Why You Hate Your Voice and How to Fix It | Tim Newman Speaks

Have you ever listened to a recording of your own voice and thought, “Who is that?” If you’ve ever cringed at the sound of your voice on tape, you’re not alone. In this episode of Speaking with Confidence, I dive into why our own voice sounds so strange to us on a recording—and more importantly, what you can do about it.

I’m Tim Newman, your host and a recovering college professor turned communication coach. Today’s episode is all about bridging the gap between the voice you think you have and the one the world actually hears. I’ll show you why you don’t need to “fix” your voice, but understand what’s happening behind the scenes—both physically and psychologically—so you can finally build confidence in how you sound for your presentations, meetings, and important conversations.

There’s no guest this week; it's just me, sharing techniques and insights straight from my own coaching experience. If you’ve ever felt hesitant to speak up because you’re self-conscious about your voice, or you want to project more authority and command in your professional life, this episode is for you.

Here’s what I cover:

• Why your voice sounds so different—and often “worse”—when you hear it recorded, thanks to the physics of bone conduction versus air conduction.
• The phenomenon I call “imposter voice syndrome” and why it fuels self-doubt and anxiety.
• How exposure therapy can help you get comfortable with the sound of your recorded voice and shift from self-judgment to self-acceptance.
• Practical, immediately actionable techniques to power up your voice, including diaphragmatic breathing for resonance and steadiness, finding your optimal pitch with safe and easy exercises, and the strategic use of pauses to add authority and presence.
• Tips for using volume and articulation to ensure your message lands—so you never mumble or fade out at a crucial moment.
• How the way you use your voice transforms your leadership presence and credibility.
• Tactics for handling high-pressure situations, reading the room, and dynamically adjusting your delivery for maximum impact.
• Developing a simple, five-minute pre-speaking vocal warmup routine to make confidence a habit instead of a hope.
• The mindset shift from self-consciousness to audience focus so you stop apologizing for your sound and start using your voice as a strategic communication asset.

By the end of the episode, you’ll realize that your voice is not something to hide or “fix”—it’s your unique communication signature. With some deliberate practice and self-kindness, you’ll be on your way to speaking with authentic confidence, no matter the situation. If you take away only one thing today, let it be this: your voice has the power to change the world, starting with how you think and feel about it.

For more resources, remember to grab your free eBook and check out the Formula for Public Speaking rules at speakingwithconfidencepodcast.com. Until next time, embrace your voice and keep building that confidence!

Chapters

• 0:00 Cringe At Playback Explained
• 1:46 Air Versus Bone Conduction
• 3:19 Imposter Voice And Anxiety
• 3:49 Nonjudgmental Exposure Practice
• 4:36 Leadership Mindset On Voice
• 5:18 Breathing For Vocal Power
• 6:16 Find Your Optimal Pitch
• 7:15 Strategic Pausing Over Fillers
• 7:51 Volume And Articulation Drills
• 8:14 Apply Skills To Real Situations
• 9:01 Build Leadership Voice
• 9:32 Handle High-Pressure Moments
• 10:23 Read The Room And Adjust
• 10:41 Five-Minute Warm-Up Routine
• 11:07 From Self-Focus To Audience Focus
• 12:03 Small Wins, Big Confidence
• 12:28 One-Minute Breathing Reset
• 13:06 Progress Over Perfection And Resources

