You might think you nailed a recording until you listen to the playback. You immediately want to delete the file because you hear every breath and stumble.
This reaction is normal but often distorted. Two psychological concepts explain this phenomenon, which are the Beautiful Mess Effect (that suggests we view our own mistakes as weaknesses while others view them as strengths or courage) and the Construal Level Theory (that says we operate at a “low level” of detail while editing) while the listener operates at a “high level” and focuses on the words instead.
In this micro-episode:
- Why you focus on “the bark” while your listener sees the forest (I live in a forest, so I always use this one!)
- How over-editing breaths… pretty common… creates an “uncanny valley” effect
- Practical tips to gain perspective before you edit
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Transcript
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::I'm talking about voices. So why do you hate the sound of your own recorded voice so much? You're listening back to that episode. Maybe it's a solo episode and it's only
your voice and you think you nailed it. You hit all your points and your energy. It felt great while you were speaking. And then you listen back and you immediately want
to delete that entire waveform. Your voice.
::You're thinking it sounds pretty weird. Maybe you're noticing all your breaths or every single mouth click in that sentence where you stumbled over a word and you
noticed, of course, this is the big one, the way that you said, um. Maybe it's scripted so you notice everything and that reaction is normal. However, we don't want to
listen to that reaction for too long. We want to just act on it.
::And also, I'm going to say, you get used to listening to your voice eventually.
::Anyways, there's this concept in psychology. It's called the beautiful mess effect. And this effect, it refers to when we think about our own mistakes as weaknesses.
But those exact traits that we notice in other people, we see those same traits as strengths. Like, it's courage. They're commendable. They're doing great. But in us,
we think that it's a weakness.
::So we might be cringing at the sound of our voice or some word that you think you overuse. That's me. But your listener thinks that those things, they make you sound
natural or they think it's normal or most likely they don't think anything at all about any of those things. So there's this other concept. It's called construal level
theory. And this one explains why you and that listener literally you're hearing different things.
::I think my voice sounds bad and you think whatever I didn't even notice it. When you edit your own content like you go into that digital audio workspace and when you're
doing that you're operating at what researchers call a low level construal. You're really hyper focused on those tiny details. You notice all those things like you
know the waveform of your um or the waveform of that breath.
::You're zoomed in so close that you can see all of these things and you see them as flaws. However, your audience, the listener, is operating at a high level control.
They're focusing on the forest instead of the bark on the individual trees. That's the example I use in my head all the time. They care about what you're saying or the
tone of your voice or the overall message or how engaged they are. They're thinking about,
::whether or not the words that you're saying applies to their own lives they're like they don't care about that breath waveform like when i started editing my first
educational podcast it was about improv i manually stripped out all my breaths or like a whole bunch of them because i thought no one's going to want to hear them and i
thought it would tighten up the episode and make it a lot shorter because i thought shorter is better people don't want to listen to what i have to say but it ended up
saying that's not what i have to say but it's not what i have to say but it's not what i have to say but it's not
::sounding not that great. Like it sounded like that I wasn't taking those breaths in between sentences, right? And I should because I do. And so it doesn't sound
natural. It just kind of sounds wrong or uncanny valley as the phrase goes. So it's good to keep in mind if you're editing or making whatever choices you are about the
editing, you might not be doing it yourself. You're making those choices based on something that's really zoomed in.
::is distorted. It's not reality. So that close up, it's going to make you more of a critic. Many of the things that you notice your listener is not. So keep that
perspective in mind and act accordingly. So one other thing that you can do is you can put some space in between recording your episode and actually listening to it back
or editing it. Like take a beat in between those two things. Give yourself a couple days or get a second or third
::opinion from someone that you trust. See what they hear. Just don't resort to AI-generated voices. I'm Jen DeHaan. This is the Credibility Minute. Find more episodes
and get in touch with me and subscribe at StereoForest.com slash minute.