A friend has her own marketing communications business, and she’s been told her high-pitched voice makes her sound unprofessional and not credible. She agrees with her critics. After all, she hires voice-over actors with strong, low voices to record messages she wants certain target markets to take seriously. She knows the importance of tone of voice.
Her voice says a lot about her as a person—her life experience is conveyed through her voice. It can convey empathy or lack thereof, concern for others or lack thereof, authority or lack thereof. In short, her voice is an important part of her identity. She tends to end her sentences with an uplift in her voice that makes a declarative sentence sound like a question. She speaks at a high-pitch. These traits undermine her message to her clients and employees. She sounds tentative. She sounds unsure.
What is she to do?
The trouble is, she’s spoken in a high voice her entire life, and when she tries to lower it, as she’s been coached to do, it doesn’t come naturally to her. It’s a strain. And she sounds inauthentic. She did learn not to let her voice get higher at the end of a sentence. But it took a lot of practice because she’d always spoken that way.
Making sentences into questions is a good example of how our upbringing affects our voice. My friend grew up with critical parents who made her question her every move—even her speech. Her insecurity crept into her voice and made her sound tentative and unsure. It was a habit that no longer served her, and once she noticed it, she worked to change it.
She’s also a naturally ebullient person, which isn’t a bad thing unless you want to seem authoritative, or so she thought. She learned to tone down the smiling and slow down. She learned to keep the emotion out of her voice. But she found talking in low tones too uncomfortable to keep up for long.
My friend is not alone in thinking she has to change to be taken seriously. A low, male voice has been the standard for sounding authoritative. Many women, people of color, LGBTQ folks and others who feel marginalized, like immigrants, simply don’t have a low, male voice. Even some men don’t have a low voice and feel insecure about it. Does that mean all these people are not to be taken seriously? Do they really have to sound like a powerful man if they want to be heard?
Time for a Change
Maybe it’s time we change the “standard” and make a new one. Our true authenticity has nothing to do with having a high- or low-pitched voice. It’s just that we are used to thinking of powerful men as the only ones with authority, so we want to sound like them. But that is changing. More and more diverse people—with diverse voices—are in positions of power. Maybe it’s time to lean into our authentic selves and be confident in the content of our speech.
My friend, herself, could help change the way society judges voice. She could hire more diverse voices to connect with her target markets. She could begin to be the change she wants to see.
Nancy Travers is an Orange County Counseling professional. If you need safe, effective counseling services, please get in touch. You can reach her here: https://www.nancyscounselingcorner.com/comtact