In this article, discover how self-confidence can enable leaders to connect more deeply, engage effectively, and deliver memorable messages that audiences will remember. We explore techniques like audience-centered preparation (FAQ Method), emotional resonance through SCREEN VOICE®, and the transformative shift from “proving” to “facilitating” (Leadership by Empathy). Learn how confident, empathetic communication can elevate your influence and create lasting impact.
While writing this article in English, I use two words quite frequently: TRUST and CONFIDENCE. However, there is a great distinction needed as in French one word convenes for both TRUST and CONFIDENCE: “CONFIANCE”. TRUST and CONFIDENCE are distinct in nature and application
Trust
TRUST is interpersonal, built on belief in another’s reliability, integrity, and intentions. It is the faith in others’ reliability. It develops over time through consistent behavior and shared experiences. For instance, trust in a colleague arises from their dependability and honesty.
Confidence
CONFIDENCE is self-focused, reflecting belief in one’s own abilities. It stems from self-assessment, practice, or past successes. It reflects belief in personal competence. For example, confidence in completing a task grows from similar prior achievements.
Trust develops through consistent interactions, while confidence grows from personal experience and achievements. And SELF-CONFIDENCE influences the TRUST others can have in you.
Booster la confiance : La clé de voûte d’une communication orale efficace et du LEADERSHIP
For over three decades, I have worked with managers across diverse industries, from small companies to major international corporations, assisting them in refining their oral communication, sales, and technical presentation skills worldwide. While coaching thousands of individuals, I identified a common denominator that consistently underlies their communication challenges, a fundamental element that must be addressed to unlock their full potential.
This element is confidence, a foundational trait that profoundly impacts not only an individual’s oratory abilities but also their self-perception and credibility as leaders.
Confidence, at its core, is the keystone of all impactful oral communication. Every decision a leader makes requires it, and every effort to influence others depends upon it. When doubt starts to appear, it undermines even the most well-prepared message; doubt weakens the communicator’s ability to persuade and diminishes the likelihood of a successful interaction. A lack of self-assurance can derail leaders, presenters, and influencers, unmistakably surfacing in their voice, tone, and posture. Effective oral communication extends far beyond reading slides aloud or reciting a script—it requires authenticity and confidence that resonates with the audience.)
Without confidence, even technically proficient communicators struggle to gain traction and inspire action in their audiences.
When confidence falters, even highly knowledgeable speakers may struggle to connect with their audience and motivate them to act. Audiences, colleagues, and stakeholders alike can sense when confidence is absent, and they quickly lose interest.
To address this persistent issue, I propose an approach grounded in what I have observed to be a highly effective remedy: work on your oral communication and public speaking skills. Through continuing efforts to enhance speaking skills, I believe that the development of self-confidence can be nurtured and developed as a tangible, learnable skill, and by doing so, individuals can begin to reclaim their communicative power. By mastering public speaking, whether it is in front a few people or a large audience, leaders can influence, stand out and be remembered. Speaking in front of a public, however, is often where self-confidence was often lost as a child or young adult.
Voicing an opinion in front of peers can evoke fear of judgment, ridicule, or criticism, which can cause long-lasting damage to one’s confidence. Addressing and reversing these effects is vital in developing confident managers, engineers and sales staff who need to influence others while contributing meaningfully to their organizations.
So, why do so few individuals feel genuinely confident when presenting their ideas, innovations, products, or services? And more critically, once it is lost, why does it prove so challenging to regain, and what can we do about it?
Here are 4 quick wins to help reverse the trend and start boosting self-confidence:
Knowledge and Communication: Understand WHY it is NOT school anymore!
For many, the roots of oral communication anxiety trace back to school. Here, students typically experience public speaking in a structured, evaluative setting. They deliver content from their “brain,” aiming to prove their knowledge. Judgment looms in the form of grades and teacher evaluations, often reinforcing the notion that the primary purpose of public speaking is to demonstrate correctness.
Audiences in a professional setting are not the same as in a scholastic setting. Their goals are fundamentally different; professionals seek knowledge from a speaker that will help them resolve issues, whereby scholastic audiences of juries or teachers seek to validate whether the knowledge they are listening to is correct or incorrect.
The first step is to get professionals to admit this fundamental discrepancy and to discard the past inferior role or proving knowledge and endorse the role of demonstrating how that knowledge is useful for their audience.
The challenge then is to guide professionals away from a scholastic, approval-seeking approach to an authentic, audience-centered communication style. This shift is difficult, as it requires not only self-awareness but also the reestablishment of self-confidence. Self-confidence can empower speakers to break free from the “scholastic syndrome,” transforming public speaking from a process of demonstrating knowledge to one of forming a connection, and truly enjoying the human emotions that we all share. This transformation develops effective engagement, genuine influence, and a deep sense of intellectual and emotional fulfillment in both the speaker and the audience.
