Your Voice Is an Instrument, and You Are Playing Three Keys

Royce Blake was the first guest this show ever had. Fifty episodes later he is back, and the subject has changed. He spent more than thirty years in major market radio, interviewed hundreds of guests, and now works on something narrower: helping people sound as confident as they already are.

His argument is that most people do not have a confidence problem at all. They have a communication problem, and it only looks like a confidence problem from the outside.

Fifty Episodes Later

Richard Lowe: Good morning. This is Richard Lowe with the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. I am here with Royce Blake, who is an expert on voice, an expert on communication. Fifty episodes ago, this is precisely fifty episodes ago, you were the first person to appear on the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. So welcome back.

Royce Blake: I never knew. Well, that is an honor, my friend. Yes. And I am Royce. I have been on the radio for a long time, well over thirty years. And I believe that most people do not have a confidence problem. They have a communication problem. That sounds like a confidence problem.

Royce Blake: After more than thirty years on the air and interviewing hundreds of guests, I have realized your voice can either amplify your expertise or undermine it. And that is very important for business leaders. If you think about it, probably at least seventy percent of your job is talking, right? It is either the staff or the customers. And fair or not, your voice and how you use it is your personality.

Royce Blake: So it is very important to build vocal confidence. And that is what I help people do, because I have been talking and listening for a long time. I was also a program director, so I had to listen to disc jockeys to give them a job. So I know what sounds good.

Thirty Years Behind the Microphone

Richard Lowe: So you did this for many, many years, you were a disc jockey. Why do you not give us some information or stories about that? You have got plenty of stories. You have told me a few.

Royce Blake: Oh boy, do I. And I do that every week in my newsletter, which has been fun, because part of my newsletter is a behind the mic section. And I start remembering these radio stories that I totally forgot. I am like, wow, that was weird.

Royce Blake: One of my most recent ones, I was on a telethon. I have done tons of TV telethons for Jerry’s Kids, Easter Seals, whatever affliction, I have probably been a part of a telethon for it. And there I was live on the MDA telethon, getting ready for a five minute, well rehearsed pitch for people to send in donations. And they loaded the teleprompter upside down. All the words were backwards.

Royce Blake: So obviously I just had to ad lib, and that is where vocal confidence comes in again. I know how, because on the radio you are always live. The good thing is if you make a mistake, it is gone instantly. The bad thing is if you have a killer set, it is also gone instantly.

Royce Blake: I like to say I started in Los Angeles on the air and worked my way down ever since. I started when I was seventeen years old on a big radio station. It was called 10Q in Los Angeles. And I have done mornings in markets like Phoenix, San Diego, Portland, Kansas City. You get the idea. I have been on the air in a lot of places for a long time.

Richard Lowe: I remember the old radio stations, KLOS, B100 FM, stuff like that. I was listening to them every morning. There was Dr. Demento’s show, which I think was on at night. There were tons of others. I used to commute between Lake Arrowhead and San Bernardino, and I would listen to Dr. Demento and one of the mystery radio shows.

Royce Blake: Fabulous, fabulous show. We need more of those these days. I guess we do, but they are just called podcasts now, right?

Richard Lowe: They are not the same. These were acted out and they were always chintzy because they did not have any time to rehearse, or the budget. They just did them. I found as many as could be recovered on archive.org, so I downloaded them all. There are about five hundred of them.

What Actually Happens When People Freeze

Richard Lowe: One of the things you have mentioned to me is people stop sounding like themselves at the moment it matters most. What is happening to them at that moment?

Royce Blake: They are afraid of being judged. That is the bottom line. We are not really afraid of our speaking skills. We are afraid that people will judge us.

Royce Blake: I deal with a lot of public speakers as well, and you get this all the time. Everyone gets stage fright, or let us call it red light fright. When that little red light comes on, all of a sudden you start freaking out. On stage I always remind them, you are thinking they are worried that you missed section seven or you blew the last sentence. They are not.

Royce Blake: They are thinking about their hair. They are thinking about, did I check Instagram yesterday? Did I send Sheila that recipe? Is my car parked right? When is that soccer game? That is what is going on in their brains, because we are humans and we always think the same thing. What is in it for me?

