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

‘inoculation training’.

you are not distracted by anything (including your own insecurity); you are calm and focused.

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

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

You can’t get around fear. You can only go through it.

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,’

‘There is zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.’

But she too ‘allows’ herself to make mistakes, to say ‘um’, to let some of her anecdotes look spontaneous and under-rehearsed.

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