Slow Your Pace

Nerves speed you up. The faster you talk, the more anxious you sound — and the less you can think. The counterintuitive fix is to slow down on purpose.

Use the deliberate pause: finish a sentence, stop, breathe once, then go on. Silence feels endless from the inside but reads as confidence from the outside. A speaker who pauses sounds like someone in control of the room — because pacing, not speed, is what authority sounds like.