I can think of any childhood friend and recall the sound of his voice, and I believe we can all do the same. Your voice is an auditory thumb print, and it gets smeared on the memory of your listeners.
Yet few of us are happy with our voices. We hear them on recordings of any kind and we’re shocked. And we should be. A lot of us have voices that do not do us justice.
Here are the 3 most common voice problems that could be holding you back.
Uptalk
Also known as Valley Girl, this is a pitch pattern that rises at the end of sentences that would normally resolve on a downward slope. Repeated, the rising intonation causes the speaker to sound tentative, as though she were asking for agreement. Anything repeated too often is annoying and destracting, but this vocal habit causes the speaker to lose any trace of credibility and gravitas.
Glottal Fry
Again, this is primarily a girl-thing. Not sure why, but it seems to be more common than in the past. A speaker with glottal fry grinds her vocal chords in the back of her throat when she speaks, so her voice sounds like she’s croaking, or frying her voice, rather than supporting it with her breath.
The most pronounced frying comes at the end of sentences, when the speaker has run out of breath to support the sound. I even hear glottal fries on the radio, and it makes me think the mouth of the speaker is closed, and that she’s too lazy and self-important to generate any vocal energy. A glottal fryer makes the listener come to her. She is not making the effort to reach out to them.
Compression
This is a both-sex-thing. And mostly a young person thing. It’s basically speaking too fast, or machine-gun speaking, but it tends to come in bursts, rather than in a continuous flow.
For instance, a speaker could be walking calmly through his thoughts, and then suddenly burst in to a sprint through a particular phrase so that all consonants are lost (burs in oo a sprin through a particular phrase.) Listeners are polite and don’t say anything, but they often have to work hard (offen hata wur har) to decipher what was said (wa wa seh), and while they are deciphering, they aren’t listening.
Again, this tends to happen at the end of a sentence or a thought, and it undermines the speaker because he sounds as if he thinks that what he has to say is not worth listening to and that his inner word processor has lost the functionality of the space bar.
Your career depends on how you speak. These vocal habits make you look bad, and you should, and can, clean up your act.