Viv Groskop

You can always see a politician who does not have the same views as you, who you might disagree with completely.

but who you can respect because they have a confident way of speaking.

They put across their points well.

They have authority.

They have gravitas.

They're worth listening to.

Those people are incredibly valuable, even if you disagree with them, even if you, in inverted commas, dislike them, because they help you to understand what you think about the world, how you feel.

And if we can have more people around us who are confident in their views, who have great authority, but we don't necessarily agree with them on everything,

it can help us to be more confident in articulating our views, which are different to theirs.

So I completely agree with you that we can admire people's confidence without necessarily wanting to be exactly like them or relating to them necessarily.

I think one of the great hallmarks of true confidence is being able to speak to people who disagree with you and still be heard.

Those things are built in in certain scenarios and for certain people they have those things by virtue of the position that they occupy in society.

There's a lot of work around status and entitlement that shows us certain people are more likely to be thought of in that way than others.

So of course certain people have a bit of a bounce in this regard.

But I do believe anybody can get a flavor of those things and they can hone them in their own way without trying to be something that they're not.

For example, the pace and speed and tone of your voice really dictate

so much about how people regard you and how they think of you and how much they want to listen to you, the more you can keep your voice on an even tone to make sure that you're not talking at the end of the sentence, to make sure that it doesn't sound as if everything you're saying is a suggestion,

to keep the voice on an even tone to really show when you finish speaking you can slow down to show that this is the end of what you have to say to use pauses to take your time sometimes to soften your voice so that people have to lean in a little bit to listen to you to really take your time to direct

people's attention to you and those are not things that you need to necessarily do in a way that is bombastic or super confident or you know beyonce levels of glitter emanating from your every pore anybody can do these things i'm thinking in particular of a speaker like greta tunberg you know the environmental campaigner she has a very soft slow

gentle introverted vulnerable way of speaking that's very unusual and i don't think would have existed 30 or 40 years ago in a public speaker and yet she cuts through i want beyonce level glitter emanating from my pores i would love that