7 Ways to project confidence and win over your audience

Esther Snippe 2 Mar 2020 11 min reads

Project confidence and win over your audience

Charismatic leaders use a range of nonverbal cues that increase their likeability.

From an open, genuine smile and engaged eye contact they emanate warmth and authenticity.

As soon as a speaker walks out on stage, their nonverbal communication tells the audience a lot about them and what to expect from the talk. The audience members will almost instantly evaluate the speaker’s credibility and decide whether or not they are worth listening to based on the confidence and charisma they exude.

By cultivating positive body language, you will not only boost your confidence on stage, but the habits you develop will help you project more charisma off-stage as well.

If you are looking to include more positive body language signals and reduce unwanted, negative signals, check out these 10 tried-and-true body language tips that successful speakers use to project confidence.

1. Have a relaxed body posture

A relaxed body posture is an essential trait of a charismatic speaker.

Being relaxed is a clear sign of self-control and confidence. A speaker who seems tense, anxious, and stressed while speaking will be assumed by the audience not to be confident about their subject, and as a result many audience members may lose confidence in you and lose interest in your talk.

Good standing posture checklist:

Joints stacking on top of one another; with your shoulders over your hips, your hips over your knees, and knees over ankles.
Keep your head aligned directly above the shoulders, neither the front or the back of the neck is shortened. The throat should be visible and unstrained. Your chin is up, away from the chest, and parallel to the floor.
Your thighs and pelvis are both in a neutral position.
Shoulders are relaxed away from your ears. Press your shoulder blades into your back, then widen them and release them down your back. Widen your collarbones. Avoid hunching or rolling your shoulders forward.
Without pushing your lower front ribs forward, lift the top of your breastbone straight and upwards.
Abdominals are held lightly in, not sagging or flexed.
The natural curves of the spine are all present (lumbar, thoracic, cervical). Don’t overextend your spine to try and stand perfectly straight — think about keeping the natural curves in your back and neck. Overextending your spine is not only uncomfortable but can make you seem uptight or nervous.

Good posture projects confidence while helping you project your voice. Practice good posture whenever you are on stage.

2. Stand up straight

Slouching can give the wrong impression. Some people will see it as a sign that you are bored or unengaged, that you are inexperienced, or you are unhappy or discouraged.

When you slouch, you collapse your form. Not only does this restrict your airways, which makes projecting your voice more difficult, but it gives the impression that you are trying to take up less space. This can make you look powerless.

Standing straight conveys confidence. You are not afraid to take up space.

Watch Amy Cuddy’s viral Ted Talk where she shares incredible insights on how posture changes our hormone levels.

A recent study by researchers from Columbia and Harvard Universities showed that body language symbolizing power can subconsciously affect our decision-making. The researchers measured the risk appetite of study subjects in either expansive or slouched poses. Those in the expansive poses felt more powerful and in control, and were 45% more likely to take a risky bet.

Check your posture often, if you notice you are slouching, lightly pull your shoulders back and down, lift your chin up and away from your chest, and tighten your abdominal muscles to pull your back straight.

Imagine yourself standing powerfully and owning your space—it will immediately help you project confidence.

3. Make appropriate gestures

The most effective speakers use their hands at well-timed moments to focus the audience's attention on what is being said. They use gestures to add extra meaning and importance to what is being said.

Gestures can show people you’re competent or they can relay that you feel nervous and uncomfortable.

Your gestures create an important visual picture when on stage, reinforcing your key words and ideas.

When used correctly, they can enhance your message and make you seem confident and relaxed. However, when used unconsciously or incorrectly they can be distracting, or worse, send out the wrong non-verbal message.

Nervous energy can be used positively, but left unchecked it can easily turn into performance anxiety. If you are not mindful of it, this nervous energy will show immediately in your gestures, and will send subconscious messages to your audience.

Three main gestures types to project confidence and convey your message

1. Symbolic

These include words, numbers, position, common regional gestures

A raised hand signals a stop
A thumbs-up shows you agree or like something
Raise three fingers for the number 3
Point to show a position: up, down, left, right

2. Descriptive

These gestures express an idea or movement.

Spread hands apart to show a length
Draw a common shape with hands or a finger
Sway hands to show a flow of movement
Show the formation of an idea by pointing up
Point or move hands to suggest moving forward or backwards

3. Emotional

These gestures suggest feelings, and are used to evoke emotions from your audience

Broadly open hands to express truth or transparency
A clenched fist shows hostility, anger or determination. It could make it seem like you are hiding something.
Clasp hands to show pleading or prayer
Use a pointed finger in an accusatory way
Show shame or embarrassment by covering your face and turning away
Throw your hands up quickly and take a step back to show surprise

When you are creating your talk and going through it in a practice run, think about how you can intentionally use gestures to hit certain points home. Try adding just a few specific gestures at a time, until you get used to using them, so that they look natural.

