It’s happened to you, hasn’t it? You’re in a meeting, with brilliant ideas floating around your mind, and they don’t come out. Maybe you didn’t say anything at all. Or perhaps you did, and it didn’t come out the way it sounded in your head.
Being able to speak up in meetings, sharing your brilliant ideas is essential to your success.
I want to make this clear straight away. The process of drawing conclusions in your mind is very different from explaining your ideas to others.
When you intake information, your brain quickly processes it using data you’ve acquired during your life. But when you report information to others, they’re working with a different dataset. Their experiences are different from yours. Thus the words you use may not register with them.
So you end up using too many words, (gasp!) too many filler words, and never getting to your point. Or you end up with your mouth glued shut.
Have no fear, my dears; there is a process to speaking up in meetings and conveying information, and I’m here to teach it to you.
How to Speak Up in Meetings
Learn & practice the following techniques.
It’s entirely possible to become one of those crystal clear speakers who have executive presence and are compelling public speakers. Once you learn the techniques (and practice them) you’ll be the one speaking up in meetings, answering difficult questions like a rockstar, and crushing your job interviews.
You’ll be persuading everyone at the meeting to follow along with your ideas and getting people to like you immediately.
Everyone who is this charismatic sort has worked on their skills. They went ahead and learned the techniques and put them into action. Some people may have an easier time than others, but they knew it was necessary for their success.
And the bad news? They’re not telling you they did it! This is a highly competitive world, now much more than ever and they are trying to set themselves apart.
Now is the time to set yourself apart. Learn to speak up in meetings and you’ll do just that.
Speak up in meetings so your brilliant ideas are conveyed and adored.
But we can do it together! Let’s get your brilliant ideas out to your teammates and clients so they clearly understand and love your message.
This isn’t hard but it’s going to take some practice. I’ll list the techniques necessary below and then I’ll further describe how it’s done.
How to Improve Your Speaking Skills
Remember, Warren Buffet says that improving your communication skills is worth 500 thousand dollars throughout your lifetime. So bootstrapping it may not be in your best interest.
If you want to do it yourself with a little assistance, I recommend taking The Voice Spa online video class. It’ll teach you all the important techniques to becoming crystal clear, unafraid, concise, and powerful as a communicator.
It’s me training you in video format. You have lifetime access and we add new material and coursework regularly.
Getting your ideas heard and your CTA followed is well worth a small investment.
That involves practice. Everything you read below–be sure to practice at least 10 minutes every day for about a month.
Warren Buffet says the best investment he ever made was working on his communication skills. He reports that you’ll be worth 50% more if you improve your communication skills!
9 Secret Steps to Influencing Others
Want to be more influential? We all want to communicate our most important messages in a way that encourages others to take action. Whether that action is voting for our candidate or picking up milk from the store, the words we use and how we speak play a huge role in getting the job done.
Speaking up in meetings is hard because meetings are high-stakes situations.
How to Speak Up in Meetings
Here I’ll give you an overview, and following this list will be more specifics. Be sure to click the links for more in-depth instructions.
- Realize that meetings are high-stakes situations. You care about the outcome. You want people to consider you credible and an authority on the topic.
- Know that conveying your message involves a different process than thinking about your thoughts.
- Sit at the back of your chair. This offers your upper body support so that you can be relaxed & breathe.
- Feel confident that your message is valuable.
- Emanate warmth. Look around the room and care about the other participants. You can even look at each person on your computer screen. They’ll feel good that you’ve taken the time to look at each of them.
- Be relaxed. Increase your awareness of where the tension lies in your musculature and get into the habit of eliminating it.
- Use abdominal breathing.
- Speak with pauses. Once you become accustomed to silence, there will be no stopping the influence you’ll have over your colleagues.
- Prepare your messages in advance by recording yourself. After doing this a few times, you’ll be able to speak up in meetings off-the-cuff.
- Smile & make eye contact.
Speaking up in meetings is essential even if your message isn't crystalized.
When it comes to communication skills training the preparation you do has exponential effects. You may only need to prepare what you’re going to say for the next 5 or 6 meetings. You’ll notice each time it gets easier & easier until you don’t have to prepare anymore!
Record yourself roleplaying what you’d like to say in a meeting. You’ll be able to then reword your message until its more impactful.
Even if you discover your ideas aren’t a complete picture, remember that it may just be a puzzle piece that your teammates were looking for.