Royce Blake: And that is what you need to get through. If you can tell someone something that is helpful or hopefully actionable, then they are going to pay attention.

Record Yourself for Five Minutes

Royce Blake: The number one thing I tell people is grab your phone and record yourself. There is a special way to watch it back. Even if it is two minutes, I recommend five, and no one else has to see it ever. So that is the awesome part. This is the most honest coach of any kind, especially a voice coach, that you will ever get.

Royce Blake: Record yourself for at least two minutes. I suggest five, because let us say you record for five. The first couple of minutes can be your sales pitch or your elevator pitch, things you know by heart. But after about two minutes, when you run out of things to say, that is when the real you comes out. And that is when you notice things you never knew.

Royce Blake: We hear our voices through bone. We are listening through the bone in our heads. Others and microphones are listening to our voice through the air. So it is a totally different medium. That is why you sound so weird on recordings, because that is how you sound to others.

Royce Blake: You will start noticing things like filler words, the number one problem. You know what I mean? Things like that. Those are filler words and phrases, when your brain is trying to catch up to your lips.

The Pause

Royce Blake: The easiest way to solve that is the pause. That is my, if I could teach anything to anyone, it is the pause. Because when you pause, it does a couple of things. It lets your brain catch up. It also makes what you said last more powerful, and what you say next much more powerful.

Richard Lowe: I am like, so, what were you saying?

Royce Blake: Exactly. And that does not inspire confidence, especially to clients. By the way, the easiest way to pause is just stick your tongue on the roof of your mouth. If your tongue is on the roof of your mouth, you cannot talk. So go ahead, give it a try. You cannot do it.

Royce Blake: Even a pause of just a few seconds, half a second, can be meaningful, both for your content and for whoever is listening. But we get scared, right? We are humans. We abhor silence. And so we try to fill that silence with the ahs and the likes.

Richard Lowe: One thing also is when you are talking, you are not listening. That is very important. So if you shut up and pause, as you say, you probably will listen a little bit more, and then you might catch what they are saying.

Royce Blake: You bet. Fair or not, it is all how a person makes us feel. It is really not their words. It was, were they confident when they said that? Were they serious? Were they certain? Those are the things you are looking for.

Eighty-Eight Keys

Royce Blake: We do not use our voice. You do not use a guitar, right? You do not use a piano. You play them. And your voice is an instrument. And if you learn how to play it, your whole world opens up.

Royce Blake: Now, I varied my pitch, I varied my pacing, and I threw a pause in that last sentence. It is like a piano. It has eighty-eight keys, right? What if you had a piano and you only played three?

Richard Lowe: Pretty boring.

Royce Blake: Three keys. Not going to go very far, right? So why are you sitting there saying the same thing the same way? I will tell you why. Where did you get your voice and how you use it? You got it from your parents and your friends, whoever you hang out with. You are absorbing those habits. That is all it is, a habit. And habits can be changed. It is a skill, just like everything else. It just takes practice.

How to Watch Yourself Back

Richard Lowe: I went to Toastmasters for about six months.

Royce Blake: It is a great organization, because you have peers pointing things out to you that you are not hearing. Guess what? Your phone can work wonders on that, because if you start listening back, and here is the secret. I do have a free guide. It is called From Mic Shy to Camera Confident. It is about thirteen or fifteen pages, but there are techniques in there on how to watch your videos back.

Royce Blake: Do not watch it right away. I guarantee if you give it a day, or at least eight hours, and then watch it back, you are going to be thinner, you are going to be smarter, you are going to be funnier. Because if we watch it back right away, we are way too self-conscious.

Royce Blake: But you will start noticing things you never thought you did. Swaying when you talk. Using those filler words. This is big for women, ending sentences on up notes, so it all sounds like a question.

Richard Lowe: That is a big thing for Australians also.

Accents, Thin Voices and Enunciation

Royce Blake: Exactly. And it really depends. You do not have to have a radio voice. I am not trying to change anyone. If you have what we call a thin voice, an accent, even a speech impediment, if you can use your vocal talents in a way that varies and makes it more interesting, it does not really matter what your voice sounds like.

