How to look confident during your speech

A pilot’s voice cracks over the intercom. “Uh, folks, this is your, uh, captain speaking. We’re gonna try to get this bird in the air here shortly.” Every hand on the armrest tightens. Nobody has read a maintenance log or checked a single credential. The doubt comes from four seconds of a shaky voice.

Picture the same flight with a different voice, level, unhurried, done in one breath. “Good afternoon. This is your captain. We’re cleared for departure in ten minutes.” Same airline, same plane, the same skill sitting in the cockpit. Only the delivery changed, and the whole cabin exhales.

Montana von Fliss opens her TEDx talk with a version of this scene, and the lesson attached to it explains why her 2025 talk became TEDx’s most watched talk of the year. For 17 years, von Fliss has coached speakers at Microsoft, Amazon and Google on how to look composed on a stage while the body underneath the suit is shaking.

Her approach skips the impossible task of feeling calm and teaches 5 choices that make a speaker look calm regardless. The same choices apply well beyond a TEDx stage. A shaky voice reads the same whether the audience is 900 people in an auditorium or 3 people around a conference table. Here are the 5, in her own order:

1. Turn up your energy, just a little

Von Fliss frames vocal energy as a dial that runs from 1 to 10. Most nervous speakers settle around a 3, the register of an apology. She coaches clients toward a 5, loud enough to sound prepared and well short of shouting. The jump from a 3 to a 5 is small in decibels and large in perception, because an audience reads low energy as low certainty before it processes a single word of content. A steady 5 already sounds ready, and a 10 was never the goal. The same dial matters even more over video, where a flat vocal register reads quieter through a laptop microphone than it would across a real room.

2. Pause like you mean it

A nervous speaker rushes. Every gap in the sentence gets filled with “um” or “like” because silence feels dangerous. Slowing the whole delivery down doesn’t fix this, since a uniform crawl reads as uncertain too. The fix is a pause placed on purpose, one beat before a key phrase and another after a transition, never filled with a stray “um.” A speaker who can sit in 3 seconds of quiet without flinching reads as someone who knows exactly where the talk is headed next. A one-second pause before naming a number a client cares about gives that number room to land. A one-second pause after a hard question buys a beat to think without sounding stumped.

3. Borrow a superhero’s posture

A 1993 study found that observers judged a teacher’s effectiveness from two seconds of silent video about as accurately as students who had sat through a full semester of that teacher’s classes. The body reports on a speaker before the mouth opens.

Von Fliss calls her fix the superhero stance:

• Shoulders back and spine long.
• Smile allowed to happen, but not forced.
• Aim for the same 5 on the 1-to-10 voice volume dial.

She calls the underlying move “making the shape,” because an audience can only ever see the shape a speaker presents, never the feeling sitting underneath it. A host who opens the door slouched and stiff sends the same signal a slouched, stiff speaker sends walking onstage.

Open the posture and the room reads openness back. The same principle plays out off a stage. A job candidate who slouches into a chair and mumbles a greeting sends the same signal a slumped speaker sends walking to a podium, regardless of how sharp the answers turn out to be once the questions start.

Straightening the spine and making eye contact before the first question does work no answer can undo.

4. Practice with purpose, not just repetition

A pianist who receives new sheet music on Monday for a Friday recital doesn’t wait until the stage to sight-read it for the first time. The piece gets played daily, out loud, on the actual instrument, until the fingers find it without conscious effort.

Von Fliss holds speakers to the same standard. Rehearsal means standing up, saying the words aloud, and clicking through the actual slides, not silently rereading a script one more time.

She recommends a written rehearsal schedule, a small reward for each completed run-through, and one new technique layered in each day in the week before an event. When there’s no time for a full run-through, she has speakers repeat just the opening and closing lines three times in a row, in the shower, on a dog walk, anywhere.

Speakers often worry that rehearsing too much will make a talk sound canned. Von Fliss, who spent 30 years as a professional actor before she started coaching, treats the opposite risk as the larger one. An under-rehearsed talk sounds halting and drags the room down more than a well-worn one ever will. Her middle path is bullet-point notes instead of a verbatim script once the memorized version starts sounding robotic, which keeps the wording a little different, and a little more alive, on each run-through.

5. Write yourself a silent sentence

Von Fliss has coached speakers for 17 years and still feels her hands shake before she takes a stage. Her old instruction to herself was to be perfect, an impossible bar that fed the fear instead of calming it. She replaced it with a specific line, rehearsed as carefully as anything she says out loud:

“I invite you to be here with me while I am here with you.”

The words work because they redirect her attention from self-protection toward a role she can fill, helping the people in front of her.

Related research on self-talk backs the general mechanism, if not the exact wording. Ethan Kross and his colleagues at the University of Michigan found that the specific words a person uses internally under stress change how well that person regulates the emotion in the moment. Von Fliss builds her own version of that finding into her prep. She writes her silent sentence into the script, right alongside the spoken lines, and rehearses both together until neither needs the other to show up.

The nerves rarely leave completely. What changes is which instruction wins the argument in her head.

Finding a personal silent sentence starts with one question:

“What’s the deeper reason for saying yes to this talk in the first place?”

For von Fliss the answer stays simple, to help the audience in front of her to the best of her ability. For another speaker it might run narrower, wanting one person in the room to walk out and sign up for a CPR class, or wanting to hand over a fix for a problem the audience has been stuck on for months. The exact wording of the sentence matters less than the fact that a speaker chooses it, writes it into the script, and rehearses it with the same care given to every spoken line.

The bottom line

These five choices don’t ask a nervous speaker to become a different person on a stage, and instead ask for the same physical and verbal choices a composed speaker already makes, done on purpose until the choice becomes the default. The next presentation, pitch, or toast on the calendar doesn’t have to wait for the fear to go away, but it does need one silent sentence, said enough times in the shower or on a dog walk that the mouth finds it without help.

Frequently asked questions

What is the fastest way to look confident when you’re nervous?

Raise vocal energy from a low, apologetic register to a steady, prepared one, roughly a 3 moving to a 5 on a 10-point scale. Speech coach Montana von Fliss teaches this as the quickest lever a speaker can pull, since it changes how the first few seconds of a talk land before any content registers.

Does body language determine whether an audience trusts a speaker?

Nonverbal cues carry outsized weight in the opening seconds of a talk. Ambady and Rosenthal’s 1993 study found that observers judged a teacher’s effectiveness from two seconds of silent video almost as accurately as from a full semester in the classroom. Content still carries the talk once it’s underway, but posture and vocal energy shape the room’s first impression before a single argument lands.

How long does it take to build confident stage habits?

There’s no fixed number of days, but a structured week helps. Von Fliss recommends running a full rehearsal at least once a day in the week before an event, and repeating just the opening and closing lines three times in a row whenever a full run-through isn’t possible.

What is a silent sentence in public speaking?

A silent sentence is a short phrase a speaker repeats internally right before and during a talk, written and rehearsed with the same care as the spoken script. Montana von Fliss uses one to shift her focus from fear of making a mistake toward the purpose she wants the talk to serve.

Is stage fright the same thing as lacking confidence?

Stage fright is a physical stress response, while the confidence taught in this framework is a set of learned physical and verbal choices, so the two can coexist in the same speaker. Von Fliss says she still feels nervous before talks after 17 years of coaching others, and treats the nerves and the technique as separate problems.

Resources

• Montana von Fliss, “How to Be Confident (Even If You’re Not)” (TEDx Talk)
• Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, “Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations From Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1993.
• Ethan Kross et al., “Self-Talk as a Regulatory Mechanism: How You Do It Matters,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2014.