‘Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.’
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

It’s not fair but it is true; people equate confidence with competence, and lack of confidence with lack of competence. If you seem confident in what you say, people will assume that you know what you are talking about. This means that your power to influence is to a large extent predicated on your ability to communicate with confidence.

Steven Pearce says that his 15 years as a presentation coach has shown him that people have a surprising number of misconceptions when it comes to assessing what defines confident communication. Some think it’s all to do with the volume of your voice. Others equate confident communication with the elusive concept of ‘charisma’ .

Confident communication really comes down to clarity. You need to get your message across in plain, simple language entirely free from hesitations and digressions that habitually undermine what we want to say. We need to speak clean. This doesn’t just mean we cut out the expletives, although that would be a good start. It’s more that we work hard to cut out all the noise in our interpersonal communication that often obscures the signal.

When filming people in training sessions, and they watch themselves on-screen during the playback , a common reaction is the surprise: ‘I didn’t know I waffled so much…’ ‘I had no idea that I said “um” all the time…’ ‘Why am I looking down at my notes?’

We so often sabotage ourselves when we cloud our message with all this distracting behavior. The effect is magnified in phone conversations when, without the help of body language to provide additional context, clarity is at even more of a premium.

Self-awareness is the first part of the solution. Watch some film of yourself presenting. Record a phone conversation and once you are aware of your verbal tics, aim to eliminate them and make your communication as crystal clear as possible.

Make your pauses inaudible

Picture the scene. You are in an important meeting. All the key players are assembled around the table. Everyone is invited to introduce themselves and to give their initial impression about the document under discussion. Other people give their finely tuned thoughts, then all eyes are on you. What comes out of your mouth?

‘Um … err … well, it’s err …’ With those five sounds, your ability to influence the meeting dissipates.

It’s perfectly normal, of course, to hesitate sometimes, and be less than fluent. My theory is that the ‘um’ is your brain working in an audible pause – a microsecond of thinking time – while it orders its thoughts. There is no doubt, though, that excessive umming and erring will undermine your impact and therefore your ability to influence.

Replace the audible pause with an inaudible one – just pause. Gather your thoughts in silence. This is easier said than done and it requires real discipline. It may be worth memorizing the first line of calls or presentations – even the way you introduce yourself – just to avoid that anticlimactic opener, ‘Um … err …’

Understand that less is more

No one ever walked away from a presentation saying, ‘That was way too short – I wanted to use up far more of my time.’

Give people a platform and they often don’t know when to stop. So you need to learn to say more with fewer words. Cut out the multiple questions, the unconscious repetitions and the irrelevant comparison.

We mistakenly assume that expertise is best demonstrated through volume. We think that, unless we show, in mind-numbing detail exactly how much we know, we will be exposed as frauds. Nothing is further than the truth: The great influencers are very rarely windbags. They understand that other people’s times is as precious as their own, can distinguish between ‘must knows’ and ‘nice-to-knows’, and are ruthless editors of their own material. They get to the point and quickly.

Use fewer words; talk about fewer digressions. If people want to know more, they’ll ask.

Don’t undermine your message

Our intention is entirely reasonable : we want to be polite and not come across as arrogant. The trouble is that, all too often, in doing so we undermine the gravity of our message.

Using qualifiers as ‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’, ‘possibly’ in your speech are evidence of a lack of confidence and they invite contradiction or opposition. Worst of all is ‘just’.

• ‘I just wanted to make the point that …’
• ‘I just thought it might be an idea to …’

The word implies insecurity and hesitancy, and as such is an invitation not to take the speaker seriously.

We can often unconsciously undermine or case by using weak, redundant words and phrases when it would be more beneficial to be more direct.

Another telltale sign of insecurity is when people begin speaking despite the fact that the others in the room are not listening. A confident speaker would always insist on quiet before proceeding: she has something important to impart, so why would she open her mouth when people are not giving her their full attention?

Putting it all together (TL;DR)

Impact and influence are obviously very closely linked, and it is very difficult to make an impact when everything about our tone, our vocabulary and our demeanor screams out that we don’t even take ourselves seriously.

Sound confident and people will listen. The trouble is that we often get into self-defeating patterns in our communication style where, without realizing it, we are severely restricting our chances of engaging an audience.

This can be rectified: confidence, unlike knowledge or skill or expertise, can be faked. The right body language, the right tone and a pragmatic choice of what to include and what to leave out can create aligned, impactful communication that stands a chance of persuading and influencing the target audience. Eliminate qualifiers like ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe’ from your lexicon. The audience won’t take you seriously if you seem unsure about your right to speak.

• When did you last see or hear yourself present?
• Can you replace any ums or distracting verbal tics with a pause?
• Can you try using shorter sentences and getting to the point more quickly?