I record podcasts regularly – typically once a week at the Packet Pushers Podcast. One of the less obvious problems of podcasting is that I have to listen to my own voice during the edit process (which Ethan & I do ourselves). Even after 170 shows published to date, I still cringe when listening to my own voice. it’s personal excoriation that never ends.

Even though people think you would get used it, I never have.

I don’t think about the sound of my voice at all during a working day, or when associating with others. Your voice is just what you got when the genetic lucky dip delivered its goods. But when you are forced to listen to your own voice for hours every week, you start to adapt. I’ve noticed that my speech patterns are different from the earlier shows. I have less fillers (ums, ahs, pauses) in my speech patterns on the show and this is starting to carry over into my normal speech patterns. In fact, I was presenting to some colleagues a few weeks back and realised that I had unconsciously switched into ‘podcaster’ mode – this is where I project my voice for the microphone  with extra ‘tone’ and ‘colour’ ( I call it cheese because it sounds cheesy).

It takes about two hours to edit every one hour of published content. We do this editing because many of our guests are not experienced at public speaking and sometimes get hesitant about being in public which leads to a lot of ums, ahhs, well and over-talking  Ethan & I would rather have these conversations than to have a format where only semi-professional voices are on the show every week.

The last part is listening to your old podcasts is also painful. I listened to two of our early shows to assess how our professionalism has improved and what has changed. It’s quite obvious that my voice, tone and speech patterns are different.

This, of course, is also called practice and any form of practice improves. But you don’t think of the first 100 shows that you  create and publish as practice.