Thirteen things people tell me, and the five problems usually behind them.

You can see it happening: one person checks their phone, another starts answering an email, and by the time you get to the important part they have lost the thread.

Most of the time what they are hearing is hurry. When someone sounds rushed, people stop following what they are saying and start noticing the rush instead.

Forcing yourself to slow down does not work, because the moment the pressure rises you forget. What works is changing where you breathe from. We practise it standing up, with me playing an audience that drifts off, until you stop rushing without having to think about it.

You make your recommendation, everyone nods, and then they turn to your boss to ask what he thinks. Or a colleague says the same thing ten minutes later, a little louder, and it becomes his idea.

The content was fine. The problem is usually in how you end your sentences: the voice goes up at the end, and what was meant as a recommendation sounds like a question.

We work on the recommendation you actually have to make this month and repeat it, with me pushing back, until it sounds like something you have decided rather than something you are asking for.

You have put hours into it, you know the numbers better than anyone at the table, and you walk out feeling you were the best prepared person in the room and the least convincing.

You prepared it calmly at your desk. In the meeting, adrenaline changes your breathing and, with it, your voice. That is why it comes out perfectly afterwards in the corridor.

So we do not rehearse sitting down. We rehearse standing up, with interruptions, against the clock, and with me playing the toughest person on the committee.

It is a comment that holds back a lot of promotions, and it almost never comes with an explanation. Your numbers are fine, your work is fine, and the role goes to someone who came across as more senior.

Gravitas has little to do with personality. It depends mostly on your pauses and on how settled your voice sounds. Someone who can stay quiet for a couple of seconds without getting nervous comes across with far more authority.

Both can be trained. We find where your voice has body, and we practise holding a silence in front of me until it stops feeling uncomfortable.

You are the most senior person in the meeting and the questions still go to someone else. Or the client asks when the partner is going to join. It is an awkward feeling, and very few people talk about it.

When you are nervous your voice goes up and stays up, and that sounds like someone on edge. It has nothing to do with your age or your accent.

Forcing a deeper voice sounds fake almost immediately. Instead we find your natural pitch and train it so that it is also the voice that comes out when you are under pressure.

You are halfway through a point, someone talks over you and the conversation moves on. Your point is lost, and everyone has seen that you can be cut off.

If you speak without pausing, nobody has any reason to wait for you to finish, so they come in whenever they like. And when you try to get back in, you do it faster and louder, which only makes it clearer that you had lost the floor.

There is really only one way to train this: I interrupt you again and again until your natural reaction is to pause for a second and carry on at the same pitch.

One to one, you are convincing. Put eight people around a table and you become someone else: louder, flatter and easier to ignore. People who only know you from meetings have not seen you at your best.

More people feels like more distance, so you start pushing from the throat. You sound louder but less interesting, and what people pick up is strain.

An opera singer fills an 1,800-seat theatre without a microphone and without shouting. It works the same way in a boardroom, and you learn it by practising in front of people, not at home.

You know the subject better than anyone in the room and still end up sounding like the least certain person there. Every caveat you add gives people a small reason to doubt you, and the committee takes it.

You keep talking because stopping feels risky. Hardly anyone connects this with breathing, but it is almost always related to it.

We work with a real recommendation of yours: you say it, you stop, and you hold the silence while I look at you without saying anything. It is uncomfortable the first few times, and then it isn’t.

By Thursday your voice is tired, and by the afternoon you are nursing it instead of using it. And the most important meeting of the week catches you at your worst.

You are doing the work with your throat instead of your body. It is very common among lawyers and anyone who spends the day talking, and most people assume it is normal. It isn’t.

It is also the quickest thing to fix. Many people feel the difference in the first session, because it is a physical adjustment.

A large part of the week now happens on a screen, and on a screen it is very easy to disappear: cameras off, people answering emails, and your proposal turns into background noise.

The microphone and the camera flatten everything, so your voice has to work harder than it would in person. Online, most people do the opposite.

We rehearse on camera, exactly as people will see and hear you, until your voice makes up for what the microphone takes away.

In your own language you are quick, persuasive, even funny. In English you become cautious, and you can tell people are taking you less seriously. You are paid for your judgement, and you are being judged on your English.

When you speak a second language your voice goes up, you speed up, and all your attention goes on finding the words, so there is nothing left for how you say them. People then read that as doubt, when it isn’t.

This is not about your accent, and I do not do accent reduction. I am Spanish and I work in English in London, so I have been through this myself. What we work on is making sure you have the same authority in English that you already have in your own language.

It happens at the worst possible moment: the chair’s question, the key figure, the close. Everyone notices, and from then on you are thinking about your voice rather than what you are saying.

People put it down to nerves. With most of the people I work with it happens the other way round: the voice shakes first, you hear it, and then the nerves kick in. That loop is what makes it worse.

You break it by practising under pressure, not with relaxation exercises. Once your body stops surprising you, the nerves settle down on their own.

You notice it while it is happening: you hear yourself speeding up, you cannot slow down, and before you have finished your first point the room has decided you are not in control.

Being told to slow down lasts about thirty seconds in a real meeting. The speed is usually a symptom: you are running out of air and rushing to finish before it runs out.

If you change where you breathe from, the pace sorts itself out. That is the difference between something that works when you practise and something that works in the meeting.