How to look more confident when you speak: Dianna Booher

Convey more confidence in a meeting or hallway conversation Be intentional with your body language

Episode 180 (Dianna is based in Dallas, Texas)

In this conversation with Dianna Booher, we explore:

• Techniques to convey more confidence when surprised
• How to speak up in a meeting with more intention and confidence
• Nervous body ticks that can sabotage your message
• How to train your body to send positive signals
• How to slow down a conversation while demonstrating calm and comfort
• Handy transition phrases to keep audience attention
• How to handle a brain freeze
• How to encourage your team to participate more readily in meetings

About our guest, Dianna Booher:

Dianna Booher is the author of 50 books—all published by major US publishers (Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins, McGraw-Hill), with these available in 62 foreign editions.

As a communication consultant and presentation coach, Dianna has among her clients more than one-third of the Fortune 500 organizations.

Dianna hosts Booher Book Camps, where she helps professionals develop their own bestsellers to get their “intended message” out into the world.

www.BooherBookCamp.com

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Excerpts from this conversation with Dianna Booher:

How people how business leaders can feel and look more confident when they are speaking whether it's a presentation or whether it's simply a meeting discussion, when you work with your clients to help them look and feel more confident.

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One that sort of universally applicable is in your body language.

When you start to speak. If you picture somebody right now standing up to give a briefing or something in your conference room. If they look like they're conferring on their notes, their their eyes are downcast, they're fidgeting, they're stepping back and forward, stepping back and forth. That's nervous movement.

And that tells you that they're not confident about what they're about to say, that may not be your intention, that may not be what you're thinking. But that's how people interpret they interpret monotonous, or repetitive gestures.

Like some people just swirl their hands around often, or they'll put their hands in the pocket out of the pocket in the pocket out of the pocket, or they take one step forward, one step back one step forward, one step back, I used to call that when I was teaching classes on presentation skills, the dance step, you know, the two step,

Your body language communicates, I'm confident, I believe in what I'm about to say, I have some great information that's going to be useful to you. Or it says, I'm really not quite sure that this is going to land correctly, or got the right points with the right audience. They're picking up all of that, from the moment you stand up from your chair, to walk to the front of a conference room, to being on stage, seeing you walk up, you know, I don't care if you're a celebrity speaker walking down an aisle to music, you either look confident and like you're relaxed and going to enjoy the time with them. Are you down? And that communicates a great deal.

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So larger movements look more confident.

Yes, taking up more space. You walk into a room and somebody who's walked in, they put either their iPad or their their laptop right in front of them.

And then they throw a jacket over the next chair, and then they pull that chair back so that they can see the angle, they want to be their perspective, they choose that they're taking up space.

But I'm just saying that body language communicates attitude.

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Your Intended Message is the podcast about how you can boost your career and business success by honing your communication skills. We’ll examine the aspects of how we com