Communicate with Confidence: Body, Voice, Mind
Ed Darling
12 min read
What you’ll learn:
- How to communicate with confidence from bodylanguage.
- How your voice can increase your self-confidence.
- The mindset secret of confident speakers.
What it takes to communicate with confidence.
There are thousands of books, articles and videos on confidence in public speaking.
But if you’re new to public speaking, where should you begin?
After coaching hundreds of people to overcome anxiety and develop outstanding communication skills, I’ve narrowed it down to three fundamentals: the body, the voice, and the mind.
It’s these three areas that we begin with in our training courses and coaching.
By focusing on these first-principles, you can quickly take your public speaking skills from zero-to-hero.
Ready to learn how to communicate with confidence?
Let’s get started.
Master your bodylanguage to non-verbally communicate with confidence.
Before people hear your voice, they see your body.
It takes just 7 seconds for people to begin forming a first impression. So when speaking in public it’s crucial we get those first 7 seconds right.
That means being able to consciously display what I call “winners’ body-language”. Winners’ body-language is the combination of warmth, power and enthusiasm that humans instinctively show when we’re feeling our best.
Watch an athlete win a race, or a celebrity accept an award, and you’ll see winners’ body-language happening in real time: head up high, arms outstretched, smiling with confidence.
We’ve all experienced feeling these things.
The problem is that when faced with a stressful situation like public speaking – we usually start exhibiting the opposite: head down, arms closed, a look of nervous worry.
The trick to breaking this habit, is catching yourself in the act.
Changing your bodylanguage habits:
When you’re standing on stage and the nerves kick in, watch out for any negative body-language habits:
- Looking downwards.
- Hands in pockets.
- Feet shuffling.
Once noticed, you then perform what’s called a ‘pattern interrupt‘.
In other words, notice what you’re doing wrong, and then intentionaly do the exact opposite:
- Begin holding eye-contact with you audience.
- Use your hands to gesture and emphasize.
- Plant your feet in one spot.
The more you practise becoming aware of these things, the easier they are to control. Try to become more aware of your body-language by noticing how a stressful situations make you react. Do you start fidgeting? Look downwards, or furrow your brow?
It’s these responses you need to change in order to communicate with confidence.
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Use your voice to communicate with confidence vocally.
It takes over 100 muscles for humans to articulate the spoken word. Unlike singers or performers though, speakers often fail to truly understand or utilize their voice.
The result?
- We breath incorrectly and struggle to project our voice.
- We get stuck in a boring and monotone speaking pattern.
- We lack the variety of tone, pitch and melody that makes a voice engaging.
- We become flustered and start speaking too quickly; leading to more filler-words.
Each of these is what we call a credibility killer; something which makes us sound unprepared and unprofessional to our audience.
The solution is learning to use the full scope of the intrument that is your voice. If you want to begin this process, the first step is simple: listen to your own voice!
Developing a confident voice:
Seriously, record yourself speaking for 60 seconds on a random topic, and then listen back. Once you’ve got over the awkward cringy feeling of listening to yourself, it’s time to detach and get analytical.
Ask yourself honestly: do I sound enaging, interesting and confident?
If not, why?
- Are you over-using a certain filler word?
- Are you speaking too quickly?
- Are lacking any variety in terms of your melody?
Identify any issues, and begin working on them.
The voice is perhaps the most overlooked aspect of communication.
By working on your voice, you’ll communicate with confidence – and keep people engaged.
Develop the right mindset to communicate with confidence.
A destructive mindset will do more damage to your ability to communicate with confidence than anything else.
Yet how many people spend the days and weeks before a presentation ruminating on everything that could go wrong?
We waste energy worrying about how we’ll be judged by others:
- Will I look confident?
- Will I sound assertive?
- Will people like me?
In other words,”me, me, me…”
The best approach to overcoming this negative thinking is to completely flip the table.
The mindset to communicate with confidence:
Instead of thinking about what you need from them (recognition, approval, applause), focus all of your attention on what you’re giving them.
Understand that no matter what the occasion of your speech, it’s never really about you.
Whether you’re speaking to entertain, to inform, to educate or to influence; it’s always about your audience.
Subtly shifting your mindset in this way allows you to take the pressure off yourself. Before your next speech, pitch or presentation, remind yourself of this simple truth: “It’s about them, not me”.
Ask yourself:
- What can you do to best serve the audience?
- What impact do you want to have on them?
- Who is the one person in the audience who needs to hear this?
The more you focus on serving the audience, the more you’ll naturally begin to communicate with confidence.
Ready to feel confident while speaking in public?
Join our next 1-Day Public Speaking Masterclass
It takes practise to communicate with confidence.
Ultimately, the above only works when you do.
That means applying these skills and gaining real-life experience.
It’s not enough to read about bodylanguage, learn about the voice, or mentally reframe things in your head. These are tools that must be put to work, tested, and trained.
The best piece of advice I can give you is this:
Do more public speaking.
Or as Aristotle said:
“For the things we must learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them”.
Now that you understand the fundamentals of how to communicate with confidence, it’s time to start using them in the field.
Master your bodylanguage, develop your vocal variety, and shift your mindset.
Then get out there, and communicate with confidence.