Non-Verbal Gravitas: Aligning Body, Breath, and Voice for High-Stakes Meetings

When under stress, we all revert back to the level of our training. Your body and your voice are speaking louder than your words. And today’s episode is going to dig into how you can choose to have gravitas and executive presence non-verbally, sometimes even if you don’t quite feel it or believe in it within yourself.

here to talk about one of my favorite topics, non-verbal communication. Welcome back to the She Speaks to Inspire podcast. I’m your host, Julia Kraft, the founder of Speak to Inspire Coaching.

What I learned over many years and through my theater degree, I studied acting in college, is that the human non-verbal communication communicates way louder than our words. In fact, there’s been some amazing studies that show this. For example, the Dr. Fox study. Have you heard of it? Where they brought in this big audience and two different speakers. The first speaker is an expert, a doctor that had been doing what he does for years, considered an expert in his field. And the second speaker is an actor that they hired to read a few articles of the real doctor and present on what he knew, which of course was much less. But what do you think was different about how they presented to that audience? Yeah, the real doctor stood behind a podium, more or less read his script off of a page. Very academic, depth of knowledge, of course, but flat. The actor who spoke, moved around the stage, made eye contact, and connected with the audience. Lots of dynamics and energy in the voice. The content might not have been so rich or deep, but the delivery was much more engaging. Afterward, the audience was given a survey. Well, who do you like more? Who do you trust more? Who do you think is more knowledgeable? And who do you think overall they chose? And what was it about the speaker that they were responding to? If you guessed the actor, then you’re totally right. That audience chose the actor over the real doctor because what they were responding to in that actor was 58%

non-verbal communication physically, 35% non-verbal communication vocally, what they could hear. And then it was just 7% of what they were responding to in the speakers was actual verbal words. To add that up, that means 93% of what this audience was responding to was the nonverbal communication physically and vocally from this. And just 7% was the actual words that they chose to say.

Bringing this back to you and your speaking and how you can have more gravitas and executive presence when you come into a room. If you’re only focusing on what you’re going to say, what words you choose to put on which slide, then you’re missing a huge piece of what it takes to be an effective communicator, to be seen as a leader, and to actually influence and inspire people. Let’s break down today how to align your body, your breath, and your voice in the next high stakes meeting that you go in. With the thousands of professionals that I’ve worked with over the last 10 or so years, what I’ve seen is that there’s two reasons why my clients are lacking executive presence. And they might have gotten feedback that they need to improve their executive presence or leadership presence. These are the two reasons. Number one, there’s low self-awareness in the speaker of what they’re actually doing with their body and their voice when they’re expressing. It’s just out of their awareness. It’s unconscious, subconscious, and generally that’s not a personality flaw. That’s simply because of a lack of training in best practices or in muscle memory around speaking skills and therefore a lack of mentorship. And the second reason why I see professionals don’t have the executive presence they want to have is simply because of nerves taking over their non-communication. The nerves around speaking, the anxiety around speaking, performance anxiety, even social anxiety colors the way that you show up completely out of your control, right? Like if you could choose not to be nervous, you would. For example, if your cheeks flush, that’s an example of a non-verbal cue to your audience that yeah, you’d prefer not to give off, but reduces that appearance of total confidence and gravitas and comfort in the leadership role. Whether you’re just not aware of what your body’s doing or nerves are hijacking your ability to

make good choices, your body and your voice are speaking louder than your words. And today’s episode is going to dig into how you can choose to have gravitas and executive presence non-verbally sometimes even if you don’t quite feel it or believe in it within yourself yet. Now the reason why your body is speaking louder than your words is because we are primal creatures fundamentally. There’s no way around it. No matter how much we evolve as a society and no matter how much technology that we have, our bodies will still be scanning the external world for safety. With that in mind, you’ve probably been looking for safety within yourself as a speaker in other ways, which is what I talk about in a lot of the episodes on this podcast. Perhaps you’ve been spending a lot of time on your scripts as a way to make yourself feel, but that means that you’re probably neglecting the physical and vocal fitness that would make a difference for you to show up with that of gravitas and executive presence. I call this your speaker’s warm-up routine that there’s things that you do regularly to support the non-verbal and vocal expression of yourself as confident, certain as a leader. When under stress, we all revert back to the level of our training. And I use that word training loosely. Like if your habit is to wake up and rush out the door and you’re working on building a new habit, you’re trying to wake up earlier and build in some meditation in the morning, have a good breakfast, but that new habit isn’t quite a muscle memory yet. You haven’t trained in it for long enough to get it in your bones. Then let’s say you get sick, you have a cold or a huge project lands on your desk, you have a fight with your partner or all of those things at once. So, you’re under stress, you’re under pressure, and you have a presentation that day. You don’t sleep well the night before. And yeah, that morning you rush out the door without the meditation, without the breakfast, without that grounding in the morning that you said to yourself that you wanted to do under stress. All revert back to the level of our training or habit. That’s why building habits and internalized muscle memory is so important for improving yourself as a speaker. High stakes communications are always going to be a moment of slightly heightened stress, maybe extremely heightened stress. I can’t change that for you. These are extraordinary moments of our days or of our weeks or of our years. It’s not every day you speak to a 10,000 people most likely, right? That’s a rare person that speaks to 10,000 people every day.

