Communicate with Confidence

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Caroline Goyder.

Caroline Goyder: Delighted to be speaking. Great to be here.

Anita Brick: I'm so glad that you're here. Caroline has an international reputation for her work as an expert speaker and training with senior management within organizations as well as private clients. She worked for over a decade at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London as a voice coach. She is the author of Gravitas, Star Qualities, and then the book that we're going to talk about today, which I love, by the way, is Find Your Voice.

Her 2014 TEDx talk on the Surprising Secret of Speaking with Confidence has been viewed probably now even more than this, more than 7.5 million times. Clients–which I love this, like very eclectic, right?–clients have included news anchors and reporters, actors, CEOs of global companies, art and TV, and magicians, amongst others.

I know that you talk a lot about the physicality of voice and the physicality and the level of confidence and actually being heard are so connected. I'm very excited and this topic is very interesting to students, alumni and others who listen to CareerCast. So thanks again for having this conversation from across the pond.

Caroline Goyder: My total pleasure. It's something that I really believe in because I struggled to find a lot of the things we're probably going to be talking about.

Anita Brick: Maybe we could start off with a definition.

Caroline Goyder: What I mean by communicating with confidence is really a sense that we are able to trust ourselves. If you go back to the Latin definition of confidence, it comes from the root of fidere, faithful to trust. So I want people to feel a sense of trust in themselves, innately, and not to have to worry about judgment or imposter syndrome, or fear of rejection, fear of visibility. I want people to be centered and settled in themselves. And that's it really.

Anita Brick: One of the students asked a question which I think is really good, and I actually struggled with this when I came out of the MBA program with zero work experience, and I was trying to prove myself. And the student said: “How do you suggest we draw the line between being confident and aggressive? Any special advice for non-native speakers?”

Caroline Goyder: Oh, well, let's think about the first part of that question first. Because I think that people who are truly confident there's a lot of surface confidence, which is people masking, you know, showing behaviors that they think will make them seem confident. But deep confidence, people with deep confidence are usually able to respond to difficult situations without coming back to aggression, because their systems are centered and they are at ease in themselves. When you have a deep level of confidence in which your nervous system is settled and centered, aggression won't show up. And if it does, it's something that you can deal with because you have a resilience.

Anita Brick: I would agree with that because you can tell in someone's voice whether they're being fake confident or if they are being genuinely confident.

Caroline Goyder:  You hear is it an edge, don't you? There's an edge of effort in someone's voice when they're trying. As a species, we're really good at reading it. We don't know what we're reading, but we feel a sense of mistrust.

Anita Brick: I would agree. The second part of his question is interesting. And there's another one that's related to this. Is there a special advice for someone when English is not the native language?

Caroline Goyder: Your brain is working overtime to do a lot of the stuff that, when it's your native language, just happens unconsciously. So what I say to people who are leading or stepping up into jobs where English is not their first language, the advice that you give to actors, which is to flood your ears with sound, the sound that you're working in. So when you get home at night, listen to the radio in that language as much as you can. Make friends with people who are natives and just really get as much of an unconscious competence in the language as you can, because that's when you're going to be able to relax and to be really present. No easy answer, really, I think.

Anita Brick: I would say that you're right. Part of it is that when it is not our native language, we can fall back into translating in our head, which makes the whole process clunky and has an impact on our voice as well. But I love your idea of whether it is, you know, listening online or listening radio or whatever you're having to do to be able to have those conversations because like in anything, I'm sure you did not get up day one and give that TED talk. Because that would have been number one, really scary and probably not very prudent either. And so if you keep putting yourself in situations, it sounds like that could help a great deal for anyone. And maybe especially someone who is doing business in their non-native language.

Caroline Goyder: You know, the biggest illusion about confidence is that confidence is something innate in speech, as in TED talks, as in presentations. The people who look really confident are actually the people who've done the work. We don't notice that in good speakers. We just assume they're naturals. But we don't assume that of tennis players or Formula One drivers. So I think we need to be more respectful of the work that goes into good speakers, actually.

