How to Build and Display Confidence Through Body language and Voice
Earlier this year, I contributed to a Woman & Home article about positive body language and how it can boost your confidence—Can positive body language boost your confidence? Find out what the experts think. In a similar vein, in this article, I share the secrets to appearing confident through positive body language, eye contact and voice, and equally as important, how to use your body to feel more confident.
How to Display Confidence
How do we show confidence via body language?
Positive Body Language
Confident people exude positive body language—a relaxed upright and open posture and display less blocking behaviours, such as arms crossed over their chest, and fewer stress behaviours such as fidgeting, fiddling, and self-soothing. The problem is when we don’t feel confident and instead feel negative emotion, the body typically contracts, and blocking and stress behaviours are more likely to occur. To fake confidence, we need to emulate positive behaviours and avoid negative behaviours.
Eye Contact
Eye contact is important because it helps people connect due to oxytocin, the hormone of connection and bonding. Oxytocin is released when we make eye contact and through touch. It has an anti-anxiety effect putting people at ease and increasing positive perceptions.
People who are shy, introverted or lack confidence sometimes make less eye contact; this is perhaps connected to an increased need to look away when internally processing what they are about to say. Some people don’t carefully consider what they say and are happy with whatever comes out; others are more considerate. Less eye contact can also occur when talking about an awkward topic, which isn’t necessarily bad as it signals that awkwardness and may help others understand our feelings, allowing them to respond better.
Many people worry that they aren’t making enough eye contact due to misinformation about eye behaviours. The most significant body language myths are that eye direction, and less eye contact are indicators of deception. It’s simply not the case. It’s normal to look away—left, right, up or down—during a conversation, for many reasons, for example, emotion, recollection and minimising distractions. It’s not connected to deception, and studies have shown that contrary to popular belief, more eye contact is typically present when lying.
Become aware of your eye contact levels, but don’t assume that you don't make enough eye contact just because you look away at times, as most people are within the normal range. It you feel that you’re out of the normal range and people have hinted you make too little (or too much), then that’s when you should work on it. If you believe you make too little eye contact, there could be underlying reasons; for example, some people with autism find making eye contact difficult due to how they internally process faces. If there isn’t an underlying issue, it could stem from low confidence levels; therefore, consciously practising making more eye contact over time will help.
How do we show confidence via the voice?
Engage a Lower Vocal Pitch
Confidence is also perceived via the voice. Typically, when we feel nervous—and therefore less confident—tension in the body affects the vocal cords, and the voice comes out at a higher pitch. Higher pitched voices sound more like children's voices and are associated with nervousness. They are also associated with deception due to Arousal Theory, whereby lying generates stress and emotional loading, and Cognitive Theory, an increase in cognitive demands. These associations are unfortunate for women (in some contexts), who typically have higher-pitched voices than men. Suppose you’re in a professional situation and want to sound more confident. In that case, there’s a simple vocal trick that can easily switch your voice to a lower pitch that sounds warm and resonant—it works for both men and women and is commonly used by presenters and actors.
The trick is to engage a low hum that resonates from the chest; this can change the vocal pitch in the moment or over the long term. A minute or two of low humming can drop vocal pitch slightly and keep the vocal cords in check. This slight drop can be enough to combat the high-pitched, shaky voice when you feel nervous. Of course, this should be done privately when nobody is listening. Engaging a low hum daily, over time, can increase the natural vocal range at the lower end, which means you can engage lower vocal pitch with less effort.
People perceive us as more credible, serious, and dependable when using a lower pitch of our natural vocal range. Try engaging a lower voice pitch before interactions where you need to be taken seriously, for example, before an interview or instructing children. What’s more, displaying confidence through the body and voice, even if we’re faking it, can increase inner feelings of confidence, so we can fake it until we become confident.
Avoid Uptalk
Uptalk is also commonly referred to as upspeak, question inflexion, or rising tone and high-rise tone/terminal in the scientific community. It’s a credibility killer, occurring when the speaker ends a sentence with a higher pitch. Some questions naturally end in a higher pitch; however, a rising tone at the end of a declarative statement results in statements that sound like questions—as though you are questioning your own words. This uncertainty signal is a credibility killer because if you aren’t confident in the words you speak, then why should anyone buy into them?
Sometimes uptalk is used to imply uncertainty, and in that context, making obvious your uncertainty can be the right thing to do. In 2013, Linneman (researcher) found Jeopardy! contestants were more likely to use uptalk when giving incorrect answers, implying their uncertainty. The issue lies when you don’t want to give away feelings of uncertainty or a lack of confidence, but your voice leaks your feelings. In some cases, uptalk is habitual, occurring on most statements, where it can be perceived as a display of deference, cooperation or subordination. Conversely, falling tones are associated with assertiveness, confidence and speaker dominance.
