Realise your own worth – this is possibly the most important point.

Before any serious meeting, doing a the power pose will boost your confidence (check out this great Ted Talk by Amy Cuddyfor the science behind this)

Take a deep breath – banish the butterflies and racing heartbeat by consciously taking a couple of slow deep breaths as you are about to speak.

Saying the words out loud to yourself or a trusted friend will definitely help when you come to do it for real

Practice beforehand – if you know you want to say something at a particular meeting or pitch to a particular audience (even if its an informal corridor conversation), do yourself a favour and rehearse beforehand.

And don’t forget the soft data – stories and anecdotes are just as valid as survey results and spreadsheets If you have researched your position, you’ll feel instantly more confident in being able to talk about it.

Do your homework – good ideas deserve to be supported by facts and evidence.

But deciding to say what I wanted to even if I got it wrong sometimes definitely helped me gain confidence. It didn’t always work and I’m sure everyone knows that being talked over, shouted down or disagreed with can sting. Essentially, I felt the fear and did it anyway.

What changed? Well in the end I just got frustrated with seeing other people being heard in a way I really wanted to be.

Looking back, I suspect the reality was that a good proportion of my ideas would have been received well if I’d just had the courage to speak up. Feeling uncertain about the reaction I would get stopped me making the contribution that I should have and held me back in my career. In the early days of my own career I know that I had plenty of ideas and opinions (some might say too many!) but I typically didn’t speak in meetings or didn’t volunteer my opinion because I feared that other people would judge me. Well, here we are at the end of this short series and I’ve been thinking about how we speak up and get our voices heard - making our point at meetings, pitching ideas, telling our stories.Īs with everything else that we’ve already talked about there are plenty of reasons that we stay silent and, in my experience, these usually come back to that old chestnut lack of confidence.

I can hear your voice judge