Royce Blake: For people with accents, nine times out of ten it is articulation. Most of their language is usually much faster than English, and they do not use big mouth movements. So when they try to learn English they keep their mouth very tight, when they need to over-pronounce certain words so they sound normal.

Richard Lowe: I found that voice dictation forced me to fix my enunciation, because it is sensitive. I had to enunciate things very thoughtfully, and my speech became much better at that point.

Royce Blake: Yeah, because you realize, no, I said lose.

Richard Lowe: It is actually a good technique. Grab the voice dictation, put up a Word document, and just speak into it. You will learn real fast that you have to enunciate, or it is not going to pick it up. That is one thing that makes voice dictation actually work.

Royce Blake: You bet. And speaking of AI, one of the great things you can do when you are recording yourself is set up ChatGPT or Claude and have it ask you questions. I like this prompt or something similar: if people did not know me and they wanted to get to know me, what questions would they ask me? Give me twenty questions.

Royce Blake: And do not read them ahead of time. Print it out, hit record on your phone, and then answer the questions into the camera as you are recording. All of a sudden you are thinking on your feet and you are going much deeper, which is closer to an actual conversation with a stranger.

Come From a Place of Service

Richard Lowe: I remember my first sales call for ghostwriting. It was in the middle of a church. We were both sitting there and we were just kind of whispering. He said he wanted a book, and I got the project. It was my second one, a big one.

Richard Lowe: We just started talking and I was so nervous, and he did not care. The guy has hundreds of millions of dollars. He does not care. And I mentally listened to myself and I was like, okay, I need to fix this. Toastmasters. And it worked out really well.

Royce Blake: The mindset that has helped me for years is coming from a place of service, no matter what the audience is. An audience of two in an auditorium that seats five hundred. Or the opposite, you are expecting five people and five hundred show up. If you walk out with the mindset that I am here to serve, it changes things.

Royce Blake: We get stage fright and we get super nervous when we are all thinking about ourselves. When you are thinking about you and concentrating on you, that is when the nerves pop up. If you are sitting there going, how can I help these people, what can I give them that they can walk away with, you will find that a large percentage of those nerves go away.

Royce Blake: On the air, I know at least a hundred thousand people are listening to every word I say. Am I freaked out? No, because they are not in the room. But here is a trick you can use anytime you are making a video. Put a picture of someone you love up, or your target audience, your ideal customer. Put a picture of them up and talk to that. It is so easy to envision someone.

Richard Lowe: I have heard, and it is probably false, that if you really have nerves you should imagine the audience naked. I have heard that works.

Royce Blake: It has never worked, Richard, for me anyway, because there are so many ugly people in the world. I do not really want to see them naked.

Match Their Tone

Royce Blake: I basically started out working with podcasters on interviewing skills, because I have interviewed hundreds of guests, names you would all know, and I know how to get a guest to shut up or get a guest to open up. I still help podcasters, but now people come to me with a vocal confidence challenge. So far I have had dentists. I just finished a few calls with a midwife, who actually runs an agency for midwives. So we were talking about midwifery, which I think is a fabulous word.

Royce Blake: But it does not matter. Everyone needs to communicate. It does not matter where you are. You do not have to be powerful, but you can certainly be amiable, likable.

Richard Lowe: One thing I have found is matching the other person’s emotion works really well. If a person is angry and you talk to them joyfully, you might not make a lot of progress. But if you talk back to them roughly, not necessarily angrily, it changes.

Royce Blake: Match their tone and their gestures. You have some people that are freaking out all the time. Hey, you need this, you need this. So you give them back, oh, that sounds awesome. At the same time, if they are very interested, you want to bring it down nine notches and go, hey Bob, I understand. I feel what you are feeling. You are playing your voice. It is an instrument.

Richard Lowe: One time I had a client who was very hostile, at least it sounded that way to me. He was always yelling, and he said something that was inappropriate. I just stopped and I thought, what have I got to lose? It sounds like I am going to lose him anyway. So I said, that is an anger tone, that is inappropriate, you need to knock it off.

Richard Lowe: And he stopped, and the relationship immediately got better. He realized, first of all, I was not going to be a pushover, because this all happened in the space of a few minutes. And second, I was talking to him in his language.