Interestingly, there are gender differences in the use of uptalk in English intonation patterns, with women using more rising tone in declarative statements than men. Additionally, several researchers found higher use of uptalk in younger people.
The best way to combat uptalk is awareness. Start to hear it when you’re listening to people speaking, which will make you more aware of if and when you use it. If you find yourself using it, try to figure out where it’s coming from. Is it a deliberate signal of uncertainty or accidental? If you don’t mean to show uncertainty, this newfound awareness will help you avoid it going forward as you naturally become more conscious about how you talk.
Avoid Speaking Quietly
Often when people are being deceptive or aren’t confident in what they are saying, their voice is at a lower volume. In deception, this typically occurs on the deceptive word or statement. With people who lack confidence, it can sound more like a consistent quietness or a trailing off at the end of a statement you’re not confident in saying. For example, often, in interviews, women (and sometimes men) don’t like to blow their own trumpet in terms of their achievements, so they may trail off in volume when talking about their accomplishments.
To display confidence when you don’t feel it, raise your volume. I don’t mean shout, but be conscious about whether you have lowered your voice and raise it to an average level.
How to Build Confidence
It’s one thing to be able to fake confidence, showing positive behaviours when you’re feeling negative; however, isn’t it better to work on feeling more confident? Therefore our body language and vocal expression should automatically change to more positive behaviour, displaying natural confidence.
Use positive body language and lower tones
The good news is that a significant way to boost inner feelings of confidence is to use positive body language and lower tones of your voice, and that’s due to a body-brain feedback loop. Most people know that feelings and emotions are expressed via body language and voice, but research also shows how we use our body language and voice can affect how we feel and trigger emotions. So if we display positive and confident behaviours, we start to feel more positive and confident. This is part of a theory called embodied cognition, with research drawn from the areas of psychology and neuroscience. It’s not just body language and voice that can make a difference in how we feel; facial expression can also trigger emotion.
Using body language to build confidence—postural feedback
You may have already heard of the power pose, a term popularised by researcher Amy Cuddy. In her 2012 talk, Cuddy suggested that pre-power posing, in an expansive stance, for a couple of minutes before an important event can make you feel more powerful. Other research has backed this general idea with several studies finding a link between a more powerful stance/posture and feelings of power, positivity and better performance.
In 2019, Marcus Credé made an important observation—studies until then had failed to include a neutral pose. Instead of comparing a high or low power pose to a neutral condition, researchers compared high power poses to low power poses. When you compare high and low power poses with a neutral stance, the findings become clearer—what’s essential is avoiding low power poses. It’s not about being more expansive than a neutral pose, but instead, avoiding contractive body language like slumped posture and blocking behaviours (for example, crossing arms across the chest).
Now termed ‘postural feedback’, the evidence is clear: posture matters and can influence how we feel. Avoiding a low power pose is essential in creating these inner feelings of power and confidence.
You can learn more about the power pose and postural feedback in this post: The Truth About the Power Pose.
Using lower voice pitch to build confidence
I like to think of using a lower vocal pitch as a vocal power pose; it appears to act similarly to postural feedback. When you use a lower voice pitch, you’re perceived as being more credible, serious and dependable. Still, as well as that, it has been found to increase inner feelings of power and confidence, as well as better performance in abstract thinking tasks.
A series of interesting 2012 studies by Stel, van Dijk, Smith, van Dijk and Djalal found that lowering the pitch of your voice makes you feel more powerful and think more abstractly. In the studies, participants read a text aloud with either a lower or a higher vocal pitch than usual. Then, feelings of power and abstract thinking performance were assessed. Researchers found that participants who lowered their vocal pitch perceived themselves as possessing more powerful traits and performed better during abstract thinking tests than participants who raised their vocal pitch.
Uptalk and Empowered Cognition
I’m unaware of any research about uptalk and feelings of power and confidence, but that’s not to say studies aren’t out there. Based on what we know about embodied cognition, I suspect there will be a connection between uptalk and how we feel. Since uptalk signals uncertainty, avoiding it should increase inner feelings of confidence.
Slow breathing to combat nervousness and anxiety
Another way to feel more confident is to work on slow breathing. During the fear response, which is connected to nervousness, stress and anxiety, physiological changes occur within your body. These include hormone release (for example, cortisol and adrenaline), increased breathing rate, heart rate and blood pressure, changes in blood distribution around the body and switching off of some bodily systems, for example, digestion and reproduction. With most of those changes, we can’t control them, but we can actively manage our breathing rate. When we do this, focusing on our breath and slowing it down, it has a knock-on effect within the body, and all the changes start to regulate, resetting the body to its calm state.
Therefore if we can regulate feelings of nervousness, and return to a calm state, an increase in confidence should follow. To learn more about slow breathing and the body, check out my SOS—Breath now to Reduce Stress page or this post: One Simple Solution to Reduce Stress and Anxiety in Minutes.
