Lose your voice and gain a winning personality
By Beth Teitell
Boston Herald Columnist
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
I’ve spent years trying to be witty and interesting, and now I find, at the friggin’ halfway point of my life, that I would have been better off - more popular, more successful, maybe even thinner - if I’d just kept my mouth shut.
I gained this horrible self-knowledge last week, when I lost my voice - from trying to be interesting and witty at a party. As anyone who’s had laryngitis knows, an inability to speak above a raspy whisper is highly inconvenient. It’s hard to conduct what doctors call ‘‘ADL” - Activities of Daily Living. You know, disputing the finance charge on your Visa bill, RSVPing to children’s birthday party invitations, using your cell phone to report your location to loved ones. ‘‘I’m on Mass Ave. now, I’ll be home in three minutes.”
But even as I bravely coped with my involuntary vow of silence, I noticed that people were being really, really nice to me. At first I assumed it was just ‘‘awww, you’re not feeling well” pity. And there was the fact that I did sound really hot (as in sexy, not febrile). ‘‘I like the husky voice,” one of my colleagues said. (If I’d been smart, I would have re-recorded all my outgoing phone messages. ‘‘Hello, big boy, leave your message at the tone.”)
But deep down, I know neither sympathy nor lust explained the great increase in my‘‘positives.” The secret to my newfound sparkling personality was that speaking less meant that I listened more. Fran Lebowitz once observed that ‘‘The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.” But with no voice, I really listened, as opposed to seeming to listen (in which you are thinking up your response to whatever the heck the speaker is going on about).
People flocked to me. I was a social magnet in a way I’ve never been. ‘‘You’re a great audience,” one woman said after I guffawed at a remark she’d made, without cutting short my laughter to make a joke of my own. ‘‘We should go out sometime,” a mother I hardly knew said, after I listened to her talk about her children without adding a single anecdote of my own.
But the weekend brought good news. On Sunday evening, my voice returned, and not a moment too soon. I couldn’t wait to get back to work to talk about my listening skills.
