other person is saying. They are listening but they’re not hearing. After repeated attempts asking the speaker to increase his/her volume, they stop listening. If you want others to hear your message, then you must learn how to increase your volume properly. Yelling is definitely not the answer. You have a normal, natural volume level that you have not been using for any number of reasons. 1. Possibly you were raised in a quiet household. 2. Your mother or father spoke softly. 3. You were raised in a loud household but were offended by your parent’s or siblings’ volume and refused to speak at their level. 4. You may have been abused as a child. The difficulty in learning how to increase your volume is that your inner ear (which is how you hear yourself) is most comfortable with the level at which you have been speaking out of habit. When you try to increase your volume, your inner ear will tell you that you are shouting – that you are too loud. This is why retraining your inner ear is vital so that you can accept a larger voice without feeling like you are yelling. The best way to overcome your lack of volume is to first accept that indeed you do speak too softly. Your second step is find a voice training program that will show you how to increase your volume naturally, without forcing your voice from your throat and voice box. In order to understand your volume compared to others, record someone, like a broadcaster, from your TV and then record your own voice right next to the professional’s take. [When you record, make sure the microphone is the exact same distance from the TV’s speaker as it is from your mouth. Otherwise this test will not work.] Play it back at a comfortable listening level and compare the two. I am confident you will notice the difference. Your next step is to learn to power your voice from your chest cavity which will automatically increase your volume naturally. If you are extremely soft-spoken, you may need additional work with your volume which is what a good voice training program will offer. If you want others to take you seriously, it will not happen until they can hear you first. Learn to talk at a normal volume and you will be surprised at how impressed others are when you speak.