No, chances are you don’t need a deeper voice or a better voice than the one you naturally speak with.

Most people hate the sound of their own voice. If you video record or audio record your voice during a rehearsal and then listen to it, chances are you won’t like yours either. Here’s why: when you listen to your voice coming out of a TV or a speaker, you are hearing your voice in a non-distorted manner; this is how everyone else hears your voice on a daily basis.

But that’s not how we normally hear our own voice. All day long we hear our own voice distorted through the bones in our own skull from both inside and outside. So when we hear our voice coming from just a speaker and not from within our head, we are all of a sudden not hearing the distortion. The result? It sounds so different to us that it is disorienting and we don’t like it. They we think we need to change our voice.
Not so fast!

Chances are your voice is fine; it’s just different from what you are used to. Different isn’t bad; it’s just different.
In theory, it is possible to have a voice so awful, shrill and annoying that it seriously detracts from the person communicating. But in 25 years of training and working with tens of thousands of people around the globe, I have never encountered anyone whose voice was that bad. In fact, I have rarely worked with anyone whose voice is as bad as Barbara Walters’s voice and she makes tens of millions of dollars a year with her voice!

So the solution for most people is to simply get used to their voice by hearing it more and getting over it. Often, women and men feel they need to speak in a lower, deeper voice because they believe this will make them more authoritative and believable. This is very dangerous. Most audiences are very good at detecting someone who is acting phony or trying to put on airs. If you try to sound like you have a rich, full, deep voice and you don’t, you’ll end up a joke—don’t try it.

I have read various clinical researchers who purport to have proof that audiences respond better to deeper voices—I don’t buy it. Look at the most successful news anchors and talk show hosts. They don’t all sound the same, but they tend to have very full ranges to their voices, they hits highs and lows without fear of sounding less authoritative.

There are voice coaches out there who can dramatically help anyone improve the quality of their voices. If you really feel you need help in this area you could try to find one. But I don’t find this a useful or productive way for most presenters to spend their limited time to improve themselves. Instead, I would urge you to use your time creating interesting ideas, messages and stories for your audience and then rehearsing in front of a video camera. This will score you more points than if you suddenly start to sound like the guy who does the voiceover for the lottery commercials.

Very few people, myself included, have voices that are so great that we could make a living as professional voiceover actors. But that’s OK since I don’t want to be a professional voiceover actor and chances are you don’t either. To be a successful voiceover artist you need a voice that is so distinctive and unique that it instantly stands out and gets remembered. Typically this is true of only one in a million people.
But nearly every person can use his or her voice effectively when presenting in front of people as long as the presenter can be heard and understood and has interesting memorable messages.