Your non-verbal communication should be congruent with your message as opposed to being divergent from your message as if it’s working against it. I call this static. It’s like my non-verbal communication is static on top of my message. Let me do it with my voice now. It’s like my non-verbal communication is uh you know like sort of staticky on top of my message and so um what it um yeah it just sort of like you know makes it um harder to to hear. Maybe you get the sense of what I’m talking about now. Static static on top of the message as opposed to a clear signal exactly what you mean and what you want people to take away. Let’s get into some suggestions for what you can do about this to have more non-verbal gravitas. Well, first of all, I just want to say from the get-go, get mentorship because this is something that you probably won’t be able to see on your own and probably won’t know what to do better on your own. So, get mentorship. If you are interested in talking with me, go to speaktoinspire.com, schedule a consultation. However, let’s talk about some best practices. We’re going to talk about non-verbal best practices and we’re going to talk about examples of non-verbal communication training exercises that can help you build the muscle memory. Let’s say in your presentation you’re talking about we’re going to work together. We’re going to work collaboratively. If you’re listening to this podcast, you won’t be able to see my body, but if you’re on YouTube, you get the video. I might do a gesture something like this. It’s important that we work together. My hands are coming together in front of me, interlacing my fingers. It’s important that we work together collaboratively. I just cupped my fingers together to show collaboratively. There’s no one way to do this with your hands, but this is my version, right? We’re going to work collaboratively as opposed to what if my hands just We’re going to work collaboratively and my hands are apart just, you know, whatever. They’re moving with the words, but they’re not really saying. So, we’re going to work together collaboratively. My gestures are congruent with my message. Similarly, let’s say you’re presenting about a data point. We’re expecting a 25% increase this quarter in blah blah blah. Do you think that data point is good or bad? Is it good news or we should be excited about it or is it bad news? Should we be worried about it? Your non-verbal communication tells that story. I’ll give you two versions. 25%. We’re expecting a 25% increase this quarter versus we’re expecting a 25% increase this quarter. Which one was communicating this is good and which one was communicating this was bad? I’m sure you got it. I’m sure you could hear it even if you didn’t see my body or my facial expression. However, when my voice starts communicating that tonality, yes, my body and my facial expression follow along. They support the narrative. That’s what we want. Congruence between the message and the non-verbal expression of the message so that there’s no confusion on what I want you to get. Last example of a best practice for non-verbal communication. Gravitas. I want to sound more certain. I want to sound more confident. I want to come across like a confident leader. Okay. If that’s what you want, well then I suggest a simple thing to do with your intonation. At the end of your sentence, when you want to state a point, share your perspective, go down with your intonation at the end of the sentence. I’ll give you an example. Going forward, I believe that we need to do less of XYZ. You hear? Versus going forward, I think we need to do less of XYZ. Do you hear the difference? Which one sounds more certain? Definitely the first one.

Right. The intonation going down at the end of the sentence. It’s easier said than done when you start to become aware of this non-verbal communication habit. It’s a habit. You might have trouble breaking it. And I have some ways that I work with people in coaching to like get it in their bones of what it feels like to be certain. It’s both an inner confidence journey to believe in yourself, but it can also just be a simple skill to do it with your voice before you even believe in yourself fully. That’s why I love non-verbal communication training because it helps you typically get where you want to go. Lastly, let’s talk about non-verbal communication training exercises that can help build this. Number one, a basic one that is just so important for everybody. Diaphragmatic breathing for nervous system regulation that you breathe deep on to calm yourself to ground yourself before, during, and after. Number two, if you want to work on your voice, the sound of your voice, the range, the volume of your voice, try doing vocal slides as training before presentations, vocal slides that go up your range and down your range, and you’ll start to be more comfortable in your voice. Sort of like being more comfortable in your skin. Bringing our attention to the body. A last training exercise could be body shakes that you shake out from the shoulders, shimmy shake your whole body to release tension, to release any rigidity and to release that heady sense of pre presentations. Like if you’re up in your head and it’s all about the information, shake it out and get back into your body. Get back into the present moment to connect with people. Ultimately, all of this work I’m talking about today for non-verbal gravitas and executive presence is about taking a message, an idea, a perspective that you have and making it accessible to your audience as an inspiring, influential, and persuasive message. This happens through how you deliver that message, not necessarily through changing the message. For more training and tips around your public speaking and your non-verbal communication, head over to speaktoinspire.com. Listen to more of the She Speaks to Inspire podcast. And for VIP personalized coaching, schedule a consultation with me at speaktoinspire.com.