However, at first glance, many may feel that by using emotions, they are pretending, or “faking it”; that is “seems like acting” and as such they may feel foolish, and even feel “like an imposter”. Dr Amy Cuddy from her research on “Power Posing” and her well know TED Talk “How your body language influences yourself” gives simple tips on adopting dominant and power poses prior to a stressful situation to allow the body to secrete more testosterone (the power hormone) and less cortisol (the stress hormone). She coined the term “fake it until you make it; fake it until you become it!”
I propose to take this concept of “fake it until you become it” by also addressing the emotions we commonly use in everyday life and applying them to the business world. These emotions are based on the personality styles approach and are what Bob Larcher and I have coined “SCREEN VOICE®”.
RECONNECT with emotions and speak from the HEART not the BRAIN!
By relying solely on logical content (and the inevitable lack thereof), students miss the opportunity to build an emotional connection with their audience. When they can speak “from the heart” and share a genuinely empathic perspective first, communicators open a stronger channel to the “brain,” facilitating a connection on both intellectual and emotional levels. And emotions are the key to memory.
Let’s take a brief look at methodology SCREEN VOICE®:
During the COVID pandemic, Bob Larcher and I rethought how communication has changed, for the worse it seems, due to virtual meetings, and we created our SCREEN VOICE concept to improve screen-to-screen interactions.
The prevalence of virtual meetings since the pandemic has transformed oral communication norms, with screen-to-screen communication requiring a more concise and emotionally engaging approach. In virtual settings where body language is limited, if not inexistent, voice plays an increasingly central role in conveying meaning and establishing connection. Traditional cues like gestures and facial expressions are minimized on small video screens, making non-verbal elements such as vocal tone and rhythm, or paralanguage, essential for impactful communication.
In fact, many virtual meetings are only LISTENED to with the speakers video not used by the audience. Many virtual meetings today resemble that of a poor podcast with illegible slides. And they are BORING…
Prior to the pandemic, body language comprised up to 55% of face-to-face communication impact, supported by vocal dynamics (38%) and content (7%). In screen-to-screen interactions, paralanguage takes precedence, sometimes accounting for 50% or more of communication impact as visual cues disappear. Even if the well-known work of Albert Mehrabian can be misinterpreted, as the figures can be disputed, it is clear that the body language impact that exists Face-to-Face certainly doesn’t exist Screen-to-Screen. Thus, speakers need to harness SCFREEN VOICE® – the intentional use of vocal elements like volume, pitch, speed, and rhythm, to compensate for reduced body language and to create emotional resonance with audiences.
This is not only useful for virtual communication, but also valid for all oral communication today, be it presentations, meetings, negotiations or interviews. It relies on the strategic use of emotional appeals that ensure messages are remembered and positively perceived.
By emphasizing trust, empathy, and clarity, presenters can engage audiences and enhance recall. Conversely, detachment or monotony can detract from message retention and harm the speaker’s reputation. Emotionally aware communication is particularly critical in virtual presentations where establishing a genuine connection relies largely on vocal variation.
SCREEN VOICE® employs distinct vocal “colors” to communicate intention and engage audiences:
Yellow (Inclusive Voice):
Conveys warmth and inclusivity with a friendly tone, suitable for welcoming and creating a positive group dynamic. It can be used to get audiences to “buy-in” an idea.
Green (Empathic Voice):
Shows understanding and support, ideal for building empathy and demonstrating a shared perspective. Often used to demonstrate understanding of “pain points” an audience has.
Blue (Authoritative Voice):
Demonstrates expertise and clarity, suited for delivering facts or evidence-based arguments. To be used to state strong messages with no ambiguity possible.
Red (Urgent Voice):
Delivers urgency and drives action with a direct, assertive tone. Fundament for all change management issues.
Each voice color aligns with specific emotional appeals, enhancing the speaker’s influence and adaptability. Effective communicators can adapt these styles to resonate with diverse audience needs, moving beyond a single dominant voice and strategically switching tones to reinforce key messages and emotional engagement.
SCREEN VOICE® is essential in today’s oral communication landscape. By understanding and mastering vocal variations, presenters can effectively convey emotion, build trust, and inspire action, ensuring their messages are memorable and impactful in any screen-based setting.
For our full articles in English please see “Identifying, Developing and Mastering Screen Voice” and “Upskilling to meet the new web-presentations norm” at https://www.aptpresentations.com/category/article/ and view our webinar in English on Screen-to-Screen Presentations and Leadership Voice https://www.aptpresentations.com/presentations-and-leadership-webinar/.
The Shift from "Proving" to "Facilitating"
As mentioned earlier, one of the most transformative shifts in a speaker’s journey is moving away from the mindset of a student – someone who must constantly prove their knowledge – to that of a facilitator, whose role is to share insights that help the audience. This shift releases the speaker from the constraints of self-doubt and enables them to step into the role of an empathetic leader who can inspire, guide, and provide valuable solutions.
