You cannot hear your own voice, which is the real case for coaching

Let me get the obvious out of the way. I am a speaking coach, writing about a video in which Simon Sinek says everybody should have a coach. You should read this knowing that, and I will try to be more useful than agreeing with him.

He is right, and the interesting part is not that he is right. It is the reason he gives, which is better than the usual one, and the thing he does not mention because he is talking about coaching in general rather than about speech.

The line worth keeping

“A coach is somebody who they’re there to support you. They don’t have any politics, they don’t have any stake in your career, they can’t put in a good word for you at the office. They’re there strictly for you.”

That is the argument, and it is not the one people expect. The usual case for coaching is expertise: someone knows more than you do. Sinek’s case is absence of interest, which is rarer and harder to source.

Think about who is currently positioned to tell you how you come across.

Your manager has seen you present many times and their view is entangled with your promotion, which means the feedback arrives shaped and late. Your peers are in some measure competing with you. Your team cannot say it at all, because the power runs the wrong way. Your partner has heard you talk for years and has stopped hearing it. Your friends want to remain your friends.

The people best placed to tell you are the people least able to. Everyone with enough exposure to have an accurate view has a reason to soften it, and the softening is not malice, it is the ordinary operation of being in a relationship with someone.

A coach is the only person in the arrangement who loses nothing by telling you the truth in the first hour. That is worth more than the technique, and it is the part clients most often say afterwards that they did not expect.

The bit about speech that he does not cover

Sinek talks about blind spots in general terms: seeing things you do not see, understanding your own blind spots. In most coaching that is a matter of persuasion. Someone tells you that you avoid conflict, and you either come round to it or you do not, and there is no tape.

Speech is different, and it is the cleanest case of a blind spot there is, because you cannot hear your own voice.

Not metaphorically. When you speak, some of what reaches your ears travels through the bones of your skull rather than through the air, which is why recordings of yourself sound wrong and slightly thinner than you expect. The voice in your head and the voice in the room are physically different signals. Everyone knows the recording feels wrong; fewer people follow it to its conclusion, which is that the room’s version is the accurate one and yours is the artefact.

That has a practical consequence. Rehearsing alone, without recording, trains you to be satisfied with a performance you are the only person in the world who cannot assess. It is the reason “just practise more” so often produces someone who is more fluent at their existing habits.

It also removes the persuasion step entirely. I do not have to convince anyone they speak too fast. We play the recording and they hear it, usually with an expression I have come to recognise. Nearly every client I record is running faster than they believed, and almost nobody accepts it before the playback.

This is why every session I run is recorded and sent to the client, including the free one. The recording is not a service extra. It is the mechanism that makes the whole thing work.

“Coaching is a proper skill” — how to check

“Most people don’t realize that coaching is actually a proper skill. It’s a profession. It’s not just like some friend who gives you some advice.”

Agreed, and this is worth turning into something you can actually use, because “it is a profession” does not help you choose between two websites.

Three questions I would ask any speaking coach, including me.

Do you record me, and do I keep the recordings? If not, you are both relying on memory and politeness, and one of you has an incentive to remember it generously. Recordings also make progress checkable rather than a matter of opinion, which cuts both ways and should.

Will you tell me what is already working? A coach who only finds faults is not diagnosing, they are performing rigour. Some of what you do under pressure is worth protecting, and a coach who cannot name it will happily train it out of you.

What do you not work on? This is the most revealing one. A coach who takes everything is selling hours. I turn away children’s coaching, exam preparation, and anything involving a stammer or a diagnosed condition, because the right professional there is a speech and language therapist. An honest scope is a better signal of competence than any list of clients.

Where I would push back

“The best athletes all have a coach” is a weaker argument than it sounds. An elite athlete has a coach because marginal gains at the top of a field are worth enormous amounts, and because they have already done ten thousand hours of the basics. Most people reading this have not recorded themselves once. The comparison flatters the reader and slightly overstates the case.

And you do not always need one. If you have never listened back to two minutes of yourself speaking, do that before you pay anybody. It is free, it takes ten minutes, and it does a genuine share of the work, because the four things you can change about a voice are audible immediately once you are actually listening. Plenty of people fix a speed problem on their own this way.

The other case for not booking: if you are not going to do the ten minutes a day between sessions, an hour a week with anyone will not shift a habit. A coach cannot want it more than you do, and I would rather say that here than discover it in week three.

What Sinek gets exactly right

“For some reason the rest of us either are forgotten or don’t think we need it.”

The people who most often need this work are the ones furthest from being offered it. Senior enough that nobody gives them feedback any more, and senior enough that the cost of speaking badly is highest. It is a strange gap and it widens with seniority, which is precisely the wrong direction.

If you are the most senior person in the room, nobody in that room is going to tell you that you lose people three minutes in. They will adapt around it instead, which feels like everything being fine.

What to do this week

Record two minutes of yourself, standing, saying something real. Not reading. Then listen once for each of the following, separately, because you cannot hear them all at once:

1. Pace. Are you faster than you thought? You are.
2. Pauses. Count the full stops where you actually stopped.
3. Endings. Do your sentences finish downwards, or do they lift into a question you did not intend?

That is the coaching Sinek describes, minus the coach, and it will get you further than most people expect. If you want the version with someone listening, the first thirty minutes are free, recorded, and end with a written list of what is actually in the way, whether or not you book anything after it.

Common questions

Why do people need a speaking coach if they can just practise?

Because practice repeats what you already do. You hear your own voice partly through the bones of your skull, so the version in your head is not the version in the room, and rehearsing without a recording trains the habits you cannot hear.

Why can't my colleagues give me feedback on how I speak?

They can, and it will be filtered. Your manager's view is entangled with your promotion, your peers' with competition, and your friends' with wanting to stay your friends. Simon Sinek's phrase for what a coach has instead is no politics and no stake.

How do I know if a speaking coach is any good?

Ask three things: do they record you, will they tell you what is already working, and what do they refuse to take on. A coach who records, praises specifically and turns work away is describing a method rather than selling hours.

When do I not need a coach?

When you have never recorded yourself. Do that first, because it is free and it does a real share of the work. Also when you are not willing to put in the ten minutes a day between sessions, because nobody can want it more than you do.