How to Be Louder Around Women

Be louder, and do it on purpose. On one of our live Q&A calls, a student told us he kept getting turned down for being too quiet. The answer our coach gave sounded almost too simple: speak up. He also said it would be emotionally hard, like every sticking point in this work. The sting of one more rejection, he said, should be bigger than the discomfort of raising your voice. The rule is the same whether she is a woman or a man standing next to her, because being heard is the whole job. The stakes just show up faster with women.

Volume is the first thing she reads, before your words land. When you speak at a level others can hear, you are showing that you believe what you are saying and that you are not afraid of who overhears it.

One of our coaches makes the point with the men who murmur offers to people passing on a city corner. They are quiet because what they sell is shady. A man who mumbles "excuse me, can I talk to you?" at the same volume gets filed in the same box, even though his words are perfectly innocent. The same sentence said so that a bystander can hear it tells her you have nothing to hide.

Our coaches call too-quiet one of the most common problems they see in the field.

You do not need to shout. Our daytime rule of thumb is about a quarter louder than necessary. Picture talking to her from two and a half feet away, then say it as though she were five feet away, or as though you were talking to someone standing just behind her.

There is a second test that comes from a coach working with a group of students. You are loud enough when a bystander occasionally glances over. And if now and then one girl in twenty gives a small jump when you open, that is a good sign, because you got on her radar.

Practice the mechanics too: push the air from your diaphragm instead of squeezing it out of your throat. The coach's view is that every man already knows how to be loud. Doing it is a matter of attitude.

A student on one of our calls asked how to get used to doing something outside his personality. When he spoke louder it did not feel believable, and he figured the bad reactions he would get would only prove it.

Our coach pointed out that he was predicting, not reporting. He had not run the test. The method he gave is a good one:

• If a behavior is probably right but feels unnatural, try it several times, not once.
• Judge it by your results, not by how it feels from the inside.
• If it improves your results in spite of feeling odd, that is a strong sign it suits you.
• If it makes your results dramatically worse, the gap between the new behavior and the real you may be too big for now. Try it again later.

He added that when you are changing something, your instinct about it is often wrong. Learning a golf swing is famously unnatural at first, and then it clicks.

Loud is not only about the dial. A coach reviewing body language points to a habit he calls pecking: every time she talks you lean in to hear her, and every time you talk you lean in to talk. It looks tense and nervous.

Good projection fixes it. If your voice carries, you can sit back and let it do the work. Lean in when she is genuinely too quiet to hear, then slowly, and pull her closer instead of darting forward.

On a breakdown of a student's daytime set, the coach's first note was energy. Act like you want to be there and expect it to be fun. If you look dragged into the conversation, she senses it and wonders why you are talking to her. Louder voice was his second note, right behind it.

Take one sentence: "I didn't say you stole the cookie." Say it as many different ways as you can, changing only your pauses, your tone, your volume and your rhythm, until each version means something different. Salespeople sometimes do this one with a tape recorder. Once you start using your voice as an instrument, your words get more effective.

In a loud room you need more volume, and you also need fewer words. Our coaches tell students in a bar or club to be louder, get her attention, and speak in sound bites. She will miss every third word anyway, so say the short version of what you mean.

That is the whole plan. Say it louder than you want to, test it more than once, and keep what works.