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

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

Leadership no longer necessarily comes from strength – let alone physical strength. It comes instead from those who are more intelligent, more creative, more innovative: ‘And there are no hormones for those attributes,’

This is not a time to be quiet, keep your head down and hope that someone might hear your modest, interesting whisper.

All you need to be is a credible, honest version of yourself.

If everyone listened to their inner critic, nothing good would ever happen.

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.

although they all have moments of levity and humour, which are designed to raise the mood of the room. They don’t project the intensity or direct leadership of a Michelle Obama speech, but they are just as commanding in their own way.

—Your speed is highly determined by your breath. You ignore your breath at your peril! It’s a great tool to use to keep yourself relaxed and to find natural pauses in your speech. Just a few moments spent thinking about your breathing before or at the beginning of a speech will relax you. Notice how you punctuate what you’re saying using your breat

You don’t have to be perfect, we learn. You just have to be a plausible, comfortable version of yourself, even if that isn’t perfectly poised.

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