Personal Branding: Cultivating Your Unique Voice

We can control the way we sound and how we want to be perceived. Our voice is a significant part of our personal brand. I would go so far as to say it's the most important part of our personal brand. Welcome back to impact through voice. I'm Lisa Hugo and as a speaker coach, I'm on a mission to empower you to unlock your full potential by understanding the power of your voice.

Today, we're exploring personal branding and the role of your voice in your personal brand. Whether you're an entrepreneur, forging your own path or an employee shaping your career, this episode is for you. First things first, what is personal branding as opposed to business branding? And how do they differ?

Well, in many ways, they're not really dissimilar. Branding is all about your identity, your reputation, and how you represent yourself or your company. Company branding is obviously centered around the company as a whole, how they choose to represent themselves, their core values, and how they stand out against their competition.

A personal brand is centered around an individual. Now this could be a musician, a coach, an entrepreneur, an influencer, anyone who really wants to make a meaningful and lasting impression. Therefore, it's critical for anyone in today's professional world to have this asset. Your personal brand is the unique image and reputation that you build around yourself.

It's how you want to be perceived and how you speak to your ideal customer. How you speak, how you hold yourself, how you style yourself, and how people will see you online and in media. It represents you and your value that you can bring to the table.

Why is personal branding then so important as an individual?

Well, think of it as your personal identity. This is the thing that will set you apart from other people in the industry. In a world where there are a huge amount of opportunities, but the competition is fierce, your personal brand will help you to stand out and be memorable in a crowded marketplace. It’s your ticket to creating a lasting impression.

Not only that, but how you brand yourself will help you to connect with the right audience who will be interested in you. Now, as you know, on this podcast, we are focused on the voice.

So how does the voice connect with our personal brand?

One of the most beautiful things about communication is that we each possess a very unique voice.

It's not just the sound, but the essence of what makes us who we are. So let's start there. Let's discover your unique voice by creating more awareness. Your voice is like a fingerprint. It's distinctly yours. But here's the key. Even though your voice is unique, it's been molded by circumstances and influences throughout your life that have created the voice you have today.

You see, we learn to speak by mimicking the sounds we hear. This means that by the time we hit our teenage years, our voices and speaking style are quite set. Now, if your influences were good growing up, you might be lucky and have developed a strong speaking style, but very often our influences were not so great.

And we've been left with a voice and communication style that doesn't represent us as a reflection of how we want to be perceived. But that doesn't mean we can't change. Just like an actor can learn to play a role and change their voice to become a character. Anyone can work on their skills to harness and hone their voice to align it perfectly with their personal brand.

How can we find our vocal brand?

Imagine your voice is the bridge that connects you with your audience. It conveys authenticity and it builds trust. Now let's get into the nitty gritty of talking about how we can make this happen. To do this, I'm going to break down the way that you use your voice into five elements. Pitch, pace, melody, volume, and tonality.

Pitch

Now let's start with your pitch. Pitch is how high or how low do you speak the majority of the time. Does your pitch represent you, your identity, and your personal brand accurately and authentically? For example, If you're teaching young children, stereotypically, you're going to have a higher pitched voice that children can connect with.

If, however, you're teaching teenage kids and you're still maintaining that high pitched voice, your students won't identify with you because their voices have already lowered into adult sounds and they'll find you annoying and painful to listen to. Now consider the primary school teacher with the high pitched voice who then comes home and continues to speak with her friends and family with the same high pitched voice.

Hi, good evening, everybody. I'm so glad to be back home. Hmm, again, it could be really annoying. So we need different voices to match different settings. We have an optimum pitch, and we have a habitual pitch. Optimum pitch is the pitch that suits our image, our body size, and our profession. Habitual pitch is something we've adopted through habit, but it might not be serving us in our personal brand.

Melody

Now I want to move on to melody or inflection, intonation, sometimes called modulation. It’s the ups and the downs of your voice. I want you to think of a musical piece. A musical piece could have the same note played over and over again or it could have a beautiful melody. Now when we speak, we speak on musical notes just like we do when we sing.

So when we speak, we could only speak on the same note over and over again or we could speak with a beautiful melody. Hear the difference?

Volume

How loud or how soft? A therapist who's in a one on one setting with their client would probably have a softer voice than someone who is a sports coach.

Tone

Now, lastly, the tone of your voice, this is going to set the stage for your message. It's a mix of all of the previous elements, pitch, pace, melody, and volume, that is going to connect to your emotion and to your words. For example. If you're an entrepreneur building a brand around eco consciousness, your tone might exude passion, care and a sense of responsibility. Now that might mean that you'll have more melody to express the passion, increased volume as well, but then again, a slightly lower pitch to express the care and the responsibility. Getting the idea? That means you need to speak with a tone that's going to reflect what you stand for, so that your audiences can feel your passion, your enthusiasm, your authenticity, and your sense of responsibility.

Reflection

I want you to think about your own profession and make an outline of how you want to be perceived by your audience, by your colleagues, by your boss, when you're speaking in interviews, on camera, in meetings, on stage.

To wrap it up, we can control the way we sound and how we want to be perceived. Our voice is a significant part of our personal brand.

I would go so far as to say it's the most important part of our personal brand, and here's why. You can present yourself immaculately, visually, through the way that you dress, through your website, through your social channels. But if, when you open your mouth to speak, your voice doesn't represent the image that you've crafted visually, there's going to be a disconnect.

And you know which one will be most memorable? The visual or the audible? Your sound will overpower your image. Therefore, if you haven't already worked on your voice in your personal brand, get started today. Start recording yourself. Identify your audience and how you feel that audience would connect with you.

What elements of your voice would you need to work on?

It's hard to assess your own speaking because your ears are used to your own sound. Unless you're trained in performance, acting, singing, it's going to be hard to know how to make that change. Go and get feedback from others. Try using sounds that at first don't feel comfortable. Get a coach who can help you to refine your voice.

Remember, it's all about self awareness, aligning with your brand and mastering these five elements of voice.

If you found this episode inspiring, remember to subscribe and leave us your comments.

We've got more golden nuggets coming your way, so let's continue this journey of self discovery and impactful communication together.