Record Yourself and Find Your Habits

Imagine an interior designer named Marguerite who has a video call with Mr. and Mrs. Achterberg. They have bought an apartment in a building she has admired for years, and a friend of theirs gave them her name. At the start of the call, she asks whether she may record it for her notes, and they say yes.

Mrs. Achterberg asks whether Marguerite has worked in the building before. “Absolutely,” Marguerite says. “Not this one. Two on the same street, and one of them was in Elle Decor last spring.” Mr. Achterberg asks what a project like theirs would cost. She gives a range and keeps going, faster now, about how every project is different. When Mrs. Achterberg says the kitchen is the room she cares about most, Marguerite says, “Absolutely,” and smiles.

Marguerite closes the laptop sure that the call went well. She felt warm, and she liked them. A week later, Mrs. Achterberg writes to say that they have chosen another designer.

So Marguerite opens the recording. In 25 minutes, she says “absolutely” nine times. She smiles through Mr. Achterberg’s question about cost. Her voice jumps when she gets to the magazine. The question about the building gets an answer about the magazine, which nobody asked about. The minute after the price is the fastest minute on the recording. None of it was in her memory of the call.

Her memory of the call was built from how she felt in it. The Achterbergs saw it from the other side of the screen, and so does the recording. That is why the recording is the only honest witness to your habits. It holds the client’s view, and nothing else does.

Your sense of how you came across is built from the inside

In 1996, two psychologists at Macquarie University in Sydney, Rapee and Hayman, reported three studies. The studies were about how people judge their own performance in company. Earlier research had found that people who are anxious in company rate their own performance too low. Observers watching them rate it higher. The same anxious people rate other people’s performance accurately.

In the three studies, people did a social task and then rated how they had done. Some of them watched a video of themselves first. The ratings made after the video were closer to the observers’ ratings than the ratings made without it. That held for the anxious people and for the people who were not anxious.

The authors’ explanation is that a person judges how they came across from a picture of themselves. The picture is built from three sources. They are what the person remembers about themselves, what they felt inside, and what they could see from where they sat. The client has none of those three. The client has only the outside, and so does the recording.

Here is what that means for Marguerite. Her picture of the call was built from feeling warm and liking the Achterbergs. The nine times she said “absolutely” were not in it, because she could not hear them from inside. The recording did not add anything to the call. It showed her the half of it she had no way to see.

The six habits to look for

The habits on a recording come from the body treating the meeting as a danger. They also come from the reach for whatever shows that you belong. Six of them are worth watching for. Each one is something the client can see or hear, and none of them is part of your answer.

Fillers are the sounds and words that hold your place while the next sentence arrives. “Um,” “so,” “kind of,” “you know,” and “like” are the common ones. Each person has a favorite.

A smile that stays on is the smile that does not come off. It is still there during the question about cost and the question about a delay. A smile answers a moment. One that lasts the whole call answered nothing in particular.

Bursts of volume are the places where your voice jumps. They arrive at the part you most want the client to hear. On Marguerite’s recording, that was the magazine.

“Absolutely” is the yes that arrives with extra force. It answers a question that wanted a plain yes, a no, or a fact. Marguerite said it to a question about a building she had not worked in.

Listing your credentials is the magazine, the certificate, or the well-known client, offered when the question was about the client’s apartment. The client did not ask, so the list answers a question that only you were asking.

Rushing is the passage where you speed up. For Marguerite it was the price. For you it may be the price, or whatever part of the conversation you were dreading on the way in.

An art teacher did not hear her own filler until the footage was edited

Clara Lieu teaches art and makes video tutorials for Art Prof, a free website for learning art. In a post from February 2019, she writes about three years of editing those videos. She cuts every pause and every filler word, even a pause of half a second, because it makes the videos “succinct and efficient.”

Her first tutorial “was a total disaster in terms of filler words,” she writes. “I didn’t even hear myself saying ‘kind of’ in almost every sentence until one of my interns pointed it out to me.” She was editing the footage at the time, and the filler still went past her. The intern heard it.