Anita Brick: And it does take a lot of time and effort. I do think that we're also in an environment these days. People are more on edge. And I love to ask this question, which I agree. I think it's a very interesting point: “These days I feel each conversation or video conference call I have is grace under pressure, because of the situation and even more on the state of mind many people are in these days. How would you suggest some things to help build a bridge to even be heard?”

Caroline Goyder: It's hard, isn't it? For example, this conversation is happening in a tiny cottage by the sea where my family are downstairs, and one of them just tried to give me a cup of tea and there's a dog. Our lives are very compressed, aren't they? Where we would have had an office to go to and where we had a house. It was all separate. Suddenly things are compressed and we are in this collided world. And so your boardroom table may also be your kitchen table.

What I would say to people in handling that particular pressure of collision is that we have to be really scrupulous, you know, and you referenced this earlier on about looking after the body because we sit at laptops to make zoom calls, to write emails, to work on documents and we forget that when we're speaking on a zoom call, that's a physical thing. Our voice is physical, our expression, our gesture. That's about the physical body, the breath, how we sit, how we move even when we're sitting on the phone. And so I'd say to people, nurture the body, because where you would have been walking between meetings at work, you're now sitting all day at a desk. So if you can take ten minutes between meetings to go and walk around the garden or do some star jumps, if you're in a city flat, to drink water, put the radio on and sing. Those are the kind of things that are going to feed you as a speaker, because the body feeds speech and we forget that.

Anita Brick: It's a good point. I know I have been accused of looking incredibly silly putting on loud music in between appointments. I can't believe I'm saying this and dancing around the flat.

Caroline Goyder: Brilliant!

Anita Brick: Yeah! And I feel good and I love it. You're right. We need those breaks. Otherwise I think the tension builds up and it carries over into one more video conference call, which we need to look a certain way. We need to sit a certain way. There's a level of self-consciousness that arises. What you're suggesting maybe taking a little bit of a break, whatever that means for you. I'm not suggesting talking to yourself, but maybe just speaking out loud or reading a poem out loud, even if they seem silly, could actually help us be better. Does that make sense to you?

Caroline Goyder: Perfect sense. You know, my background is theater, so an actor will religiously tape a half in London theater before a show, which is half an hour or more. In that time, the actors are sitting quietly, they're breathing, they're getting present. Because what they know is that in a performance and a meeting is a performance, what makes you good is your ability to listen and be present, not your ability to say clever things. That's helpful too, but you've practiced that in rehearsal. And so for actors, that moment of quiet before they go on is about honing their ability to be present. And we love people who are present on zoom calls as much as in real life. People just really hone their ability to be present through body, through breath, through listening, through meditation. Whatever floats your boat, they will have better meetings.

Anita Brick: So along with that, and I found this very intriguing. And so did the student. He said: “I was intrigued by the idea that if I'm uncomfortable, say in a fund or a pitch or something else, other people will sense my discomfort and join me in that negative space. Any positive triggers to remember that I want them to feel at ease, so we're both gaining a positive impression of each other?”

Caroline Goyder: When I'm in a situation and there is discomfort, I've learned to reflect back to myself, how is it that I'm showing up in this situation that is a part of this discomfort? We're just nervous systems meeting each other, and sometimes we're conscious of what's going on in our nervous system. Maybe I've had too much coffee and I'm speaking too fast. Maybe I'm very relaxed and I need to up my energy. Where you become really ninja in relationships and in meetings is when you can just clock that nervous system jangle in yourself, in the other person, and just take a moment to calm your own state down. A good way to do that is to become aware of a long outbreath as you pause. An outbreath slows the heart rate and that steadies the system. The problem is that what we do in speech, and I just did one, we gasp at the breath in. If we do that a lot in speech, because we're nervous, and I hear people do this all the time, it becomes a bit like this, it becomes a bit staccato and the breath is pulled in through the mouth, and that says to the system, punch them or run away. So it just dials up the adrenaline.

