Why You Are Unable to Hear Yourself the Way Everyone Else Does

When it comes to your speaking voice, you are unable to hear it the way everyone else does because you recognize your sound by means of your inner ear. You hear all other sounds around you by means of your outer ear.

Sadly, your inner ear does not tell you the truth. This is why you do not recognize the sound of your speaking voice on your answering machine, voicemail, camcorder, or some older form of audio recording. Not only do you not recognize what you hear, but you probably find the pitch of your speaking voice higher than the way your inner ear perceives the sound.

Pitch refers to the highness or lowness of sound – not the volume which is the loudness or softness of sound.

So which one is correct? Unfortunately, as great as your voice may sound to your inner ear, the true sound is the one you hear on recording equipment. Even a poor quality recording speaks more truth than the way you think you sound.

When I was a child, I would swim under water and talk to my friends. The sound was garbled, muffled, and distorted because it was sound waves traveling through a liquid. Much the same thing is happening inside your head. Your voice is vibrating in the solid and liquid of the brain and is essentially distorted sound.

When you speak to others, however, the sound coming from your mouth is traveling through air, so everyone else to whom you speak hears your voice in that manner. One of the reasons radio DJ’s wear headphones is so that they can hear their voice the way their listeners hear it. The headphones transmit the voice to the outer ear so that they can fine tune it.

In working with my clients, I will have them stand in a corner with their mouth about 6 inches away from where the 2 walls meet. When they speak, their voice hits the wall and bounces back past their outer ear. They are then able to hear how their voice sounds to others. Once I show them how to find their ‘real’ voice, the corner exercise is wonderful because they are able to practice using their real voice and then go back to their old or habitual voice. In doing this back and forth exercise, they are training both their inner ear and their outer ear to recognize the 2 different voices.

You have a better voice inside. It is only a matter of allowing your chest to power your sound instead of just your throat, voice box, mouth and/or nasal cavities. The good news, however, is that when you make the change, you will sound better, you will probably look better, and you most definitely will feel better about yourself. Discovering your ‘real’ voice is an ear-opening experience!