you may feel as if you need to take everyone's temperature in the room. In other words, you mistakenly try to determine what your listeners are thinking while you are speaking. Talk about stacking the deck! You find yourself waiting for a response from your listeners to validate whether or not you're getting your point across. The waiting and watching distracts you, and you begin to lose your train of thought. The sense of obligation to keep their attention begins to grow. You feel as if you need to energize your presentation by picking up your pace. Then you realize that you don't know how to slow down. Finally, you just want to get the experience over with as quickly as possible. You feel as if you aresound confident, poised, and authoritative. