Yourself on tape

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Do not like the way I look or sound

I was working a train once and I was approached by someone from the BBC who wanted me to work on the radio. I declined because at the time I knew I was to stay on the railways.
When we spoke on those train tannoys we soon learned how to pronounce our words so they came out loud and clear as the agro we had if someone had not heard! You can imagine.
One funny moment on a train I worked. Well. I didn't know, but the tannoy on this train was loud. And I also announced loud. And somehow, from the cab, I could not quite hear the words come out. So I opened the cab door (Was a single coach train.. A class 153) and I called down the train "Did anyone hear that announcement?" Every single passenger on my train shouted back "Yes" at the same time. It was hillarious! Hahahahaha! It made me chuckle!
When I worked the trains I put on my "Bold" official work mask. I was able to come accross as an entirely different person even to other staff and trains mangers. Yes, my personality was the same, but when I spoke in work, I had a boldness to me. Yet people who saw me off the trains on a day off were sometimes puzzled as I was a shy withdrawn person. It really puzzled some people!

^
Yes I can see how that immediate feedback of the result would have accelerated the learning process. And there's something in the idea that we become different people at work.

Back in the day, one or two people were very pleasantly surprised when they heard me sing for the first time. One of them said they'd dreaded the embarrassment because they'd been expecting me to sound all mumbly and introverted like I sounded when I was speaking. Hopefully my speaking voice has improved since then.

I've sometimes wondered if it would be good to have elocution lessons, if a teacher could be found who worked cheap and didn't try to make me sound like too much of a toff. But in the absence of professional guidance, I suspect that folks can get good results with a recording machine or whatever. It'd probably help to get some recordings of the kinds of voices the person thinks sound good, and to try imitating what they say. I've also noticed that when I mimic an accent, it's immediately clearer and sounds much more attractive (to my ears) than my natural voice. Though I was once astonished when a lady I was talking to on the phone told me I had a sexy voice. That was like being the Elephant Man and being chased by a crowd of female admirers, it's very nice when somebody tells you that what you thought was your worst feature is attractive. Of course she could have been making it up, but why pick out something so obviously ugly about me to compliment me with? My best guess is that our conviction that our own voices sound horrible is mostly in the mind.