How to Use Your Voice to Captivate the Room with Tracy Goodwin.

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Is your voice helping you communicate with clarity? Is it helping you influence and persuade? Is it helping you connect with people — or is it doing just the opposite? Tracy Goodwin's game-changing voice training teaches you how to captivate the room regardless of the message, venue, or audience size. She has taught thousands of celebrities, professionals, and entrepreneurs how to use their voices to transform their lives and the lives of their listeners. Her unique approach — the Psychology of the Voice — gets to the core of limiting voice habits and transforms your voice from the inside out. Here's my conversation with Tracy Goodwin.

What Is the Psychology of the Voice?

Peter: Tracy, you use the term psychology of the voice. What do you mean by that?

Tracy: Psychology of the Voice is the name I gave to the methodology I developed over 30 years of research, study, and listening to voice. What I discovered — and I first started piecing this together through dialects — is that the subconscious is actually calling the shots on how we use our voice. We have vocal cords, air hits them, all of that is real. But my research showed me that the subconscious is trying to protect the heart. Sense of belonging. Fitting in. The voice is the orchestra of the heart. The subconscious is taking in experiences and filtering them, then telling the muscles — the muscle memory — how to use the voice and what to do.

Before you're five years old, someone says something like: you're too loud. Or: children are to be seen and not heard. Your subconscious takes that in and says, okay, we've got to keep her safe. That means we need to get her talking in a quiet voice. Let's lock her jaw. And then the next thing you know, little Tracy is 14 or 20 or 40 and she's still operating from that same driver that was locked in before she was five.

Core Drivers and Voice Stories

Tracy: I had a client named Bill — very quiet, wanted to command more space. I said: Bill, do you have siblings? He said he had six older sisters. I knew in that moment what had happened to him. His sisters loved him. He loved them. But before he was five, Bill couldn't get a word in edgewise. His subconscious created a driver: don't bother anybody, be quiet. And it locked that directly into the muscle memory.

These drivers create what I call voice stories — internal narratives like: I'm bothering people. Nobody wants to hear what I have to say. I've got to get these words exactly right. They all go back to what people have said to us — a parent, a sibling, a boss, a neighbor, even someone on the street. We accumulate a lifetime of them. And the most important question to ask about any of them is: is that ultimately true? Those stories were put in place when you needed them. But do you need them now? Almost always, the answer is no. The subconscious just never got the memo that you're not eight years old anymore.

Peter: That hits close to home. I grew up with two speech impediments — a lisp and a stutter. Even now, even though most people don't hear them, I know they're still there. Sometimes I'll stop mid-sentence because I think I said something wrong, and I'll start over. It's still with me. The story is still running.

Tracy: And that's exactly where we eradicate the story. Is that ultimately true — that people are hearing it, that it's holding you back? Shine a light on it and you often find: actually, no. They're not detecting it. But we're on autopilot. Locked into something that hasn't served us in decades.

Voice Masks

Tracy: Voice masks are sounds we put in our voice — almost always subconsciously — to get a result that actually keeps us from getting that result. I've identified about 12 to 15 of them. Needing to prove is one. When someone is in that mask, a sound comes in, a tone, and the listener's subconscious immediately feels the disconnect. It's like bulletproof glass coming down. You can see the person, you can hear them — but you can't touch them. You can't truly connect.

People pleasing is another significant one. If I'm a people pleaser, I'm not going to show you who I am, because I don't know who you want me to be. It's much harder to connect with me because you're trying to figure out who I am — and you can't.

I remember a man who came to work with me and said: I think I'm repelling potential customers. I said: yes, you are. He asked how I knew. I said: what are you trying to prove? He was stunned. It turned out he had spent his entire life trying to prove his worth to his father. It was in the muscle memory from a story. We eradicated the driver, moved it out of the muscle memory, and customers came to him. The subconscious discerns all of this — grains-of-sand-sized sounds — and makes decisions about whether to connect or not, without either person realizing what happened.

Other masks include convincing — that need to make you understand, to make you see, to talk you into it. Buffering. Justification. Talking at people instead of to them. These all come from a story that says you better prove yourself, or they won't like you, or they won't buy. And they all do the opposite of what the speaker intends.

The Three-Pillar Process

Tracy: Everyone comes to me wanting step three — the vocal variety, the flair, the engagement. And that's fantastic. But if I bring out your best vocal self and you still have a driver that says tone it down, circus clown, that driver is going to win. It won't stick. So we have to start at the beginning.

Pillar one is about the noise in your head. Are you focused on judgment? Are you in the past or future instead of the present? You cannot be effective vocally if you're not in the now. We redirect, reroute, and eradicate those stories and drivers so there's inner freedom — you're no longer bound by the belief that nobody wants to hear what you have to say.

Pillar two is about masks. What are you doing? What are you trying to prove? Why are you buffering? We work through all of it. I don't say: say it like this. Through questioning, you figure it out. You realize you can let it go. Then I give you a technique — something like: say it again, but imagine you're just talking to someone you know, like, and trust. They do it again, and it's a totally different sound. We lock that into the muscle memory.

Then pillar three — and only then — we work on the five elements of vocal variety. Rolling in the real you. Because this is who you are. If you came to my house for Thanksgiving, this is how I'd be with you. And yet so many people put on a mask of professionalism and stand up in front of a room and you have no idea who they are.

How to Start Improving Your Voice Today

Peter: For listeners wondering about their own voices — what's a tip they can use right now?

Tracy: Look at what's happening on the outside. Do you have the connections you want? Do people engage with you? Do they do what you ask? That's your big clue about what's happening inside. And then from the pillars: get in the now. You cannot be thinking about what I'm thinking about you, or about that thing you said in 1983. Your power is in the now vocally. You cannot control the outcome — but you can control the conversation by the way you make somebody feel.

Then, to circumvent the masks: turn everything into a conversation. You and I are having a beautiful conversation right now. I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm not talking at you. A presentation is a conversation. A sales call is a conversation. When you approach it that way, it helps move you away from the mask and toward genuine connection. And from pillar three: work from the place of what do you want your listener to feel? Are you excited about what you're sharing? Then I need to hear that in your voice. Don't data-dump me. Let me feel it.

Peter: Tracy, where can listeners find you?

Tracy: The best place is captivatetheroom.com. All the social media links are there as well — you can find me as Captivate the Room or Tracy Goodwin on LinkedIn and the other platforms.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Public Speaking with Peter George. Are you ready to be calm, confident, and credible every time you speak in public? Then visit petergeorgepublicspeaking.com and let's make it happen. I'll see you next time.