Transcript

Tim Newman: 0:08

Welcome back to Speaking with Confidence, the podcast that helps you build the soft skills that lead to real results. Communication, storytelling, public speaking, and showing up with confidence in every conversation that counts. I'm Tim Newman, a recovering college professor, turn communication coach, and I'm thrilled to guide you on a journey to becoming a powerful communicator. Have you ever hit record, listen back, and you think, who is that? That instant cringe when you hear your own voice is almost universal. It sounds higher, thinner, or just plain weird compared to the rich, confident voice you hear in your head. And the problem isn't just momentary discomfort. That feeling makes you hesitant. You start holding back in meetings, when calls, or when presenting because you're subconsciously afraid of how you'll sound to everyone else. But here's the truth. Your voice isn't the problem. The disconnect between what you hear and what the world hears is. And this isn't about changing your voice into something it's not. It's about understanding why that disconnect happens and learning practical techniques to bridge the gap so you can communicate with the confidence that's already inside you. So why does your own voice sound so foreign when a recording? It's not an audio glitch. It's basic physics and biology. When you speak, you hear your voice through two different channels simultaneously. The first is air conduction. Sound waves travel from your mouth to your ears just like you hear everyone else. But the second and more dominant channel for you is bone conduction. The vibrations from your vocal cords resonate through the bones in your skull and jaw, which adds a layer of lower frequency resonance. And that's the rich, full-bodied voice you're used to hearing. The voice on a recording is pure air conduction. It's the unfiltered, objective sound that everyone else has been hearing all along. Your brain has simply never had to process this version of your voice as you. And this creates what I call the imposter voice syndrome. You hear the recording and feel like a fraud, like the voice doesn't match the person you know yourself to be. And this dissonance creates a real communication anxiety. It makes you second guess yourself, speak more quietly, or avoid speaking up altogether because you're subconsciously trying to avoid the sound of that imposter voice. The first and most crucial step to fixing this is exposure therapy. You need to normalize the sound of your recorded voice. And this doesn't mean listening to a presentation and critiquing every um and uh. That's called judgment, and it reinforces the problem. Instead, the goal is non-judgmental listening. Record yourself reading a neutral passage from a book or article for about 60 seconds. Then listen back with one simple goal to hear the sound without attaching any negative emotion to it. Don't analyze the content or your delivery, just listen to the timber, the pitch, the quality of the sound itself. Do this for just a few minutes each day. After a week, the cringe factor diminishes significantly because your brain starts to accept the sound as part of your identity. From a leadership perspective, this is critical. Leaders don't speak with apology in their voice. They speak with conviction. They own their natural sound because they know the message is more important than the messenger's self-consciousness. Overcoming this initial hurdle of self-perception is a foundation for projecting the authority and confidence that commands a room. Now that we understand why the disconnect happens, let's talk about how to build a voice you can be confident in. These aren't about creating a fake radio voice. They're about optimizing the instrument you already have for clarity, power, and presence. The first power-up is diaphragmatic breathing. Your breath is the engine of your voice. Most people breathe shallowly from their chest, especially when nervous, which results in a thin, weak sound that's prone to cracking. Diaphromatic breathing gives you a solid foundation. Place a hand on your stomach. As you inhale through your nose, focus on pushing your stomach out, filling your lungs from the bottom up. As you exhale, your stomach should naturally draw inward. Practice this silently for a minute. Now let's add some sound. When you're exhale, make a steady s sound, like a tire slowly deflating. The goal is to maintain a consistent airflow and sound for as long as possible. This builds the core support needed for a resonant voice that doesn't waver under pressure. The second power up is finding your optimal pitch. When we're nervous, our pitch tends to creep upward into a less authentic range. Imagine being in basic training with a drill sergeant with a high-pitched nervous sounding voice. That wouldn't work. Your optimal pitch is where your voice feels most comfortable and resonant. A simple way to find it is a hum and sigh exercise. Start by humming a comfortable note, not too high, not too low. Feel the vibration in your lips and face. Now, as you sustain the hum, slowly open your mouth and let it transition into a relaxed sigh, letting your pitch glide down naturally. The note you land on at the bottom of that sigh is likely very close to your optimal speaking pitch. Try speaking a simple sentence like good morning, starting from that note. It should feel easy and sound richer. The third power-up is mastering strategic pausing. Yes, strategic pause can be used here too. Filler words, um, like you know, are often crutches we use to fill silence while our brain searches for the next word. But remember, silence is powerful. A deliberate pause gives your words weight, allows your audience to absorb what you've said, and makes you appear more thoughtful and in control. Practice this with a simple reading exercise. Read a paragraph aloud and challenge yourself to replace every potential filler word with a complete silent pause. It will