How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (18 page)

It’s helpful to have different vocal strategies for different situations. Your fun voice might be higher pitched and more rapid paced, whereas your serious voice might be deeper and more measured. It’s important to keep a lot of distance between your fun voice and your persuasive voice. For people who know you, the serious voice will send an unambiguous signal that the topic is important and you might not be open to negotiating.

My guess is that only 20 percent or less of the general public speaks with proper voice mechanics. And by that I mean proper breath control, tone, and mouth strategies. You probably think any improvement
to your voice quality would be wasted. After all, the people you speak with understand you perfectly. But research shows that voice quality is far more important to your overall health and happiness than you might imagine.
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Studies show a commanding voice is highly correlated with success. Other studies suggest that both men and women with attractive voices find partners more quickly than those with less attractive voices.
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While most of us will never be able to speak like Morgan Freeman no matter how diligently we train our voices, we’re all capable of improving how we speak, and that’s probably worth the effort.

One of the strangest patterns I noticed during my corporate career was that many of the higher-level managers seemed to have distinctive, interesting voices that commanded attention and gave an inexplicable weight to everything they said. I’m willing to bet that you could play voice recordings of employees to a group of volunteers and the subjects could accurately predict—at least better than chance—who will ascend to power and who will remain a worker bee. One study showed that nurse managers tended to have stronger voices, and this was correlated with a perceived higher quality of care and greater management abilities.
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Throughout my corporate years I used a serious-sounding tone of voice whenever I was in “professional” mode. I was literally acting, but it didn’t feel disingenuous because the business world is a lot like theater. Everyone tries to get into character for the job they have. When I was a bank teller, I was obsequious to customers. When I managed people, I spoke in a way that I thought sounded authoritarian and reasonable. In meetings with higher-ups I lowered my tone and spoke with the sort of self-assurance that only the insane come by honestly. I’m reasonably sure that my fake voice, with its low notes and artificial confidence, made me appear more capable than I was, and that wasn’t difficult because I was largely incompetent at every corporate job I held. Despite my obvious lack of ability, nearly every boss I had—and there were many—identified me as a future corporate executive.

Keep in mind that I was poorly dressed, five feet eight inches tall, and prematurely balding in my twenties. I certainly didn’t look like CEO material, and while I’d like to think my interior brilliance sometimes shined through, I doubt that was the case. I think my fake professional
voice and body language were at least half of the reason I was seen as having management potential.

I also noticed during my corporate years that women who had never met me in person flirted like crazy on the phone whenever I used my fake professional voice. I assume the same voice qualities that indicate potential for leadership also influence potential mates.
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My fake confidence, along with my fake low voice that screamed “testosterone,” worked like catnip on the ladies. Unfortunately the flirting stopped as soon as anyone saw me in person. That’s why I assume my fake voice was the secret sauce.

At least one voice expert believes that my fake voice, with its artificially low tone, was a cause of my later voice problems with spasmodic dysphonia. I don’t know that to be true, but it’s worth mentioning.

This book isn’t designed to give you voice lessons, but I’ll include a few common methods for developing your best “success voice.”

For starters, it helps to learn to breathe from the bottom of your lungs, not in the upper chest area. Proper breathing has lots of other benefits, including stress reduction, increased and more efficient metabolism, and better physical stamina, so it’s worth learning.
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If you put your hand on your belly button and breathe correctly, that’s the only part of your torso that should be rising and falling. If your upper chest is expanding when you breathe normally, you’re doing it wrong. When you get your breathing right, your words will come out sounding more confident.

Next, you need to pick a tone. Some voice experts will tell you that your best and most natural tone is probably higher than the way you normally speak. Many people have a natural tendency to speak lower to other humans than they might to a pet, for example. On some level, we all understand that lower voices confer some weight to what we say.

The downside of a lower voice is that it’s difficult to hear words that match background noise. In my fake-voice era no one could hear me above crowd noises. It was hard to order a drink or make conversation in any noisy situation. I’ve since learned to penetrate background noise by using a higher-pitched voice. It’s great for communicating, but I don’t expect to get any CEO offers. It’s a real trade-off.

Another
common speaking trick is to hum the first part of the “Happy Birthday” song and then speak in your normal voice right after. You’ll notice your posthumming voice is strangely smooth and perfect. The effect won’t last, but it gives you a target voice that you know you can get to with practice.

Posture is also important for good speech. If you don’t sit up straight or stand straight, your vocal equipment will be pinched, and it will sound that way even if you don’t notice it yourself.

When you’re trying to convey a fake sense of confidence—which is often handy—you need to tell yourself you’re acting. Simply speak the way you imagine a confident person would speak and you’ll nail it on the first try.

You want to get rid of the hemming and hawing, the “ums” and “uhs,” and anything that disrupts your flow. That takes practice. The quickest fix is simply to substitute silence where you once had “ums” and “uhs.” It will feel uncomfortable at first, but you’ll get used to it. I also like to form full sentences in my head before I start them, at least whenever that’s an option. And when I know a topic is likely to come up in the near future, I practice entire conversations in my head until I can speak my thoughts fluently.

