Almost nobody has heard their own speaking voice accurately. What you hear while you’re talking is filtered through the bones of your own skull, which is a large part of why a recording of your voice always sounds wrong the first time you hear it. It isn’t wrong. It’s just the first time you’ve heard it properly.
This lesson has one job: get an honest recording, before you know anything else in this course, so you have a genuine “before” to measure against.
Do this now. Find something you know well: your job, a hobby, an opinion you hold, and talk about it out loud for two minutes, recorded on your phone. Don’t rehearse it and don’t script it. Talk as you would to a colleague.
Now play it back, once, all the way through, without stopping to wince. Then play it a second time and note three things only: where your pace changed, where you took a breath (or clearly should have and didn’t), and whether you used any pauses longer than half a second.
Most people find this uncomfortable and mildly embarrassing. That reaction is normal and it passes quickly, usually by the second time you do this exercise, later in the course, it stops feeling like a test and starts feeling like data.
Keep this recording. Lesson twelve asks you to compare it against a second one.
