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This is a generalization, but I've never really heard the opposite, so I think it's fairly truthy.

Everyone wants to sound natural on the mic. But also what's fairly rare to hear out there is what does that

even mean? What is natural? Because I doubt that many of us are talking like we would in a kitchen making

dinner with our partner, which is also really natural.

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And it's not the same as like say the natural energy I have when I'm performing on a stage to a room full of

fitness students which feels really me but I can't do that on the microphone. None of you would keep

listening to that. So really all of these places are natural but we're modeling our natural to the context

that we're fitting ourselves into. So natural isn't really something you just are.

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It's something that you've kind of learned from watching other people perform naturalness in these

different scenarios. Like you've been in and watched conversations in a whole bunch of different

settings. We've seen TV interviews and performances. We've listened to other podcasts and YouTube

videos and various niches. And they all have their own styles. We're all going to put our own thing on them.

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But overall, there is kind of a natural for you in each of these different things. We've kind of absorbed

what is sort of a style for a given context and found our natural within it. So trying to be natural is

actually just trying to perform something without really kind of just admitting that we're performing.

Because that seems unnatural, but we really are our

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This is really me on the microphone. So then to try to sound natural, if you're trying to sound it, you're

like forcing yourself. I'm going to sound natural in this podcast. You oftentimes sound worse because

you're trying, right? You're forcing it. Or perhaps you haven't really thought about what you're aiming

for specifically. So you don't really know and it's kind of confusing. Becoming intentional about what

your goal is, then

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You might decide on purpose to pause in a certain spot in your notes or your script. You might choose to speed

up there or emphasize this word or drop your voice for that phrase, which you might even get a lot closer to

say how you are in the kitchen, that kind of natural, but just sort of applied to the podcast context. So

intentional starts to sound natural because

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you're moving towards something specific. And when you know that, practice it over and over, then it's

going to allow you to start forgetting that. It gets out of your head. And that's when you can really

actually just relax into the delivery and sound much more natural for that context. Because even though

it's technically a performance, it's now really natural to you in this specific context.

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this and get your reps in. Pick one thing at a time to work on. It might be those pauses or perhaps it's the

speed of your delivery. What you say faster or what you slow down to emphasize but pick one of those things

and then record and see how it goes when you listen back. And do that listen back after a little space of time.

Take a beat so your brain doesn't focus too much on it which will make it sound weird and unnatural no matter

what. Notice how it serves the show and

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what to work on further, and then it becomes clear on what you want to work on further until you meet that

goal. I'm Jen DeHaan. This is a Credibility Minute. Find more episodes and get in touch with me at

stereoforest.com slash minute.