If you can pause, center yourself, have a long outbreath, come back to my face. You're on the floor. My bum is on the chair. I can feel the air on my face. You slow yourself down and you will probably notice that that has an impact on the other person. Because our heart rates tend to synchronize even though we're not aware of it. We know the person who speeds our heart rate up often.

Anita Brick: That's true. I know that. There was a related question about the breathing part. This MBA student said, she said: “When the stakes are high, like now with job interviews, I speak quickly and/or freeze up and it feels awkward to change my breathing in the moment. Is that it really is very obvious in a zoom call. Help and thanks.”

Caroline Goyder: Thanks. Great question. These are all really good questions. First thing with job interviews is they are extreme, aren't they? Because you have imposter syndrome, judgment, fear of getting it wrong, fear of looking stupid, fear of being rejected. It's a toxic soup of, you know, possible worries. You kind of have to approach an interview–and it's the way I approach the TED talk, which was a similar level of pressure for different reasons–like an actor would approach a show, which is that your day is not your own.

And what that means is you kind of have to be really kind to yourself on the day of a big interview. If it's in the morning, get up early, go for a run, do some yoga, sing you know, in the shower, wear something that makes you feel wonderful. Get there really early, sit quietly, turn off your phone. And that's feeding your nervous system messages of you've got this. You're as ready as you're ever going to be. That will give you a sense of control as you walk through the door.

Now, I'm not saying that's going to remove the adrenaline. It's not. But what it will do is allow you to meet the adrenaline with a sense of, oh, hello, I care about this and it will up your game. If we meet the adrenaline with a sense of I'm not ready, I'm rushing. That's when things go really wrong and then it can spiral. So take control at the beginning. But then I take your point that in a conversation, we can notice that we're really speeding up. In that situation, it's fine to get to the end of a sentence and just close your mouth and notice the breath coming back through the nose, and to feel your feet on the floor and to be comfortable with silence, because often that's quite a high-status behavior if it's relaxed. And it just gives your system a moment to calm.

Anita Brick: I like that, it isn't so obvious. It becomes really obvious when someone continues to speak very, very quickly to fill up the silence. And sometimes a pause is a good thing.

Caroline Goyder: Pauses are lovely. In a very speedy culture, pauses are to be valued and nurtured, I would say.

Anita Brick: One of the questions that came up with an alum. I think it goes along with what we've been talking about. Confidence, as another layer, this alum added, was authenticity. “Hi Caroline, I know you speak a lot about how important it is to be authentic. And yet when I am in a meeting, I really do believe that our leadership team at the company expects more data than heart. What advice would you have for me to be more of a persuasive communicator under these circumstances?”

Caroline Goyder: That's a good question. And it's, you know, it's real, isn't it? That sounds to me like a question from someone for whom empathy and being liked is really important. Now, what we know is that people who are good at empathy within a business are really good leaders. They are essential now more than ever. Yet sometimes those leaders will ask me a question like this. And what I say is authenticity doesn't mean that you are always exactly the same everywhere, in the sense that flexing to meet the needs of a different audience. And where an audience is high data with that audience, go in and think, it doesn't matter if they like me or not. And have the data, the key figures at your fingertips and land the core message in three minutes and then ask for questions. And they will love you.

Because what I hear from very senior execs when they are presented to is I'm flooded with information. Just give me the headlines. I've had eight meetings today. Everybody will want to give me too much detail. I can't handle it. With those audiences, if you can really just hit the key numbers and land it in a really credible, it doesn't matter if you like me or not way, that is what will make them respond to you. And that's where the confidence comes because you know you can handle them.

Anita Brick: I love that because sometimes I think what people forget when they're in conversation and they're presenting and so on. Because the stakes are high, they forget the other person or the other people are human beings.

Caroline Goyder: Exactly.

Anita Brick: And when we treat people like conduits for us to get what we want and forget that they're human beings, I find that things really break down.

