Your voice is how you communicate your personality, your confidence and your enthusiasm to others. When you learn to use it well, it will change people’s perception of you. A trained voice is influential because it commands attention.

When you speak, do people listen, or do they look down at their phones or interrupt you? When you speak, do people hear what you have to say? Because, in order to lead a team, make a sale, influence, innovate or inspire, you first have to be heard. Wouldn’t it be incredibly valuable to have a powerful speaking voice that gets people’s attention and holds it? Don’t you think that would make a big difference in your life, and your career and your ability to close deals, influence others and lead? Of course, it would. But is it even possible to change your voice? Not to sound like a different person like I do in animated TV shows and movies, not to sound like you’re someone else, but to sound like a better version of you. Is it even something we can do — improve our voice the way we improve our appearance, like a vocal makeover?

Well, actually, yes. Not only can you change the way you sound by training your voice to sound better, but when you do, it will change your life. Just like improving the way you dress and look changes the way that people respond to you, improving the way you sound changes people’s impression of you as well. After all, isn’t that the story of “My Fair Lady,” where Henry Higgins, a professor of linguistics, makes a bet that, with some vocal training, he can pass off a poor flower girl as a duchess? And he does it. She completely transformed her life simply by training her voice. So, today I am going to be your Henry Higgins and show you some simple exercises that will train your voice, except instead of transforming you from a flower girl to a duchess, you will simply become a more effective communicator who is more influential, and therefore more profitable.

First, it is important to recognize that if people are tuning you out, it could be because they are responding to the sound of your voice rather than the content of your words. The tone, pitch, pace, projection and variety of your voice is like a magnet. It can either repel people away from you or attract them toward you. And that’s because it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it. Communication is only about 7 percent content. The other 93 percent is all about tone of voice and body language. In other words, the way you make people feel when you say it, especially now in this new virtual reality where we are meeting online, means your voice needs to immediately connect with people in the absence of your physical presence. But if you don’t like the sound of your voice, you are not alone. Studies show that most people don’t like the sound of their own voice. Yet, that is how people respond to you. Most of us are stuck in a very tight range in our throat, locked down to a few notes without hitting any of the highs or the lows. Both are important.

The high notes in your range communicate passion and transfer enthusiasm to others. The low notes communicate confidence and authority. Unlock the high notes, and you will become a better salesperson because sales is a transference of enthusiasm to the customer. Unlock the low notes, and you will become a better leader, which is why the U.S. presidential candidate with a lower voice has won every election since Calvin Coolidge. But most of us are stuck in the middle of our range, playing only a few notes, leaving all that potential locked inside. It’s like your voice is a wonderful musical instrument, but no one ever taught you how to use it, which is a shame because a trained voice is a valuable asset. A 2013 study from Duke University and the University of California found that a 25 percent decrease in vocal pitch among CEOs of any gender is associated with an average increase of $187,000 in annual salary.

I sounded 15 until I was about 25. When I reached adulthood, my voice never really changed. I still sounded like a kid. It’s hard to get taken seriously with a voice like a prepubescent teenager. So, I invested in private voice coaching and learned some vocal exercises that changed my life. The exercises did not make me sound like James Earl Jones, but they did give me a bit more control and flexibility with my voice. And thanks to that training, it gave me a 20-year career as one of the most recognizable voiceover actors in Hollywood. I’ve voiced hundreds of commercials and thousands of promos as well as over 100 animated TV shows and movies.

You might not want to be a voice actor, and you might not want a career in voice acting, but, in business and investing, clients trust advisors with lower, more resonant voices. They sound more confident, and clients will give their money to people who have those lower voices.

Your voice is a muscle, so let’s do a few exercises and start training it now.

Action step 1: breathing. The breaths you take support the sounds you make. So, let’s start with some simple breathing exercises. Most of us are cut off at our throats, and we hold a lot of tension there. You know who knows how to command attention? Babies.

