7 min read 11th Nov 2026
There’s a moment I see frequently when I’m coaching people on presentations. Someone’s still shuffling into place when they start to speak, and out comes, “Um, right, so, uh, thanks for having me.” I can see why it happens, because when everyone’s looking at you, a couple of seconds can feel like a long time to keep them waiting.
The funny thing is, if I sat down with that same person over a coffee and asked what they thought about their work, they’d tell me without much fuss. There’s something about being handed a clicker that makes “Good morning” feel like a sentence you should have rehearsed.
I can see they’re finding their feet, but someone hearing them for the first time might wonder if they’re sure of what they’re saying. That’s what I mean by the trust gap. You know your subject, and the rest of us are still working out how much weight to give what you say.
What do we believe when the signals don’t match?
You know when someone says they’d welcome challenge, then jumps in before the first person who disagrees has finished? I think I’d let someone else go next.
At Body Talk, we call it congruence when your words fit with how you sound and what you do. When those things pull in different directions, we’re left to make sense of what we’ve heard. In two studies on how people read a speaker’s attitude, facial expression could carry more weight than tone, and tone could carry more weight than the meaning of a single word. We can come away with quite a strong impression of someone from a few cues, without much idea of what’s going on for them.
When we worked with researchers at UCL, 652 people watched short videos of presenters using the same script with changes to how they stood and spoke. Some versions came across as more confident and convincing, which you might expect. What surprised us most from the study was that the speakers in those clips also came across as more knowledgeable. I think about that when I catch myself deciding how much I trust a speaker before I’ve heard them out.
How much of your CV does the room need?
It’s tempting to give the room a tour of your qualifications, though the person most likely to enjoy the trip is you. I want to know what qualifies you to speak, and while you’re telling me that, I’m wondering whether you’ve understood the bit of the problem that’s keeping me up at night.
Aristotle had a view on this. When he wrote about ethos, he was interested in what we learn about someone’s character by listening to them speak. We get a sense of their judgement and whether they have our interests in mind. That’s easy to forget when you’re wondering how much of your CV to get onto the first slide.
If you can talk about the problem in a way that makes me think, “Yes, that’s the bit I’m struggling with,” I’m much more likely to want to hear what your experience tells you about it.
How long do you have to be here before you can have a view?
I was working with a group of graduates recently and we got onto a question that comes up a lot. How do I speak up when I’m new and everyone else has been doing the job for years? I can see why you’d keep a thought to yourself when you’re still getting to know the people in the room.
If I wanted to know where an explanation stops making sense to someone hearing it for the first time, you’re the person I’d ask. You’ve just heard it, and you can tell me where you got lost, which is something the people who wrote it might struggle to see for themselves.
When you tell me what you’ve seen and how you’ve made sense of it, you’re giving me a reason to trust your judgement. I’d listen to that, even if you’ve only been there a week. As I said to them, your experience may be new, but your perspective is valuable.
What happens when we start with “I think”?
“I think we might just need a bit more time.” If you said that to me in a meeting, I’d be wondering whether you were making a recommendation or working one out as you spoke. “I’d give the team another week so they can finish testing” gives me something I can respond to.
There are times when “I think” does a job. It lets me offer a view and leave room for someone who’s seen something I haven’t. When there’s a good reason to be unsure, I’d rather say what it is, so you know how much weight to give my advice.
The sociologist Maja Jovanovic tells a story about a conference panel where one speaker opened by wondering what she could add, and another said she thought the invitation had gone to the wrong person. Both had been invited for their expertise. I wonder how many of us, hearing those opening lines, would have guessed how much they knew about the subject. I wrote about that panel in Stop Saying Sorry.
The same nerves can keep us talking after we’ve made the point. We’re worried someone might have misunderstood us, so we explain it again, and before long a good recommendation starts to sound like one we’re still trying to talk ourselves into. Once you’ve made your point, a pause gives people a chance to respond, and you can hear whether they need any more from you. I wrote more about that in Why We Over-Explain (And How to Stop Doing It).
Give your first sentence a moment
A pause can help at the start, too, when you’re still finding your feet and everyone’s waiting for you to speak. Give yourself a second to settle, then imagine someone’s asked you over coffee what you make of the subject and start with the answer you’d give them. The clicker can wait.
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