Caroline Goyder: Yeah, exactly. And I think there's another layer to that, which is that meetings don't always just happen in the meeting, do they? You know, a really elegant thing to do is to have a kind of subtle pre-meeting. If you're able to get to those leaders, even in the corridor, when we still have corridors, even if it's a quick call, perhaps it's a call with one of their team, you know, what is he or she looking for? Is there anything I should focus on? Where would you like me to focus in this meeting? Then you start from a position of real strength. So I'm absolutely with you that the more we can really step into the audience's shoes and start where they are, the more likely we are to have success and the more likely we are to feel confident next time.

Anita Brick: What's interesting, and there is another alum, she said: “I take questions very seriously in small and large meetings. That said, how can I build skills to respond rather than react? In other words, to be confident, not defensive? I really appreciate your advice.”

Caroline Goyder: It can be hard contact because we often feel very protective of our work. There's a moment where you can feel that your body wants to react, lash out, and be defensive, and there's something about just catching that and telling your system that it's safe and stepping back from the personal. And as you've said, Anita, seeing that person's perspective, where are they coming from? What's their perspective on this? And if there's a bigger picture, if you were looking down on this room from a distance, what advice would you give yourself? Center yourself, take it on board, and deal with what you do about it later?

Anita Brick: Yeah, I think that is easier said than done, but I like that perspective and maybe it is an experimentation, a series of experiments where we do those things in lower-risk situations so that we're better able to leap into it when there's more at stake.

Caroline Goyder: Absolutely. And I think in terms of the strategy to practice that will help you with that, because obviously in a meeting you need to have answers. There’s that very elegant thing that you see people do of asking questions to a question. So if someone says, I'm really worried about the numbers in Q4, you might sa,: “the numbers in Q4?” and see what they come back with because it gives you space and it also honors that question. It honors that point.

Anita Brick: It's a very good point.

Now, one thing shifting gears just a little bit, we all talk about this, the impact of devices. You talk a lot about it in the book. It's not an either/or, but it does have an impact. And there was a question from an alum, said: “In your book, you talk about the negative impact our devices have on our confidence and on our communication. I am stuck on how to balance my need to be informed with the downside of checking my device before or even during a meeting. Your advice is welcome and thank you.”

Caroline Goyder: Great question. And what I would say to that is not all meetings are created equal. There are some meetings that are so critical that actually, if you thought about it, taking 15 minutes to get yourself calm and centered is a brilliant investment of your time. But you might only have 1 or 2 of those meetings a week. And there are other meetings where you've already got a sense of trust. It's lower stakes. Actually, checking three emails before you go in might be a good thing to do, but I trust that your alums will have a good radar for what are the meetings that really matter. Now, they might not necessarily be senior exact meetings. They might be, you know, meetings with your team where there's something really tricky to resolve or where people are feeling really vulnerable. You have to judge what are the critical meetings I have this week and how can I protect my time before those meetings so that I go in really centered? It's a judgment call.

Anita Brick: So it's not an either/or. It's not never check. It's not always check. It really goes back to us and having judgment about if we find out something that might upset us, maybe it's related to work or not, will it take us off our game and will we be distracted in a meeting where our focus is really essential?

And I mean, because sometimes you don't even have to open up that email or know that text message and you see it from someone and you know it's likely not going to be so great.

Caroline Goyder: The example that really made me think about this was the sales exec, senior sales executive said, I was sitting in my car with my colleague, and we were about to go in and pitch there, a big tech consultancy globally. He said to me, don't check your phone. We've really got to focus. And he said, I always ignore him and the email that came through was a message to say we'd lost out on the last pitch we'd gone up for, and he said that was really serious. You know, that was a real problem for us. And he said, I took that stress into the next meeting and lost that one too.

Anita Brick: Yeah, but you're right. And then, you know, sometimes we have to look at our devices because of something going on in our family where we need to be on top of it and just know that there's risk of looking and reading before something that requires our full attention.

Caroline Goyder: And I think the thing to do with that is name it. You know, and actors will talk about this. An actor will tell you that if you're making a speech and you feel nervous, name the nerves and say, I really care about this. If you've had a really stressful message from a family member, rather than taking unnamed adrenaline and stress, you might just say, you know, forgive me, I've had a message that I just need to deal with, and I'm just going to take two minutes to sort it out and I will be with you. Because then it’s present in the room. People understand what it is and they can deal with it.