Meetings are high-stakes. Don't blow it!
There’s a lot riding on the ideas you convey at your meetings.
You can tell your best friend your genius ideas; she thinks your firm is lucky to have you. She says you should be the CEO. But for some reason, you don’t deliver the concept as profoundly when you’re in a meeting. Is it a mystery?
Mystery solved. There was no mystery. Communicating well during informal situations & poorly during high-stakes situations is normal and happens to everyone.
Our bodies go into fight or flight during anxiety-ridden situations, causing our minds to draw a blank, rapid speech, high-pitched voices, shaky voice, the list goes on.
Since your body is in fight-or-flight you are unable to deliver your message as well as when you’re comfortable. You become filled with self-doubt. So I’ll give you the strategies and you’ll need to practice them.
Body language counts even in virtual meetings.
Why we speak differently in high-stakes situations.
You’ll want to have an open body posture and sit at the back of your chair. Keeping your body supported keeps you in control of yourself. An open body posture means don’t cross your arms or legs.
Communication skills go both ways. You’ll want to use what you know on others as they’re speaking. Take a look around you at the meeting and see what your colleagues’ bodies are doing. Are their arms crossed? They may be defensive. Are they sitting against the back of their chair with their head up? They’re feeling confident.
Keep your body relaxed. Make sure your shoulders are down and your arms are resting nicely on your legs or the armrest.
Speak up in meetings because your message is valuable.
You’re good at what you do. You’ve been working on it for a long time. Have you made some mistakes? Yes, but you’ve learned from them.
Your bosses, colleagues, team, and clients need to hear your message. Your input is inestimable. It’s your responsibility to deliver it so people can act on your ideas.
Love Your Audience
Don’t think about yourself. Overlook your fear of being ridiculed or dismissed and focus only on how your ideas will help your audience.
I don’t distinguish between audiences. If you’re in a meeting or on the stage, most of the same rules apply. If you care about what your audience knows and what they need to know, you can remove your fear and anxiety.
When you love your audience, you emanate warmth, and your credibility shoots way up.
Speak From Your Abdomen-Not From Your Throat
Speech is air molecules that vibrate. Your vocal mechanism is a musical instrument.
There’s a ton of misinformation out there that we are supposed to speak from our throats. That’s incorrect. Speaking from your throat keeps you in a state of fight or flight and makes your voice thin & tinny.
You want to use abdominal breathing for speech. This will keep you relaxed and give you an authoritative and influential voice.
An Introduction to Accent Reduction
This brief introduction will get you started on the road to speaking Standard American English.
Speak with Pauses
To be easily understood, we need to provide information in chunks. That’s how people process information most efficiently. Bulleting your speech also stops you from using filler words because you replace your fillers with pauses.
Are you worth the investment of a coach? Contact us if you want us to be your personal guide. We can get it done lickety-split, and you’ll be quickly on your way to successful meetings, resulting in a successful career.
I want to hear from you! Have you got any neat tricks you use to speak up in meetings? Any embarrassing tales of woe during meetings? Share them in the comments section below.
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This has always been a problem for me, Sometimes when I’m in meetings and I want to share something, it doesn’t come out the way it sounded in my head. So your point that the process of thinking my ideas and conveying them being different really struck me. That makes perfect sense! Love your stuff! Thanks for sharing!
Super glad to help, Lars, and thank you for your kind words!
Gratitude, Lars!
It’s funny, I never realized that the higher the stakes of a situation the worse I speak. But it makes perfect sense and it’s true. Don’t know why I didn’t put that together.
I promise myself I’m not going to use filler words or say, “I think” and I end up doing it at meetings. I don’t do it when I’m just chatting with a friend. Big difference.
I remember when I first started my career I was so surprised to find that my ideas weren’t coming out the way I expected them to in meetings. I’d never had any problems speaking. I never told anyone because I thought it was only me. But now I can see I wasn’t alone at all! Now I see the same thing when I report to the board. These techniques make a whole lotta sense 🙂 and I’m going to put them to good use!
Thank you, Ita!
Everyone thinks they’re the only one who isn’t a perfect communicator during high-stakes situations! But it’s the norm. It makes sense that the more you want out of a situation the more fear or stress you’d have. Those are the times you must perform your best!
