How Loud Am I, Really? Finding Your Target Speaking Volume

The tricky thing about volume is that you can’t hear yourself the way others do. The fix isn’t a decibel target — it’s a personal band you can actually see and hold.

“Speak up.” “You’re a bit loud.” If you get both, sometimes in the same day, you’re not doing anything wrong — you simply can’t judge your own volume from the inside. What sounds normal in your own head can land as a mumble or a boom to someone across the table. The first step to fixing it is understanding why you can’t hear yourself accurately.

Why you can’t judge your own volume

You hear your own voice partly through the air, like everyone else — but also through the bones of your skull, which carry it straight to your ears with more warmth and body. That’s why recordings of your voice sound thinner and stranger than you expect. It also means your voice almost always sounds fuller and louder to you than it does to the person listening, so “normal” to you can be “too quiet” to them.

There is no single “correct” loudness

It’s tempting to want one right number to aim for, but volume doesn’t work like that. The level you need changes with the distance to your listener, the size and echo of the room, background noise, and even the microphone on a call. Chasing an exact figure is a trap; the useful goal is a target band that’s right for you and your situation.

Let a meter show you your range

Because you can’t feel your own volume reliably, the most useful thing is to make it visible. A live meter shows you, in the moment, when you’re slipping too quiet, when you’re pushing too hard, and when you’re sitting in a comfortable, carrying band. It turns an invisible guess into something you can actually see and adjust.

Calibrate to your real situation

A target only means something at the distance and in the room you actually speak in. Set yours where you really sit — at your desk, on your usual call setup — rather than in the abstract. Using your front camera to keep a consistent distance helps, because leaning closer or further changes how loud you land without you realising.

Find your everyday target

• read a sentence and watch where your natural volume sits on the meter;
• nudge up or down until you’re in the ideal band without straining;
• notice how that level feels in your body, so you can find it again without the meter.

The aim isn’t to stare at a meter forever — it’s to learn what your target volume feels like from the inside, so you can return to it on your own. After a while, “am I loud enough?” stops being a guess and becomes a feeling you can trust.

Aim for steady, not loud

Being easy to hear was never about being the loudest person in the room. It’s about finding a comfortable level that carries and holding it steadily — especially through the ends of sentences. Once you know your target and can feel your way back to it, “what did you say?” starts to fade, without you ever having to shout.

Vocalio is for general speech practice and self-improvement — it is not medical care or speech therapy. If you have a medical or speech concern, please consult a qualified professional.