You have been asked a question in a meeting, you are about to do the Stew-in-the-barber-need-to-talk-about-foootball-kneejerk-reaction. You don’t have to – you can stop yourself! All you have to do is breathe, find your centre, anchor yourself and see what comes out. To do that you need to know your breath, and experience your voice being grounded. If you can do these 8 exercises regularly it will make you more present to the audience, to yourself and to what you actually want to say.


When children breathe in, they push their bellies out. We were all born breathing right and then, pretty much around the time we became teenagers – around the time we became aware of our bodies and started to feel self-conscious – we started doing it wrong. Whether you ran into your adolescent years as a popular and confident teenager, or reluctantly crawled your way through them, the moment puberty hit we all started slouching. And when we started slouching we stopped connecting with our breathing, which connects to our voices, and our confidence took a big hit. Here is how you breathe in a supported way:

Hold your breath for a fraction of a second and then breathe out for five seconds, allowing all of the air to leave you. Breathe out of your mouth for four seconds. You will feel a little bit like your stomach is a deflating balloon. This is good.

Close your mouth and breathe in through your nose for four seconds. Your stomach will fill up like a balloon. Nobody likes to let their stomach hang out, but it is what singers and swimmers do to fill their lungs with air. It’s what you need to do to launch your voice out of you.

Now you have done this once, do it for 30–60 seconds. Allow yourself to breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds and breathe out for four seconds. You are learning to use a very valuable muscle. The return on your investment will be huge.

Now that you can feel this new sensation of supported breathing, let’s pay more attention to it. When you breathe out, imagine that somebody is pulling a sewing needle through your stomach and out behind you (I know it sounds weird, but I learnt this in drama school and it really works). If it helps, mime that sewing needle. I do this every time and it never lets me down.

As you breathe back in, allow that sewing needle to pull your stomach forward.

Now it’s time to land your breathing in your voice. I don’t know any other way to release the voice for long term success apart from these final three exercises...

Breathe out one more time, breathe in one more time. Then, instead of just breathing out the next time, close your mouth and send a hum out into the room. Make the sound ‘Mmmmmmmm’, keeping the sound at the front of your mouth, just behind your lips.

Now imagine that as you hum, you are sending a spaceship across to the other side of the room. Your hum is the fuel. You have to keep humming and making it a little louder as you run out of breath.

Hum again – and this time, when the spaceship is halfway across the room, open your mouth to continue the mmm into ‘Mmmmy name is …’ and say your name! It will feel very weird the first time, but then it will actually become fun! There is nothing more satisfying than saying your name confidently and loudly.

If you do these ten steps every day, or any day, your body will start to thank you by helping you to speak confidently and stand tall.

This is just the beginning – the foundations of great storytelling – but it is the training that you need. 

Stay tuned for more blogs, or you can join my Confident Communicator Blueprint where I share videos on these skills and many more!