Should you change your voice for your podcast?

Voice Over: 00:00:00

Got dreams of being a professional podcaster, but have no idea what you're doing. This is impossible. That's about to change. A new kind of school. Welcome to the PodSchool podcast.

Rachel Corbett: 00:00:10

Hello. Welcome to the show.

Today, this is such an important question.

Satya has sent me through a question I actually get asked quite a lot, and I want to give a little pep talk to you if you are somebody who is thinking this, because it can hold a lot of people back from podcasting. And I want to encourage you to not let this be the thing that holds you back.

The question is, should I change my accent to sound more neutral or more professional?

Absolutely not, is my answer. No.

The idea that you have to sound like a certain person or that your accent is going to mean that you don't connect with certain people or that you have to sound more neutral — I hate that idea. And I get where it comes from, but I just want to encourage you to be yourself.

Honestly, if you are showing up every single week and creating high-quality content for an audience, they want you to sound like you. And if you have an accent, that is you. That is you.

And I really think the idea of having to kind of wash that out of yourself or feel like you can't truly be yourself and still build a connected audience of people that love your show is just a myth that holds a lot of people back and makes people feel like they're not good enough to host a podcast or their voice isn't good enough.

I would say in my 20-plus years of working in audio, I have never in my life met a single person who has heard their voice on tape for the first time and thought, “Gee, that sounds great.” Everybody hates the sound of their own voice. Everybody.

The only difference with when you are a podcast or a radio person — you're used to hearing what you sound like. So you get used to it. It's less about, “Oh God, I love the way I sound.” It just sounds less jarring to you.

Because when you hear yourself recorded for the first time, you are actually hearing yourself exactly how other people hear you. That's never how you heard yourself, because you always hear yourself through your cheekbones. Your ears are not sitting outside the front of your mouth listening to your voice. But the way that you sound when you are recorded is how you actually sound. So it's jarring because it doesn't sound normal, it doesn't sound right to us.

So it makes sense that we are uncomfortable with the sound of our own voice. But if you have an accent, you do not need to sound more neutral to connect with your audience. Your audience will really relate to authenticity — you being real and you genuinely being passionate about your content.

So please don't let that be holding you back, because it's...

I do get this question quite a lot and it always really saddens me, honestly, because it's just not great for anybody to feel like their most authentic self is not enough to build an audience, because it absolutely is. It absolutely is. And I want to give you the confidence to feel that that's the case.

I would say this is also a concern for people not even just around accents, but just around that feeling of professionalism and polish. And I often get asked the question around whether, you know, “I don't think I've got enough of a radio voice.”

And I would say, honestly, the more conversational and you you are, the better placed you are to be a podcast host. There is a sort of voiceover voice that goes on some radio shows that, you know, if you heard someone in the street, you'd be like, “Oh, you work on radio.”

That doesn't always work in podcasting. It sounds a little bit too OTT, you know, when you're sitting down and having a con[versation] with someone — which is what this medium is all about.

Broadcast is really more about capturing people's attention out of speakers in an environment where they're often distracted by other things — the car, the office, the vacuum cleaner, the kids. A speaker is taking up space in a room with you. The content is sort of stepping into that space with you.

With a podcast, you are really selecting that content, putting it in your ears. So that kind of really over-the-top, polished radio sound — it just doesn't work as well often in a podcast.

So you don't need to sound polished, because you don't want to sound like a voiceover person. You want to sound like a person who's talking to your audience. So really, I cannot stress enough that how you sound is right.

And if you are listening to your show as you're recording it — which you absolutely should — you should have your headphones in so you can hear yourself. You will be hearing what your audience hears. You can adjust yourself in the moment. You will get better at this over time, the more that you present.

But the more you hear yourself in the moment when you're recording, the more you'll be able to make slight tweaks and changes in the way that you communicate or maybe re-record something if it doesn't work, so that you can be presenting in a way that's really clear because you're hearing what your audience could hear.

So it's almost like you have to separate your brain a little bit and kind of listen with one ear to “How is this sounding as a listener?” while then also working on your brain to be like, “What am I saying again?” So that's an important trick to learn. It sounds difficult, but it actually just happens subconsciously the more that you do this.

So practice is your key.

The one thing I also always say is that you are always going to have more success being the full-strength version of yourself than the light version of somebody else. If you are trying to copy somebody or do what they did or sound like they did, you're just not going to pull it off. Nobody ever does.

Nobody ever sounds authentic when they're trying to do a bit or act like somebody else.

You know, you... you always need to tap into what you have to bring to your audience personally. You can look to what other people do and admire that and say, “I want to create a show like that.” But the idea of having to copy and paste that or make yourself sound more like that because that's what success means?

Those people are successful because they are them. So you need to remember that you can be successful by being you as well.

I just want to really put a full stop, underline, exclamation mark, asterisk around that because it is a question I get asked a lot and I definitely don't want you to feel — if you don't think your voice is good enough or strong enough or polished enough or you've got too heavy an accent — none of those things matter.

You know, as long as you are clear in your communication, you are providing value for your audience. You're really thinking about what they need and what they're listening to. You're listening to the content that you're creating, adjusting it in the moment, you're editing and making sure that it's polished.

You're doing absolutely everything that you should be doing. And an audience will come — no matter what size that audience is.

So, Satya, thank you for the question. I really appreciate it and I really hope that that's made you feel that you shouldn't let that hold you [back], because you can definitely be a podcaster exactly the way you sound.

If you've got a question, then please head to the description of the episode where you'll find a link to submit it.

And you'll also find a link to my resources, including my free podcasting guide, which will give you all the equipment that you need if you want to set things up and start recording into a microphone and seeing what you sound like — as well as details about my online podcasting course, PodSchool.

I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening.

Voice Over: 00:07:09

That's all for today.