How to sound more confident when speaking and presenting
If giving a presentation or speech makes your knees knock and your stomach flip, you’re in good company. Feeling nervous when speaking in public is an extremely common challenge. Yet we don’t want our nerves to impede our ability to communicate… we want it to be easy for our audience to understand and act on our message. Even those who do feel comfortable speaking and presenting might not be signaling confidence with their speaking style. Since our stakeholders weigh the merit of our ideas partly based on how credible they find us, portraying confidence is vital to the success of our message.
There are a variety of physical and audible ways to develop and portray a greater sense of confidence when presenting. This article will focus on the latter: what our audiences hear in our voices. If you’re not sure whether you’re conveying confidence with your voice (or body), ask for feedback from some trusted sources and/or watch some video footage of a recent presentation you’ve given.
Ever wondered…
…why your voice sounds so different on a recording? When we hear ourselves talk real-time, we hear the sound waves through both bone conduction and air conduction. We hear others (or recordings of ourselves) only through air conduction.
If you’d like to sound more confident than you currently do, use the following tips to bolster the quality of your audible communication. These tools will help in all communication scenarios: one-on-one conversations, roundtable meetings, and in front of larger groups, whether virtual and in-person.
Seven tips for sounding more confident when you speak
1 Stand (or sit) up. Posture is the foundation for using your voice effectively. Watch a musician play a wind instrument, and you’ll see their posture is tall; the same is true for playing the “instrument” that is your voice. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, hips and shoulders aligned to form a tall column. I always advise my clients to stand to present whenever possible. If you’ll be seated, sit on the front edge of your chair with both feet on the ground, hips and shoulders straight. Avoid leaning on the table or the chair arms.
2 Go deep. A tall posture is what best enables you to engage in what singers and athletes also leverage: diaphragmatic breathing. Powerful speakers use diaphragmatic breathing to get enough air into their lungs to finish their sentences strong and with adequate projection—both of which are essential for signaling confidence. Check yourself by taking a few deep breaths in front of a mirror while holding your hand on your belly. Try to keep your shoulders stable and expanding your belly to draw in the air.
3 Open wide. To get the most out of your voice in terms of projection, you’ll actually have to open your mouth. Really open it. Think about the sound a tuba—with its wide opening—makes compared to a flute. Though it will feel strange to practice this, I promise it won’t look strange. Your audience won’t notice the difference in your face but they will hear the difference in your voice; it’ll be clearer and more audible, signaling greater confidence.
4 Pace yourself. Most people speak quickly when they’re nervous (anxious to get it over with, perhaps?) whereas a measured pace reads as poised and unruffled to audiences. The average conversational rate of speech is between 120-150 words per minute. Speaking much faster than that also puts your audience’s comprehension at risk, so aim for something in that range that feels most natural to you. Then, create emphasis on particular points by speeding up or slowing down. To guage your typical speed, pull 250 words from a recent presentation or email into a document. Set a timer for a minute and speak aloud as though presenting that content. Mark your stopping point when the timer expires and count the words. If you’re prone to speaking too quickly, practice pacing yourself by downloading a teleprompter app and setting it to 10% slower than you typically speak; keep ramping down as you practice until you’re settling into a healthy range.
5 Clean it up. Sloppy work doesn’t instill confidence. And poor enunciation is the verbal equivalent of unintelligible penmanship. Our audiences need to know we care about them before they’ll trust us; clear enunciation signals confidence. (The faster we speak the more important this is for their comprehension, as well.) Practice enunciating using tongue twisters. Here are a few fun ones to use.
6 Find your sweet spot. The lower end of a speaker’s vocal range will convey a higher degree of authority to audiences. We instinctively use a higher pitch to speak to a scared puppy and a lower pitch to tell the dog to shush. Those whose voices are generally higher in pitch will benefit from being more purposeful in lowering it. I’m not suggesting anyone develop some sort of counterfeit “speaking voice” (as Elizabeth Holmes was thought to have done). Instead, I advocate all speakers be mindful of their pitch, intentionally using the lower end of their vocal range on points that merit a more authoritative tone.
7 Kill the fillers. Nothing undercuts credibility like an overabundance of ums and uhs and any form of hedging language. Instead, while you’re thinking of what to say next, simply pause. This is a difficult skill to master, but probably the most effective remedy for appearing to have a lack of confidence. Train yourself by practicing this in everyday conversation.
Use your voice effectively to sound more confident
I encourage you to think of your voice as a tool you leverage for greater impact with your audience and therefore your messages. Like any tool, it must be sharpened in order to be most effective. By putting any or all of these tips into place as part of practicing your delivery skills, you’ll keep your instrument in top shape and come across as a confident, compelling speaker every time you present.
Bonus tip: Are you prone to uptalk? Where all your statements sound more like questions? Check out this video for some additional coaching on how to remediate uptalk.