Now, if it's your executive committee, you may not be able to do that. And that's the meeting where you just turn the phone off for 15 minutes. I know it's a hard one, isn't it, when it's family. But it would be hard to go in and say that to an exco unless you knew them very well. So you might want to keep the phone off at that point.

Anita Brick: I also think that keeping the phone off and maybe this is a little bit old school, keeping the phone off during a meeting, unless there is an extraordinary reason to keep it on, is also a demonstration of your commitment to the others in the room.

Caroline Goyder: So much. Yeah. It’s polite. I do think it's polite.

Anita Brick: I see people tell me that they keep their phones on during job interviews. Either side, either the interviewer or the interviewee. It just sends a message that there's something more important than where I am right now.

Caroline Goyder: And it's that meta-message to your unconscious about, yeah, how much attention you want to give this thing, I go back–sorry about that. That was a tractor going in, if you can hear that. I go back to, you know, my actor training and you wouldn't walk on stage having just checked your messages because you would know that it would impact your ability to listen. If you're not listening, they're not getting a good feeling from you. We all know the person who, when we sit down to talk them, they listen with their whole heart, and those are the people we remember in life. And it's a dying art. And if you are the person who is present and deeply listens, people will want to work with you. I want to work with those people.

Anita Brick: You're right. It gives us an edge to be present and listening and care.

Caroline Goyder: Yeah, exactly. We need it more than ever. It's more important in business than ever.

Anita Brick: I agree. Do you have time for one more question?

Caroline Goyder: Definitely such great questions. How could I not?

Anita Brick: Okay, good. You've given us a lot of things to think about, and you've also given us a little bit of latitude to think about different situations in different ways, that we're not going to be the same way across the board, which is very comforting to me. At the end, we like to kind of wrap things up a little bit. And so what are three things that you would advise someone to begin doing right now who wants to communicate with confidence and use this to build a successful and enduring career?

Caroline Goyder: The three things are, firstly, to value the instrument. Sounds a little bit thespian, but what I mean by that is, as a leader, your voice and body communicate a huge amount to the people you're talking to. And so learn to be aware of your voice and your body and learn to look after it. Whether that means going to a yoga class or learning to sing or, you know, going for a walk every day. Just honor the system that allows you to communicate. Be aware of it. We are not just talking heads. I thought that for a long time. You know, I learned the error of my ways at drama school.

The second thing I would say, once you've got to know your instrument is noticed in the world where people are tasked or where they, relationship focused. Now we all switch between the two. In corporate life, especially as you go up the tree. Although they're not trees often, they're often a flatter structure these days. But when you're talking to senior leaders, they're often highly task focused. And for many people learning how to switch on that task focus. Let's get this done. It doesn't matter if they like me or not in this meeting, we’ll be friends once we've sorted this, that can really help you. And then the final thing I would say is on the theme that we've really talked about today, if you want to be a good speaker, learn to deeply listen, because good speakers are always, always, always good listeners first. It's as simple as that.

Anita Brick: You make it sound so easy. I know it takes a lot of practice, but I think you've given us some very good places to start. And keeping in mind that this is a practice that we get more comfortable with over time, more confident around and actually better at doing.

Caroline Goyder: It’s my belief that we are all brilliant communicators when we relax and trust ourselves. As you say, when we up the skills, it's like learning to drive.

Anita Brick: It's a very good point. I am so glad that you made this time from your cottage to speak with us today and for writing the book. It's very good. It's very, very practical in so many different ways. Your perspective and insight is really invaluable. So thank you, Caroline for spending time with us today.

Caroline Goyder: My total pleasure, Anita.

Anita Brick: Thank you again.

Caroline Goyder: Thank you. Great pleasure.

Anita Brick: Caroline has a lot of interesting things on her site, and I'm going to spell her site because I want to make sure you have it correctly. But it is www.carolinegoyder.com. Find a lot of really interesting things there. Caroline, thank you again.

Caroline Goyder: I've really enjoyed it. Thank you for having me.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.