Thirty Years of the Request Line

Royce Blake: I guess I am lucky in a way. After thirty years or so of answering the radio station request line, for those of you that remember you could actually call into a station and request a song, ninety percent were not requesting songs. They would sit on hold, it always amazed me, for half an hour just for me to pick it up, and they would go, you suck.

Royce Blake: After that happens a few hundred times, it does not bother you anymore. And here is a secret, and this works great online too for snarky comments. I used to always tell them, hey, thanks for listening. That just makes them mad. And on social media, thanks for improving my reach.

Richard Lowe: I just ignore them, delete their comments, whatever. Because who needs the troll wars? I do not need that in my life.

Royce Blake: I always remember, no one bigger or more important than you will ever put you down. They do not have the time or the inclination. So if somebody is going out of their way to be mean to you, they have got a problem, not you.

Royce Blake: And one of my favorite lines of all time came from an old broadcaster I know. He was very controversial. He did news and then he would end with a comment on certain newscasts, and he would say outlandish stuff. I asked him one day, John, are you not worried about what people are saying about this? And he said, Royce, I do not care if they hate me, as long as they hate me every day. I am like, I am writing that down, man.

Richard Lowe: I have gotten to the point, I am older now, I do not care what people think of me. It is irrelevant, unless they are paying clients. Or some official who has authority. But your average person, I do not care, because they do not matter in my world.

Crutches and the Air Check

Richard Lowe: So is there anybody you cannot help?

Royce Blake: Probably the mute. I am guessing I could not help them. But otherwise, no, not even very seasoned speakers. Here is the thing. In radio we call them crutches. When you end up saying the same thing and you do not realize you are saying it. I used to say, that is crazy, a lot. And I did not even know I was saying it. It sounded totally natural.

Royce Blake: But in radio you go over what are called air checks. They record your show and then you sit down with a program director and you listen to it together. Never a fun experience, but they point out things and I had no idea. Crutches evolve, though. When you lose that is crazy, it becomes absolutely.

Richard Lowe: In the world of AI we call those tics.

Royce Blake: Really? I did not know that.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. In this digital world, a lot of AI starts that way. In the digital world today. That is a tic, or a tell. So you look for those kinds of tells or tics, and there are a lot of them it uses all the time.

Royce Blake: It is like the this and that argument. This, not that. The conundrum.

Richard Lowe: I have a bunch of articles on my website all about those things. It took me a while. It deconstructs it totally, all the way down to all of the tics and how to clean them up. It is not an easy thing. You might as well just write it yourself.

The Pendulum Swings Back to Real

Royce Blake: That brings up a great topic. In this era of AI, I think we can all agree we are living through an era of transition. The world is changing right before our eyes. We are right in the middle of it. And with more and more AI, and we know how much the videos have improved, I find myself the second a video comes on almost checking first in my brain, is this AI? Is this even real?

Royce Blake: And I was like, wow, has that changed. But in this era I believe the pendulum is swinging the other way and people are going to crave real. Real people, real mistakes. And I think that is going to make vocal confidence and building your communication skills that much more important.

Richard Lowe: It turns out a big ghostwriting agency did a survey of thousands of people, and what they came up with is that executives are looking for the human touch. They are not interested in the machine touch. The question was, is ghostwriting becoming obsolete? And the answer is that it is actually rising.

Richard Lowe: If you look at an AI book, it has a structural problem too. You think, well, it is just the words, I can fix the words. But it makes every chapter exactly the same. Same length, same structure, same ending, same beginning, just different words. It is all very even and it is very conservative.

Richard Lowe: You want to write a book about a serial killer like I did, a serial killer comedy, and it has a hard time with that, because it wants to make the violence less and it wants everybody to be good guys and have a good arc. You do not want that in a book. You want it rough, not necessarily bloody, but in your face.

Richard Lowe: I did a lot of experimenting with it. When you are doing that kind of thing you may as well just write it, because you are spending a whole lot of time on silly stuff. It is whack-a-mole. I identified eight layers that it puts on that you have to strip out. I have a page where you click a button and it changes to the next layer, and then the next. It is fun to do.

