Jonathan handed me these CDs at his recent Holographic Communications seminar.

“Nice packaging,” I said. “How much did it cost?”

“$5,” he said.

“Worth it,” I replied.

The first 2 CDs contain lots of tips for improving your voice. I’m going to give away one of them as an example of how useful these tips are. Jonathan suggests obtaining a Walkman or MiniDisc player that gives real-time feedback through the headphones as you’re speaking. I first heard this tip from Jonathan several years ago and spent the whole lunch hour changing my internal hearing so that I hear what other people hear when I speak. This tip alone has doubled or tripled the quality of my voice and thus vastly improved the response I get from people.

I remember getting a guy to try this with the dictation machine I had. The transformation in his voice was magical – and took about a quarter of a second. Such is the power of properly organised, neurological feedback loops. But he hadn’t noticed any change in his voice!

There’s another tip on the first CD that by itself more than justifies the cost, which is the guitar-shaped vowels and is just genius. But you’ll have to buy the CDs or persuade Jonathan to find out more.

The second CD concerns the 5 biggest problems that people have whilst speaking. I agree with Jonathan’s list and hope to eliminate one of them myself. It also talks about chaining states vocally including the fabulous hub state concept. The big idea is that instead of arguing/reframing someone into doing what you want, you simply elicit the state in which they’re most likely to do what you want. This might seem obvious to you. It only seems obvious to me after listening to the CD and wonder why I’ve been doing it the hard way all these years.

The third CD teaches ‘headlining’, which is an extremely powerful skill that Jonathan teaches in both Holographic Communication and Linguistic Wizardry. It’s a way of grabbing people’s interest with the first 5-20 words out of your mouth. This again puts people into the most receptive state of mind for what you want to communicate. Jonathan gives an easy strategy for generating good headlines but add a step for making it appropriate to the context. If you start to sound like a newspaper seller, your friends will look at you funny.

The fourth CD covers the Voice of Truth which I’ve yet to play with. It teaches both basic and advanced concepts in calibration.

Jonathan’s voice itself sounds best on the second and third CDs and is much improved from Irresistable Voice I. On the first CD, it’s a bit staccato and on the last it sounds like he has a cold. All the CDs are scripted which makes Jonathan sound less natural than he does in reality.

All in all, if you liked the original Irresistable Voice, you’ll love Irresistable Voice 2. You don’t need the former to appreciate the latter. If you've had a lot of voice training, the first CD might be superfluous. But otherwise you’ll need both to have a great voice.