4. Relax your hands and arms

While using gestures is essential for helping you communicate your message—you probably won’t be gesturing the entire presentation. What you are doing with your hands and arms can communicate many things to the audience non-verbally.

A. Never cross your limbs

Open body language welcomes people in. This is immediately attractive.

Folding your arms, standing with one leg behind the other, sitting with your legs crossed, holding on to one elbow, clasping your hands together either in front or behind your body—all signal that you are closed off, giving the impression you are either blocking others out or protecting yourself from potential threat.

Resist the urge to cross your limbs if you want the audience to see you as open, confident, warm, and charismatic.

But what then to do with your hands? Overthinking this can lead to your hands feeling like lumpy logs hanging from your shoulders. Here are some top tips.

B. Rest your hands by your sides

Think about how you stand naturally.

How do you hold your body when you are standing in your kitchen?

At a cocktail party?

In line at the grocery store?

We pick up a lot of standing habits in our daily life; such as standing with our hands in our pockets, our arms folded, hands on hips, or clasping a smartphone. While this might just be how we stand naturally, sometimes it can send off the wrong signals when on stage.

Standing completely open with your hands at your side might feel awkward, especially at first, but from your audience’s perspective, you look confident.

Place your hands by your sides. Keep your elbows loose, with a microbend. Your hands, wrists and shoulders relaxed.

This will help you keep your gestures and body language intuitive. When you lock your limbs, it will make you appear stiff, and natural movements will be more stunted.

Practice standing like this when you are not on stage. The more you practice off stage, the more natural it will feel when you are presenting.

C. Use power gestures

Holding an open palm outward towards the audience significantly increases the possibility that your audience will follow your lead and lean into your message.

In his insightful TEDx Talk, professor of psychology Alan Pease explains how you can immediately increase your power of influence by adopting very specific gestures.

From his TEDx Talk “Body Language: The Power Is in the Palm of Your Hands”

“The thing about body language, it’s an outward reflection of your emotional condition. All body language shows is how you’re feeling. Whatever attitude or emotion you’re feeling is likely to be reflected in gesture, movement, or posture.

Now the reverse is true as well. If you intentionally take certain positions or postures, you’ll start to feel the emotions that go with it.”

— Alan Pease, Professor of Psychology, “Body Language: The Power Is in the Palm of Your Hands”

Our hands can help us make connections with others.

When your hands and your words move in flawless formation, tying together your presence with your ideas, you will exude confidence and your audience will have an easier time following your talk.

5. Keep your jaw mobile

To come across as a confident speaker, you will need to speak with clarity and precision, and this is only possible by keeping your jaw open and mobile.

When stressed or anxious, we tend to limit the movement of the jaw muscles and clench our jaws tighter.

Keeping your jaw relaxed will help you pronounce words with more precision, and help you project your voice.

Moments before getting on stage, try relaxing your jaw by stretching it out. Below is an exercise from Dom Barnard, co-founder of VirtualSpeech that you can try before your next talk.

Exercise for jaw release

Reduces tension in the mouth and jaw area during speaking:

Place your palms on the sides of your face and slowly massage the jaw and cheek muscles with small, slow circular motions
Continue to massage while lowering and raising your jaw
Add the sound – “mamamama” with a very light lip contact for the “m”
Change to “wawawawa” with very light lip, rounded for a slightly distorted “w”

6. Stay bright and energetic

Charisma and energy are intrinsically tied together—charismatic people usually have a bright, energetic quality to them.

Enthusiasm, defined as eager enjoyment and active interest, is an audience's most desired trait in a speaker. Unsurprisingly, a boring, dry, delivery — evidenced by a low monotone voice, dull facial expressions, and overall lethargy — is their most disliked trait.

Your on stage energy should be a natural thing, flowing from your authentic enthusiasm for your topic and for sharing ideas.

Overdoing it, or faking it, usually backfires on novice speakers. They come off sounding more like highschool pep squad leaders than confident, capable experts. This over-the-top energy can overwhelm or irritate audiences.

Instead, generate bright, warm energy from within. Focus yourself both mentally and emotionally. Spend a few moments before getting on stage centering yourself and getting in the zone. This will help you balance your energy and engage your audience throughout your talk.

Remember, if you’re mentally checked out, your audience will follow suite.

7. Go back to your message

Overthinking your body language can do as much damage as good. Speakers who look too posed, with their movements mechanically perfected, can come off as inauthentic or disingenuous.

While it can help to be aware of your body language and work towards using postures and gestures to relay confidence, don’t overintellectualize it. You need to allow your natural charisma to shine through.

The best way to align your verbal and nonverbal communication is by focusing on the outcome of your message. What are you offering to the audience? What do you want to be the result of your talk? Focus on this.

Stand up straight, pull your shoulders back and keep your chin up: assuming this physical posture will naturally increase your confidence. Focus on the positive outcomes and this will help you send out nonverbal warmth and likeability cues.