However, the very heart of a student’s anxiety is the fundamental decision of the content to communicate. And the doubt can easily originate from the believe that the audience (teachers) knows more about the subject matter than they do, after all, scholastic judgement is rooted in evaluating “right or wrong”, “correct or incorrect”. Yet, a business audience does not necessarily judge in this manner. They are giving the speaker their valuable time in order to understand if they can tangibly put to use the information in their own professional context.
Basically, searching how this information will HELP them.
If they already know the information, then a different type of judgment will take place, as they do not need to listen to understand something they already know. Faced with this there are only two alternatives:
1) either they politely do not disrupt, and they do something else (i.e. use their smartphones, laptops, or other distractions that allows them not to waste valuable time), or
2) they challenge the speaker – and this case it is a win-lose scenario that should never take place. In both situations, the audience members are experiencing a negative feeling from the speaker because the speaker did not fulfill the role of helping them understand the benefits of using the information.
So, to never be in this position, one must be prepared to select content that the audience does NOT know, but which they NEED to know. When an audience understands that the speaker is delivering NEED-TO-KNOW content, they will always be more attentive.
Apply a Leadership by Empathy and the FAQ Methodology: How to be a facilitator when speaking by preparing differently!
It is well known that audience analysis is the first step towards preparation. However, almost everyone that I have coached in the past never took a really strong look at audience segmentation and the subsequent information needs that each one has. When I began my coaching career, I felt that “audience analysis” was a difficult and vague task that had no recipe. So, I developed my own approach that I call “the Leadership by Empathy and FAQ approach”.
It is basically putting yourself in the position of the intended audience and writing the questions you think they would have, before, during and after your presentation:
The before questions are their expectations while just seeing the title of your intervention and the knowledge they currently possess.
The during questions are if they could interrupt you at each and every slide, or concept and ask a question.
The after questions are the tricky ones that you feel they could ask even if you do not address them in your communication.
By clustering this new database of FAQs into 3-5 chapters, you know have an outline based on what that audience needs to know. This is the beginning of the empathic route to assist an audience with your knowledge to solve their issues (the reason why they are listening to you). It is a PULL approach instead of a PUSH approach and the speaker is now a facilitator of information.
By understanding this new role as a facilitator of USEFUL information, speakers can unlock the self-confidence that may have been previously blocked by fear. Now, they can approach each interaction, whether it’s a business presentation, a formal speech, a roundtable discussion, or even a team meeting, with a sense of purpose and authority. The ability to clearly communicate while remaining focused on the needs of the audience (answers to their FAQs) creates lasting impressions and drives results.
Effective oral communication isn’t merely about delivering facts or information – it’s about building a connection, solving problems, and creating value. This type of communication builds upon stronger relationships, higher employee satisfaction, and greater engagement. Confident speakers are not only better at presenting their ideas, but they also inspire their teams, enhance productivity, and positively influence company culture.
This newfound confidence and clarity are universally applicable across various communication contexts – formal speeches, business presentations, filmed videos, conferences, panel discussions, interviews, or simply managing people more effectively. As professionals gain confidence in their oral communication skills, they not only transform their ability to lead but also enhance their overall career trajectory.
The Transformative Power of Confident Communication: A Universal Skill for Every Situation
With over 30 years of experience in the presentation consulting and coaching field, I’ve seen countless professionals transform their careers through confident oral communication. In their words, “Self-confidence is not just a desirable trait—it’s the foundation of success”.
Many people today need to speak in a foreign language, yet it’s not just about language – of course you must be able to speak it – but it is a question of the organization of the ideas that really counts.
It’s not just about learning how to speak – it’s about shifting your mindset and having fun along the way! When professionals enjoy the process of developing their oral communication skills, they become more engaged, adaptable, and, ultimately, successful.
In summary, self-confidence is a veritable catalyst for effective oral communication and a fundamental trait among successful leaders. Connecting with the audience by understanding their needs firsthand, and by delivering to them the content that answers their questions proactively is a real game changer for everyone to adhere to. Connecting to the heart of each audience member with authentic emotions will allow for audiences to remember content as you influence them to become ambassadors of your messages.
The journey to confident oral communication is not an easy one, as a strong self-reflection and self-viewing on video needs to take place. However, the lessons learned are invaluable as speakers can be liberated from a knowledge driven approach to an empathic proactive assistance method to help others. By investing in self-awareness, enhancing the craft of delivering clear and empathetic messages, speaking from the heart instead of the brain, and embracing the challenge of audience-centric communication, professionals can transform their approach to oral communication and, ultimately, their effectiveness as leaders.
As individuals develop self-confidence, they enhance their ability to engage, influence, and lead with impact, while creating trust with their public.
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