feel awkward at first, but it trains your brain to embrace silence as a tool rather than a vacuum to be filled. Beyond these three, work on volume control, not just being loud, but using subtle increases in volume for emphasis and dropping to a quieter tone to draw people in. And finally, articulation drills ensure your message isn't lost to mumbling. Exaggerate your mouth movements while saying tongue twisters like red leather, yellow leather to warm up your to warm up your articulators. The key to all this is consistent deliberate practice. Record yourself doing these exercises for just five minutes a day. Don't judge your performance. Just observe the progress. Over time, the changes become integrated into your natural speaking style, building a voice that feels and sounds authentically powerful. Now that you have these technical building blocks, the real magic happens when you shift from practicing exercises to applying these skills tactically in real-world situations. And this is where your voice stops being just a sound and starts becoming a strategic tool. Think about matching your vocal delivery to your specific intent. If you're delivering difficult feedback, your voice should reflect calm authority, slower pace, lower pitch, deliberate pauses. If you're energizing a team, you might use a slightly faster tempo and more variation in volume to build excitement. The technical skills give you the control to make these intentional choices rather than just reacting nervously. And this is especially critical for developing what I call the leadership voice. It's not about being the loudest person in the room. It's about projecting competence and conviction through vocal stability. When you speak from a supportive breath at your optimal pitch and with controlled pacing, you signal that you are in command of both your message and yourself. People subconsciously equate vocal control with general competence. It's one of the fastest ways to build credibility. Handling high pressure situations is the ultimate test. The natural response is tension which creeps into the throat, raises the pitch, and speeds up delivery. The counterintuitive move is to do the opposite. When you feel that pressure building, consciously drop your shoulders, take a deep diaphragmatic breath before you speak, and intentionally slow your pace by about 20%. This doesn't just help you sound more confident, it actually tricks your nervous system into calming you down. You're using your voice as a lever to control your state. A huge part of tactical application is learning to read the room and adjust accordingly. And I talked about this in episode 94. If you see blank stares, it might be a sign of confusion, not boredom. And that's your cue to slow down even more, articulate more clearly, and use more pauses to give people time to process. If you see fidgeting or yawning, the energy might be dropping. That's when you increase your volume variation and maybe even stand up or move around to physically shift the dynamic. Your voice is your primary instrument for managing the energy in the room. To make this sustainable, build a simple vocal warm-up routine you can do in five minutes before any important speaking event. It could be one minute of diaphragmatic breathing, one minute of the hum inside to find your pitch, and then running through a few articulation drills. This isn't about a major overhaul each time. It's about creating a consistent ritual that cues your brain and body to perform at their best. Consistency turns these techniques from something you have to think about into your new normal. And the final and most important piece is the internal shift. All the technique in the world won't help if you're still fighting a mental battle against your own voice. The goal is to move from self-consciousness to audience focus. Your voice is your unique communication signature. It's part of what makes you you. So instead of seeing it as a flaw to be fixed, start seeing it as an asset to be optimized. The confidence you build by knowing how to use your voice effectively translates directly into leadership presence. When you're not worried about how you sound, you can focus 100% of your energy on connecting with your audience and delivering your message with impact. This shift happens through small, consistent improvements. You won't wake up tomorrow with a completely new voice, and that's not the goal. The goal is that each time you practice diaphragmatic breathing or using a strategic pause, you're reinforcing the belief that you are in control. Over time, these small winds accumulate into a fundamental change in how you show up. You stop apologizing for your sound and start owning it. If you take only one thing from this, make it this. Before your next meeting or important conversation, take sixty seconds for intentional breathing. Find a quiet space, place a hand on your stomach, and take five deep slow breaths focusing on filling your lungs from the bottom up. This single act does two powerful things immediately. Physically, it oxygenates your brain and grounds your voice. Psychologically, it signals to your nervous system that you're preparing to speak with intention, not anxiety. You'll notice that your very first sentence comes out with more resonance and steadiness, and that small shift increases a positive feedback loop that changes your entire delivery. Start with this one practice. Don't try to master everything at once. Embrace the process of getting comfortable with the sound of your own voice, because that's the foundation of communicating with true confidence. That's all for today. Remember, we're looking for progress, not perfection. Be sure to visit speaking with confidence podcast.com to get your free ebook, The Top 21 Challenges for Public Speakers and How to Overcome Them. You can also register for the format for public speaking rules. Always remember your voice has the power of changing. We'll talk to you next time. Take care.