How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking

We’re trained to read emotions, facial expressions, body language and tone long before we understand words.

the contrast between how you present externally (what other people see) and how you think of yourself internally (how you feel).

Presence draws other people towards you because you seem open, engaged and fully, well, present.

You just need to say what you came to say, without getting caught up in doubt and fear.

without your own belief that you can own the room – and your desire to own it – the room is already lost.

It’s easy to forget that in the situations where Michelle Obama and TED Talkers are presenting, the speakers often have access to speech writers, voice coaches, notes and autocue. There is often a whole support system behind them. Just as it would be wrong to compare your hair, make-up and grooming with the standard in a Beyoncé video, these speech

Watch how Susan Cain does this in her TED Talk. First she talks about how it was for her when she turned up at summer camp as a shy child with a suitcase of books. She moves swiftly into discussing statistics and research about how we treat shy people in society. Good speakers move easily and quickly between the personal and the universal.

As the American coach Brendon Burchard writes in The Motivation Manifesto: ‘Almost all fear we experience today, and its resultant cowardly thinking and behaviour, is just imagined social drama created by unchecked mental processes and conditioning. We are afraid of being rejected, isolated or abandoned – not of being eaten alive.’

—Pace is often dictated by nerves, and nerves can also be controlled by the breath. If you’re gabbling, register that and take a moment. Feel the soles of your feet on the floor; let your brain drop into your stomach; breathe through your feet. Relax. Pick up your thought and start again.