There is a human species where loudspeakers and amplifiers are builtin features. I know this for sure, because I might be one of the first members of this club! I am guessing I was born with a loud voice. If not, I certainly took after it at an early age as even my vivid childhood memories have me speaking loudly.To bring in a few facts, on an average I speak loudly even when there are few people in a small room. When I am talking on phone or in a crowded place, save yourselves, I shout! And, when I am excited or emotionally stimulated, run for your lives, I yell!
Thankfully, I am surrounded by people who compulsively correct one another. Given my history, I get nudged at my voice too often! I practice breathing exercises, anticipating my triggers in advance, and I have even gone to the extent of recording my voice at different emotional states for revisiting and then correcting myself. What it taught me is this - Introspection is great, Controlling is detrimental. All the above activities were driven by controlling my volume and not understanding myself. And it failed me over and over again. Every time I tried to control it, it became worse. First, I got angry at not being able to control myself. Then, I got angry for getting angry at myself. And somewhere between this chaos, I got emotionally hijacked!
Changing my motive to understanding myself, the same activities gave me an entirely different perspective. Being able to hear and experience yourself breathing is a sign of being healthy. Anticipating your emotional triggers in advance saves you from a bad mood instantly! Finding out that you are a loud speaker isn't necessarily bad if you can make it pleasing to hear. Now, I also celebrate multiple advantages of my volume which I refused to even acknowledge earlier. A loud volume makes me effortlessly audible in a very large audience, it gives a good dimension to my presentations or stage performances, I am able to express very clearly with a stable audible volume, and so many brilliant advantages that I experience at unexpected situations! On a lighter note, no one can ever say that "I didn't hear you"!
In closing, I would like to share my three point learning - Understanding over Controlling, Acceptance over Refusal and Celebration over Criticism!
