Vanessa Van Edwards explains how breath and pitch shape how confident you sound. Lower pitches signal confidence while higher pitches and vocal fry signal nervousness. Take a deeper breath, relax your vocal cords, and speak on the exhale to lower your pitch instantly.
Every human, both men and women, have a natural range. And my lowest end sounds like this. My highest end sounds like this. This also feels natural to me. But if you can imagine if I gave the entire course like this, it would drive you crazy. We like to hear people in the lower end of their natural range. The more space our body takes up, the more oxygen we can breathe in, and the lower our tone is. When we get nervous or afraid, we tend to take in less breath. And then we speak up here, and then we sound really nervous. This can also happen when we get into vocal fry. Vocal fry is when we hear that frying sound in our voice. I want you to list to yourself as you're speaking. If you're ever in conversation and you hear yourself going higher into your vocal tone or getting vocal fry, I want you to take in a deep breath, relax the vocal cords, and speak on the out breath. It's almost impossible to speak in that higher range when you're speaking on the out breath. This will immediately relax you and also relax the listener if you hear yourself going to vocal fry. Another little trick you can give is just speak slightly louder. So if I go into vocal fry, but then I speak louder, it immediately gets rid of it.
