Quick answer
To breathe effectively when speaking in public, Allison Shapira, a Harvard Lecturer, Executive Advisor, and Hall of Fame Speaker, recommends a three-step technique from her book Speak with Impact: stand tall, breathe low into the abdomen, and exhale while speaking so the breath carries the voice. Pausing to breathe at the end of each sentence keeps the voice steady and supported, which helps listeners believe the speaker.
Leaders who want to sound more confident often expect advice about what to say. Some of the most important advice I give them is about how they breathe.
Most speakers don’t think about their breath until something goes wrong. Their voice shakes, they run out of air halfway through a sentence, or their throat tightens. In my experience, each of those problems usually traces back to one habit: holding your breath instead of using it.
Why does breathing matter when you speak?
Your voice is air from your lungs vibrating your vocal folds. When you hold your breath or run out of it, your voice loses its support and can turn shaky, thin, or gravelly. When air flows steadily through your words, your voice stays warm and resonant.
I learned this long before I started advising leaders. As a freshman opera student, I auditioned for a solo I knew I wouldn’t get. Then I turned back and asked to audition for a tiny line of Gregorian chant. My calm, purposeful sound won me a longer solo that the department had planned to cut, and I became the only freshman with a solo in that concert.
A calm, purposeful sound is something you can build, and it starts with your breath. I first wrote about this in Harvard Business Review, in Breathing Is the Key to Persuasive Public Speaking, and I still teach the same techniques today because they work in a boardroom just as well as on a stage.
Your voice also shapes whether people trust you. Research has shown for years that how confidently we speak influences how credible we sound. In a 2017 study, researchers at McGill University found that listeners were more likely to trust statements delivered in a confident tone than the same statements delivered with doubt. As lead author Xiaoming Jiang explained, “If a person sounds more confident, we tend to believe him more than when the person sounds doubtful” (Jiang and Pell, Human Brain Mapping). In an earlier study, the same researchers found that our brains can register a speaker’s level of confidence in as little as 0.2 seconds (Jiang and Pell, Cortex).
People form a view of you before they have weighed a single argument. Your breath is one of the few things you can control in that moment.
Why does your breath disappear when you’re nervous?
Your breath disappears under pressure because nerves trigger a fight-or-flight response. Many people react by breathing quickly and high in the chest, or by holding their breath without realizing it. Both habits leave your voice without the steady support it needs.
Here’s the most common mistake I see. Many times we take in a nice deep breath, then hold it, don’t let it out, and try to speak. This creates vocal fry, that strained, gravelly sound. The three steps below give your breath a natural place in your speaking, so you can use it rather than fight it.
How your breath affects your believability
Of the three drivers of believability (Credibility, Communication, and Connection), your breath belongs to Communication, which is how you speak in the moment. Audiences notice when your delivery and your words don’t match. If you tell a room you’re confident about a plan while your voice wavers, your audience may believe the waver more than the words. A supported voice lets your delivery and your message say the same thing.
Three steps to breathe when speaking in public
This technique comes from my book Speak with Impact: How to Command the Room and Influence Others, and you can try it right now, wherever you are.
1. Find the right posture.
Stand up tall with your feet shoulder-width apart and your weight balanced evenly. Take a deep breath in through your nose as you raise your arms. Then slowly exhale through your mouth as you lower your arms, and keep your ribcage where it is.
You should now be standing tall with your shoulders back, owning your full height. When you slouch or hunch over your notes, you squeeze the space your breath needs. An open posture gives your lungs room to expand, and it changes how you look to the room before you say a word.
2. Breathe into your abdomen.
Put both hands over your belly button. Breathe in and feel your abdomen expand as it fills with air, then exhale and feel it come back in. Do this a few times, then return to normal breathing.
The point is to feel the difference between a shallow breath high in your chest and a full breath low in your body. Nervous speakers tend to breathe quickly and high, and a low breath feels calmer and gives you more air to work with.
3. Speak on the breath.
Take a full, low breath, and start speaking as you exhale. I call this “speaking on the breath,” because your breath carries your voice forward and projects your sound.
When you exhale as you speak, you get a warm, confident, resonant voice that carries across a room or through a camera lens. That matters in hybrid work, since a supported voice carries through a laptop microphone just as it carries through a conference room. To hear the difference, say a sentence while holding your breath, then say it again while you exhale through the words.
Each step builds on the one before it. Posture makes room for the breath, the abdominal breath fills that room, and speaking on the breath turns the air into sound.
“Allison Shapira balances big-picture framing (future vision, strategic authenticity) with hands-on tactics (impromptu skills, breathing, power phrases), making her an ideal coach for senior leaders. I’ve found her guidance both rigorous and highly practical.”
~Global Co-Head of Investment Banking at a Fortune 50 financial institution
How do you use your breath during a speech or meeting?
Once you know the technique, you can put it to work in three moments. I devote a full chapter of Speak with Impact to this, called “Pause and Breathe.” Taking a moment to pause, breathe, and center yourself helps you speak with intention and clarity.
Before you speak, take five minutes to yourself. Turn off your phone, email, and notifications, breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, and focus on your breath. This helps focus you, center you, and overcome some of that fight-or-flight you might be feeling as you approach the moment. In a 2023 Stanford study, participants did five minutes of breathwork a day for a month, and an exercise built around long exhales improved their mood more than the same time spent in mindfulness meditation (Balban et al., Cell Reports Medicine). If you can’t find a quiet room, a hallway or your car works.
While you speak, pause and breathe at the end of each sentence. The pause refills your air and gives you time to choose your next words. It also gives your audience a moment to absorb your point before you add the next one. The pause will feel much longer to you than it does to them, and what sounds like a gap in your head usually sounds like confidence in theirs.
In a meeting, pause mid-sentence if someone might interrupt. A pause at the end of a sentence can look like an invitation for someone else to jump in. If that’s a risk, pause and breathe in the middle of the sentence, right before your main point: “The biggest risk to this launch… is our timeline.” The pause tells the room you haven’t finished, so you get your breath and keep the floor.
Make it a daily habit
A few minutes of practice each day will make these habits automatic, so they’re there for you when the pressure is on. Try the three steps in the morning, check your posture before each call, and practice pausing in everyday conversations. You can use these techniques every single day to harness the power of your breath, and with it the power of your voice.
Watch: 3 Breathing Tips to Speak with Confidence
What helps you stay calm and steady before you speak?
Until next time,
Allison
P.S. If you’d like your leaders to practice these techniques together, my keynote, Speak with Impact: How to Command the Room and Influence Others, includes live exercises such as Speaking with Intention and builds on my ACE Model of leadership communication.
If you’re stepping into a bigger role and want one-on-one support, learn more about my 1:1 executive advisory and start a conversation by submitting our contact form. For more on leadership communication and believability, join my biweekly newsletter.
About Allison Shapira
Allison Shapira works with leaders who need to be believable in the age of AI, so they can build trust and influence with their teams, clients, and decision-makers. For over twenty years, she has advised Fortune 100 executives, prime ministers, cabinet members, and newly promoted leaders navigating high-stakes moments. She is an award-winning lecturer who has been teaching The Arts of Communication at Harvard Kennedy School for over a decade, and in 2026 she was inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Harvard Business Review.