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Why the Website Is the Center of Your Identity

Richard Lowe: I actually wrote a book on it. It just published, called The Day Your Website Died.

Royce Blake: I need to get a copy of that. Because you probably know much better than I, but in a couple of years we are not going to need quote unquote websites, right?

Richard Lowe: Actually, not true. A website is the center of your identity. If you think of it that way, it is where your identity centers. You have complete control over your website. You can say whatever you want within reason. But you have to make sure it is the same canon. If I say I wrote fifty-four books, I have to say the same thing all over the place. I cannot change that number. If I say I took nine hundred thousand pictures, which I did, it has to be nine hundred thousand everywhere.

Richard Lowe: That becomes the one place you can control. It is your home. Everything else feeds it. LinkedIn is rented space. Facebook is rented space. All these other platforms are rented, you do not own them. But you do own your website. The only thing that can kill your website is not paying your bill, and they are not very expensive.

Richard Lowe: So if you think of it that way, it is not necessarily a place for traffic to go. It is a place for you to define yourself and your business. And then there are structures you have to use called schemas, a machine readable format that tells the machines what all the stuff is.

The Web Went From People to Interests

Richard Lowe: The internet is changing, and it is not just AI. The internet used to be person related. You would go to LinkedIn and look for personalities, and everything was personality related. It is not that way anymore. They changed LinkedIn, they changed the web. It is interest related now. What are people interested in?

Richard Lowe: I see this all the time. Somebody asks Claude a question and Claude comes right out to my website to get the answer. And so do all the others. So if somebody wants to ask what is this book, how do I do AEO, Claude or ChatGPT will have a hit on my website.

Royce Blake: We should remind folks AEO is answer engine optimization, correct? I always hate it when I listen to podcasts and somebody throws out a set of letters.

Richard Lowe: Answer engine optimization, yes. There is also GEO and a bunch of other acronyms, but it is the same thing.

Royce Blake: Generative engine optimization. I think it is great in a way. In the old days, like a year and a half ago, you had to have fifty thousand followers or Facebook or YouTube or pick your channel would not show it, because the biggest accounts were shown.

Royce Blake: And now if you have got something that is interesting to people, it can go viral if you have fifty followers, because it is looking. People forget or do not understand that YouTube is seeing your entire video in the millisecond it took you to post it. It knows exactly what it is and exactly who it guesses it is for.

Same with Gmail, they are reading your emails before they decide whether it goes to spam. There is no escape when it comes to content these days. The good side is you do not need a hundred thousand followers. If you break through, you break through big.

Richard Lowe: In fact, a hundred thousand followers is no longer an advantage at all. You need to have the amount of followers that you need to have, and that is a weird way to put it.

Richard Lowe: It looks at those followers and says, okay, there is no commonality here, so I do not know what he is talking about. Or, all of these people are into geology, everybody he is connected to is a geologist, and his posts are about geology, and he is commenting on things about geology. Then it puts together that this guy is interested in geology and starts favoring that. It is very different from the way it used to work, and this is all new as of the last twelve months.

What Is It Costing You?

Royce Blake: The world is changing so fast, and I think we have come to a point where you need to choose what you want to work on. That is why I decided, after a few people kicked me and said hey, you should be talking about helping people. As I like to say, and one of my coaches says do not ever say that again, I teach people how to talk good. And she is like, do not say that. But that is what I am doing.

Royce Blake: I understand it is tough. It is like talking about weight loss. Nobody wants to admit they are heavy. No one wants to admit that they do not like their voice. But I try to remind them, what is it costing you? Are your great ideas dying in your chair because you are too afraid to speak up in a meeting? How much is that costing you?

Royce Blake: So people start to realize, wait a second, I can be powerful. I can be memorable. People can actually lean into what I am saying. And it is all a habit. It is a skill, just like anything else. It just takes practice.

Richard Lowe: You have an incredible amount of free stuff and it is all very well written. I get something from every single issue that you send out.

Royce Blake: I could talk about a whole bunch of things. Meeting celebrities, doing stunts. I have been in the martial arts since I was six. I am a private pilot. I got to fly with the Blue Angels. Tons of crazy stuff that I am grateful I have been able to live. But the thing is, let us help people build their vocal confidence, because it will skyrocket you faster than anything I know.

