Confidence: Speaking for Impact
Our top ten tips
Confidence is multi-faceted and this is the one of several blogs focusing on a component part. Whilst confidence is internal, it manifests itself externally. We’re going to break down what confidence looks like so that you may bring your most confident self into work every day, no matter what the circumstances – even if you’re eight or nine months pregnant.
The best investment according to billionaire Warren Buffett is something that can’t be taxed, can’t be stolen and can’t be diminished through inflation. “Ultimately, there’s one investment that supersedes all others. Invest in yourself.” Everybody has potential that we haven’t explored yet, which learning can set free.
As part of fulfilling that potential, to become inspirational leaders, we need to be able to speak with confidence – something that even Warren Buffett wasn’t comfortable with doing initially. But, recognising its importance, he didn’t let that fear get in his way. Buffett enrolled on a course. The rest is history.
In common with body language, your voice can speak volumes about your confidence. What’s more, you can use your voice to enhance your confidence. The impact of your voice on your audience can be profound. Will you be considered as honest, confident, credible? Will your audience be engaged? Will they really listen to what you’re saying?
A great thing about voice is that we benefit from roughly the same vocal equipment, and we can all use our voice for impact. It doesn’t matter if we’re old, young, male, female…or eight months pregnant.
Here’s a whistle-stop guide, covering the mechanics of our voice and a little on content too.
1. Central, even, rhythmical breath: Our first consideration is our breath. This is the fuel of our voice. Breath and confidence are interconnected.
When we’re relaxed, we breathe using the centre of our bodies with a combination of our diaphragm and intercostal muscles. But when we get a rush of adrenaline – we’re angry, upset, scared – the breath tends to move upwards, into the clavicular area of your upper chest. In order to manage our stress response, reduce our heart rate, get control, focus, we need our breathing to be centred. But how do we achieve this?
Many would advise to take a deep breath, but that can make it worse, as we tend to then breathe into our upper clavicle area, and to do it too fast.
Instead, we should focus on our out-breath. When we breathe out, our heart-rate marginally drops. The act of blowing all of the breath out of our body creates the automatic response where air rushes in to where it’s supposed to be, in our centre.
Our focus should next shift to ensuring that our breath is even and rhythmical. Our in-breath may be shorter than our-breath, but each cycle needs to be the same e.g. 2 seconds in, 3 seconds out.
If we’ve had a challenging meeting, we can use a few seconds of focusing on our breathing – with eyes open and focused – even if walking from one meeting to another. By doing this, we can effectively reset our heart rate, ready for the next one.
2. Volume: When we want volume in order to be heard, another set of muscles come into play apart from diaphragm and intercostal muscles, namely our abdominal muscles. When we’re at a meeting or giving a presentation, our main objective shouldn’t be to shout, but to simply ensure that our voice fills the room. And we achieve that with our abs. But volume alone isn’t enough to ensure that we’re listened to…
3. Pitch: This is useful to build momentum and to indicate key points. For example – with italics indicating a shift up in pitch: “In Q1, sixty-three percent of our sales came from maternity workwear skirts and maternity workwear dresses.” The change lifts that number up and lands it with your audience. But in order to achieve the optimum pitch throughout our dialogue, it’s essential that we consider the next point…
4. Pace and pause: We may have prepared an excellent structure for a presentation or speech, but unless we pause effectively, that structure will be lost, and it’ll appear disorganised. Remember that time equates to authority. People in positions of authority don’t have to rush – they don’t rush, because they don’t have to, they know people will listen to them. One of the strongest ways of demonstrating confidence is to allow yourself to take a little bit more time.
At the of a start presentation, allow yourself to take a moment and connect with your audience. If you’re asked a question, allow yourself a moment to think about it rather than jumping in to show you know the answer. Obviously you don’t want to go too far – making an audience wait for ten minutes while you take a call might upset your colleagues – and variety is still the spice of life.
An added benefit of allowing yourself to pause is that it then regulates our pitch, by allowing more pitch movement. When we start a sentence, we tend to start in the middle of our vocal range. If we finish a sentence and allow a breath, we allow our pitch to re-start from a different place, allowing greater variety, which is the key to holding attention.
5. Intention: A strong sense of intention is critical. We sound much more compelling if we speak with intention, conviction, passion. And our intention may vary depending on the context, what we’re trying to convey to our audience and how we want the audience to feel: reassurance about a management restructure, encouraging innovation and creativity to fix a product-development problem, and driving home the important of GDPR, will all necessitate different intentions. Greater intention may make it sound as though you’re speaking with much greater volume than you actually are speaking.
A strong intention is easier to generate if we really care about what we’re saying, and linking what we’re saying to a greater purpose – e.g. GDPR compliance may seem boring, but by linking that to avoiding massive fines, reputational damage and loss of customer trust allows your company to succeed and continue on its mission, which – in turn – gives a greater sense of intention.
With intention, our voice will fill a space, have a presence in the room, with more drive behind each point, without being aggressive or overbearing.
I remember when I was pregnant, my boss said that I was on occasion too ‘emotional.’ On reflection, I wish that I’d given more presentations and chaired more meetings before my maternity leave. I believe that I could’ve channelled that emotion into some great presentations.
6. Emphasis: We achieve emphasis through changes of pace, pitch, volume, short sentences, repetition and pauses, and by having a greater sense of intention behind what we’re saying. Don’t forget the use of gestures, which will be covered in a separate article. People so often forget to repeat and pause to emphasise our most important points.
7. Stories: Moving on to content, a personal story is great for engaging with your audience. Try to add anecdotes from your life and career. Before your presentation, note down using the app on your phone all the relevant stories that occur to you to bring your speech to life. Discussing personal stories – even someone else’s story – also helps us to speak with passion and positivity.
8. Short sentences: Try to avoid conjunctions, which could become a fast route to monotony and your audience not hearing your points. Start your sentences. Finish your sentences. This then enables you to pause. And we saw the multiple benefits of pausing above.
9. Continuous learning: Voraciously. Active learning so often leads to great success, continuing to build up a wealth of knowledge that – as an added benefit – allows us to speak authoritatively, with confidence. It’s so important to Cazzana that it forms one of our core values.
Dale Carnegie – author of How to Win Friends and Influence People – wrote: “Talk about something that you know and know you know. Don’t spend ten minutes or ten hours preparing a talk: Spend tend weeks or ten months. Better still, spend ten years.”
The gap – if you’re able to have one – between your maternity leave starting and your baby arriving could be a great opportunity to catch up on those books, webinars and quality newspapers.
10. Notes, not rote: Best practice is to write notes for your presentation, and not a word-for-word draft. If you feel that you need a full draft, then don’t expect to read it verbatim when giving your presentation – maybe you can highlight key words in bold or different colours to draw your eye. By speaking naturally, we stay present and have an opportunity to sparkle.
Now it’s important to practice. Often. Out loud. Great leaders, past and present, know that we can inspire people to do extraordinary things with just a few well-chosen words, spoken with passion, conviction and confidence. Communication has inspired lives to be given and lives to be saved. It’s equally important in our daily communication with our leaders, colleagues and direct reports.
Quick quote: If you can’t communicate and talk to other people and get across your ideas, you’re giving up your potential. Warren Buffet.
Cazzana provides luxury maternity workwear and career advice before, during and after pregnancy to empower existing and future female leaders.