Now she knows the favorite filler of each person on her team. One says “you know,” another says “kind of,” and one says “and uh.” When she listens to interviews on the radio, every “you know,” “sort of,” “um,” and “so” leaps out at her. Before she edited video, she does not remember noticing any of them.

Lieu could hear the whole team’s filler and not her own, and she spends her days cutting other people’s pauses out. So expect your own favorite to go past you on the first viewing. If you can, ask someone else to watch with you.

A speaking coach says the pace that feels right to her is too fast

Jennifer Hennings is a public speaking coach in San Mateo, California. She writes that she has struggled with speaking quickly all her life, and that many of her clients have too. “When you’re anxious or excited, it’s easy to talk too fast,” she writes.

She has one check on herself. “When I feel like I’m speaking at a great pace, I’m going way too fast.” The pace that is right for a listener feels to her like words oozing slowly out of a jar of honey. So she tells her clients to “record yourself on video or audio” to find out “how you come across to an audience.”

Her felt pace and her real pace are two different speeds, and she coaches speaking for a living. So trust the recording over the feeling. If the recording shows you rushing through the price, you rushed, however steady it felt at the time.

Writing down what you expect first shows you more on the recording

In 2000, Allison Harvey and three colleagues at the University of Oxford ran an experiment that built on the Sydney studies. People gave a speech and then watched the video of it. Half of them did three preparations before they watched. They predicted in detail what they would see. They formed a picture of themselves giving the speech. Then they watched the video as though they were watching a stranger.

The people who prepared rated their speech higher after the video than the people who did not. They also rated it higher than they had before the video. The authors’ explanation is that the preparation widens the gap between the picture in your head and the footage. The wider that gap, the more you take in.

So do not press play cold. Write down what you expect to see, and then watch as a stranger would. What you wrote and what you see will differ, and the difference is your list.

Why recording a rehearsal alone goes wrong

Imagine a tutor named Beatrix who records herself at her kitchen table, answering the questions parents ask her. On the recording she is calm, brief, and clear. She decides that she has no habits to find.

The next week, she meets a family in the library of their house. The father checks his watch while she talks. She says “absolutely” four times and lists the schools her students got into. On the kitchen-table recording, nobody could judge her, so her body had no reason to do any of it.

The recording that tells the truth has something at stake in it. Record a real call, with the client’s permission. Or record a role-play with a colleague who asks the questions you dread and does not help you through them.

Watching yourself is less bad than it feels beforehand

Most people dread the footage, and some put off watching it for days.

The Sydney studies are the answer. The anxious people in them rated themselves worse than the observers did, and the video brought their ratings closer to the observers’. So if you dread the footage, you are likely to be rating yourself too low already. The recording will show you a person who did better than you feared, with a few habits that can be counted. Marguerite’s recording shows a designer who knew the street and had the magazine to prove it. It also shows the nine times she said “absolutely.” Both are true, and only the second one needs counting.

How to record yourself and find your habits

1. Choose the conversation you will record. Your next video call with a new client is the best choice. A role-play with a colleague who does not go easy on you is the next best. If it is a client call, ask for permission at the start. For example, a dog walker can say, “Would you mind if I record this call for my notes?”
2. If it is a role-play, tell your colleague which questions a client asks. For example, a florist can ask a colleague to call her as a bride’s mother and to ask about the price twice.
3. Before you watch, write down what you expect to see. Write how fast you think you spoke, what you said after the price, and which of the six habits you think appeared.
4. Watch the whole recording once, straight through, as though a stranger were on the screen. Make no notes on the first viewing.
5. Watch it a second time with the six habits beside you. Each time one appears, write the habit and the time on the recording. For example, a home organizer might write, “Absolutely, 2:10, 6:40, 14:05. Credentials, 3:30, when she asked about the garage.”
6. Count each habit at the end, and put the counts next to what you wrote in step 3. The habits you did not predict are the ones to watch for, because you cannot hear them from inside.
7. Keep the list with the date on it, and record your next conversation the same way. Two recordings tell you which habits are yours and which belonged to one day’s nerves.

Next: You will strip your answers down to the content alone, to find what is left when the habits are gone.