Royce Blake: If all of a sudden you become, you do not have to be powerful, but assertive. Unafraid is the best word. To talk, to raise your voice, raise your hand, stand up with a suggestion. And guess what, you are not going to die. I promise.

Richard Lowe: It is not just verbal either. It is written. Having a book puts you out there, and being able to speak about that book lets you communicate those ideas, and they go together. Then learning to make your website visible, it all goes together.

Hand Gestures and the Bubble

Richard Lowe: Sometimes I see people speaking and they are moving their hands in a certain way, and it seems to me to be a rote thing they do because somebody told them it was right. I find it very annoying. Moving hands is fine, but always moving them the same way seems distracting.

Royce Blake: I am building a course right now on this. There is a gesture bubble. There is a bubble about this big around you, and you should never go outside that bubble with your hands.

Royce Blake: There are certain obvious hand gestures. If it is something heartfelt, put your hand on your heart. If it is something you want to give, you can extend your hand. But I know what you are talking about. It is a guy that does the same thing every third sentence. Here is another one, never do the cathedral hands. That is not a good gesture either. You want gestures to bring people in.

Royce Blake: It depends on what you are saying and on the script. But at the same time, you do not want to put your hands in your pockets, and you do not want to hold your hands down the center of your legs. Or just at your sides. You want to be effusive but not over the top. You are not juggling anything.

Royce Blake: People are not paying attention that much. They are feeling what they are hearing and seeing. That is the difference when it comes to vocal confidence. It is the whole package. It is your personality. It is how you stand. Are you sucked in like a turtle, or are you open? Anytime you can show a palm is usually a good thing, because it shows in our ancestral brains that he does not have a weapon in his hand, so he is safe.

Richard Lowe: The gestures I mentioned were profound enough that I stopped watching his videos. There are other people who do it too, and I stop, because it is so distracting that all I am doing is watching them do that. It is like, stop it.

Volume and the Introvert Problem

Royce Blake: Once again, it is variance. Just like your tone and your pacing and your volume. It is all an instrument. The number one challenge for introverts, and I deal with a lot of people that have labeled themselves as shy, is volume. They speak way too softly.

Royce Blake: I keep telling them, and once they record themselves they realize it. I say, record yourself speaking at a level you think is way over the top. And nine times out of ten, guess what? They sounded normal. They sounded excitedly normal.

Richard Lowe: One thing I want to tell the audience is that if you are reading the transcript, what you cannot hear right now is Royce’s voice. He is modulating and changing. It has emotion sometimes and sometimes not. It is quite an interesting thing to behold, and it is not a static robotic voice.

Richard Lowe: You can tell he is not trying. He has different kinds of emotion. It is fascinating to watch, because I know what you are doing. You are changing the voice because it keeps people more interested. If you had a robotic voice they are not going to be interested.

Royce Blake: It is just a habit. It is a skill, and skills can be learned. Habits can be changed. How many people quit smoking, quit drinking, whatever. It is the same thing. It is building a fabulous habit that you will use for the rest of your days.

Where to Find Royce

Richard Lowe: We have been talking for almost an hour now. Anything last you want to say to our listeners?

Royce Blake: I would just say, and they are all free, I am not making any money off this, if you go to my website, voiceofroyce.com, grab that free guide, From Mic Shy to Camera Confident. It will give you tips on how to record yourself. I know it sounds simple. Hey idiot, you just hit record on your phone. There is more to it, but the most important part is how you watch it back.

Royce Blake: There are three steps you need to go through to watch it back and get the most out of it. And no one ever has to see it. You can delete it. I always like to tell people to keep the first one, because I guarantee in just a few weeks you are going to be amazed at the difference. And it is all you. It is all things to watch out for and how to improve quickly and by yourself. So it is free. Grab it.

Richard Lowe: Thank you, Royce. This has been great. Listeners, go visit voiceofroyce.com. If you are watching, that is right across the top. If you are not watching, it is the voice of Royce, spelled just like it sounds, dot com. This has been Richard Lowe on Leaders and Their Stories. You can find these on thewritingking.com/.

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