My list of combinable skills isn’t meant to be comprehensive. And every person is in a unique situation. For you, maybe the right skills are photography and botany. You’ll recognize them when you see them now that your mind is tuned to think in that way.

One of my
systems involves continually looking for patterns in life. Recently I noticed that the high-school volleyball games I attended in my role as stepdad were almost always won by the team that reached seventeen first, even though the winning score is twenty-five and you have to win by two. It’s common for the lead to change often during a volleyball match, and the team that first reaches seventeen might fall behind a few more times before winning, which makes the pattern extra strange.

If the volleyball pattern is real—and that is far from settled—I would assume there is a normal explanation for it. Perhaps seventeen just feels so close to twenty-five that the team that is behind feels deflated and the team that is ahead feels extra confident. Perhaps at the high-school level the coach who is behind feels the need to give the bench players some time before the end of the game. Whatever the reason, the pattern seems to hold. Perhaps it will change before this book goes to print. I’ll keep tracking it.

In amateur tennis one of the oddest patterns is called the 5–2 curse. In tennis, the first player to win six games, by at least two, wins the set, so you would expect the player who first reaches five to win most of the time. What happens instead, far more often than common sense would predict, is that the weekend player who is ahead feels he can coast, while the player who is behind feels he can play relaxed because the outcome seems predictable. That sort of thinking leads to a psychological advantage for the player who is behind, who often
closes the gap to 5–3 without much effort. Now the player who is ahead starts to think the lead isn’t so secure. Perhaps he feels that the momentum has shifted. It only takes a few good shots from the opponent in the next game to reinforce that impression. The player who first gets to five games against a similarly skilled amateur will still win most of the time, but not nearly as often as you would predict. If you are an amateur player with only two games compared with your opponent’s five, it helps a great deal to know you have something like a 40 percent chance of prevailing. Knowing the pattern changes how you think about your chances, and that change in thinking can then improve your performance.

Countless self-help and business books have tried to find the patterns of behavior that make people successful. If we can find out what successful people do, so the thinking goes, we can imitate them and become successful ourselves.

Stephen Covey was probably the most famous of the success-by-pattern gurus. His book
The
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
sold more than twenty-five million copies. I think Covey described a good set of patterns for people to follow, but they are only a start. I’ll summarize his seven habits and suggest you read his books if you want more.

1. Be proactive.
   
2. Begin with the end in mind. (Imagine a good outcome.)
   
3. Put
   first things first. (Set priorities.)
   
4. Think win-win. (Don’t be greedy.)
   
5. Seek first to understand then be understood.
   
6. Synergize. (Use teamwork.)
   
7. Sharpen the saw. (Keep learning.)
   

The holy grail of civilization is to someday make all people successful by discovering the formula used by successful people and making it available to all. As far as I know, Stephen Covey’s seven habits didn’t budge the poverty rate, so there are probably deeper patterns at play.

Here’s my own list of the important patterns for success that I’ve noticed over the years. This is purely anecdotal. I exclude the ones that are 100 percent genetic.

1. Lack of fear of embarrassment
   
2. Education (the right kind)
   
3. Exercise
   

A lack of fear of embarrassment is what allows one to be proactive. It’s what makes a person take on challenges that others write off as too risky. It’s what makes you take the first step before you know what the second step is. I’m not a fan of physical risks, but if you can’t handle the risk of embarrassment, rejection, and failure, you need to learn how, and studies suggest that is indeed a learnable skill.
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As far as physical bravery goes, I don’t know anything about it. But I’m glad some people have it so they can shoot the other people who have it before those people shoot me. I recommend that you improve your psychological bravery but say no to anything that has a strong chance of killing you.

Then there’s education. Do you know what the unemployment rate is for engineers? It is nearly zero. Do you know how many engineers like their jobs? Most of them do, despite what you read in
Dilbert
comics. And the ones who are unhappy with work can change jobs fairly easily. Generally speaking, the people who have the right kind of education have almost no risk of unemployment.

Education and psychological bravery are somewhat interchangeable. If you don’t have much of one, you can compensate with a lot of the other. When you see a successful person who lacks a college
education, you’re usually looking at someone with an unusual lack of fear.

The next pattern I’ve noticed is exercise. Good health is a baseline requirement for success. But I’m not talking about the obvious fact that sick people can’t get much done. I’m talking about the extra energy and vitality that good health brings. I might be getting the correlation wrong, and perhaps whatever motivates a person to succeed also motivates that person to maintain an exercise schedule. But I think it works both ways. I believe exercise makes people smarter, psychologically braver, more creative, more energetic, and more influential. In an online article about twenty habits of successful people, the second item on the list is exercise five to seven days a week.
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Other studies back this notion—physical fitness and daily exercise are correlated with success in business and in life.
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There’s one more pattern I see in successful people: They treat success as a learnable skill. That means they figure out what they need and they go and get it. If you’ve read this far, you’re one of those people. You’re reading this book because it offers a nonzero chance of telling you something that might be helpful.