You just need to put some practice in just as you do for anything you want to be good at. 🙂
This advice is so helpful and realistic. A bit of an eyeopener on how people can feel, and why it’s important as a manager or leader of the meeting to ask questions directly to each person in the meeting, sometimes just to have them participating. It will benefit the outcome, and the general feeling about the meeting afterwards. At least that’s my experience.
Love it!
Reading this has allowed me to see that meetings are definitely high-stakes, however I never actually thought about it as being high-stake situations because everyone I work with come across as so confident in our meetings. So because they seem confident and relaxed, I just thought its not the situation that is high-stakes, its just me that’s the problem. I need to put these techniques into practice so I can be heard!
I cross my arms and sit on the edge of my seat and I can’t stop it! How do I stop that?
Hi Tom,
You can come to me, let me do it with you, of course! 😀
If you’re bootstrapping it, you have to practice keeping your arms open and sitting way back in your chair when you’re not in meetings first. It’s small steps. Once you master that then you can move on to more anxiety-ridden situations.
I went for a meeting before and got rejected and was not able to understand why am I getting rejected, I was very much upset. Then I read your content and it told me regarding the body language as well as confidence and smile and how how much does it affect in a meeting while you pitch your ideas. Great stuff thank you so much.
I’ve always had trouble speaking up in meetings. Sometimes I was unclear even though I knew my content inside and out. I could speak much more eloquently on my work topics with individual colleagues or even at home with my family, but for some reason I wasn’t speaking clearly in meetings. Luckily I found your website and discovered that fight-or-flight impedes my ability to communicate by closing my throat and removing access to my prefrontal cortex. So my words get messed up, I use too many words and talk too fast. No control.
And I love how you say that anything we do we have to learn the techniques and practice them! So I’m trying to put your speaking techniques into practice. I got myself into your calendar for the free consult you offer and I’m excited to hear what you have to say!
I was great at speaking up in meetings. I thought it was a permanent characteristic. Nothing ever came out right. That even happened when I was giving a presentation and at job interviews. But I’ve been following you for a while, I took The Voice Spa (helped tremendously, thank you) and I’ve been reading your articles. They are truly chock full of tremendous advice about all things communication skills. I appreciate your insight & your generosity!
I’m speaking clearly, people really pay attention, give me respect and do what I say!
Great insights! I never thought about it before! i just took it for granted that I couldn’t speak well in meetings. But you’re right, I need to learn how to speak better. And practice it. I always wondered why I could say something in a meeting and people just look at me blankly, then someone else says the same thing and they think it’s a great idea!
Looking forward to implementing your speaking techniques!
Great insights! I found your take on communication skills incredibly practical and insightful. Looking forward to implementing some of these tips!
Speaking in meetings has always been challenging for me. And I can see that it’s slowing down my professional trajectory. I got into your calendar and we’re going to make me an incredible speaker!
As you say: Remember, Warren Buffet says that improving your communication skills is worth 500 thousand dollars throughout your lifetime. So bootstrapping it may not be in your best interest.
🙂
I wonder why they don’t train us to speak in meetings at work. You make some really great points and speaking in meetings is definitely more challenging than speaking with one’s friends. For one thing we don’t want to waste peoples times and some people tend to be rather wordy. The amount of filler words we have to listen to is crazy, so it’s hard to even process what people are saying. I’m not saying I’m better–I’m not. I realize the difference between me speaking in meetings vs me when I’m comfortable. I definitly use too many words and don’t get to the point way more in meetings.
i definitely love this website, keep on it
I avoid speaking in meetings as much as I can. I thought there was something wrong with me, but I now understand it’s normal to find speaking in meetings to be challenging. It’s not normal to be good at it unless you’ve learned how and practiced.
Thanks so much for this article. Usually when I speak in meetings someone else will say the same thing after me and everyone will think it’s a great idea! Then I can see my idea is a good one but i didn’t make myself clear when I said it. I’m going to try these speaking techniques. Thanks!
Really insightful. I love the part about someone else saying the same thing you just did and getting the credit! That happens to me all the time! Your techniques make a lot of sense. I also like how you put your speaking life into categories. It makes sense to work on your speech that way. It’s science! How do I get into your calendar?
I’ve had trouble speaking in meetings forever and I finally realize I’m not alone or impaired. Thank you! You’ve explained that speaking well is something that needs to be learned and practiced. I love your articles regarding communication and I want to sign up with you for one-on-one sessions. How do I do that?