Babies breathe diaphragmatically. That’s why tiny babies can use their voices to get an adult out of a deep sleep to do whatever they want at 4 a.m. It’s diaphragmatic breathing. They command us by using diaphragmatic breathing to support all that screaming and crying, which is why their voices project so well. It’s how they support their voice that gives it its vocal power. Then, as we get older, we start to hold stress in our throats. We start breathing shallow, which makes our voices smaller and more constrained, like when we quietly ask a waiter to bring us a drink in the middle of the day when we used to command our parents to bring us a bottle in the middle of the night. What happened to us? We became chest breathers. That’s taking half breaths that stop at our chest and shoulders and rob us of energy. Correct breathing, diaphragmatic breathing grounds you and gives you leadership presence. So, let’s start with something called “ujjayi breath,” which translates as “victorious breath.” It helps you calm down, slow down, be present and connect your voice to your body.

And that gives you more volume, a lower pitch and greater vocal presence. You breathe in through the nose for four seconds, hold the breath for two seconds, and then exhale through your mouth for six seconds making a whispered “ah” sound, like the sound of the ocean. You try it. Hold for two, out for six. Place your hand on your stomach, and imagine a balloon filling up with air when you breathe in and deflating when you breathe out.

Action step 2: vocalization. Now that you’ve learned some breathing exercises, let’s do some vocalization exercises. These will introduce sound to breath, and they will both lower your tone and expand your range so you can play all the notes in your instrument. Don’t worry if you can’t sing. These are not singing exercises; these are sound exercises. When you do them, your sound will get deeper, fuller, have more variety, and you will sound more resonant. Your brain doesn’t differentiate between singing and speaking, so you shouldn’t either. I do these same vocal warm-ups with my kids on the way to school every morning. Take a deep breath, sigh or yawn out, and make it sound like a descending siren.

If you’re in an office right now, and your coworkers are looking at you funny, my apologies. It’s about to get worse because this last vocalization exercise is a bit louder. Put your hand on your stomach, and feel it contract. You can do this first without sound, by the way, and then add sound. Do it fast and silent for a few seconds. And then do it fast with sound for a few seconds. When I teach people these techniques in my online course, I always suggest doing these breathing and vocalization exercises for a few minutes a day, every day, for at least a month in order to strengthen the sound of your voice all day long, not just for a few minutes afterward. You should hear a difference now already. Your voice is a muscle. So, without constant exercise, it will revert back to the way you habitually sound.

Action step 3: posture. How you stand, move and gesture speaks more clearly than the words you use. There is a link between your body language and your tone of voice. This last technique is about connecting your body with your voice so they both support one another. Opening up your physicality will open up your vocal capacity as well. It will increase your lung capacity, amplify your volume and make you more powerful. For instance, a monotone tone and a monotone posture go together. If you are standing or sitting stiffly, you are most likely going to sound stiff as well. Notice that Mr. Spock hardly ever made any unnecessary movements in “Star Trek”; that would be highly illogical. Conversely, people who are very authoritative and commanding speak and stand in a very expansive and expressive way.

They take up a lot of space, and the impression that gives is that they own the room. That is one reason most people’s personalities don’t come through very well in online meetings because they are sitting, probably slouching. And now, from looking down at our phones all day, our posture’s changed, and we have all got text neck. Sitting at a desk doesn’t help either. You end up shifting your pelvis back, slumping your shoulders, bending your neck, all of which restrict airflow, and that diminishes your vocal presence. Bad posture can actually hurt your voice and keep you from being able to speak continuously all day without straining it.

When your body language is as strong as your tone of voice, you will be perceived as confident and congruent.

Joshua Seth is a world-touring psychological illusionist, motivational speaker, bestselling author and celebrity voice actor. He’s known to millions as the voice of nearly 100 animated TV shows and movies. He is the creator of Creativity Cards: Brainstorming Made Easy, the author of the bestselling book “Finding Focus in a Changing World: How to Make the Impossible Possible by Thinking Differently,” and a leading keynote speaker on creativity and innovative thinking. He’s presented at Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and some of the world’s most innovative companies including Pfizer, Uber, Deloitte and Disney.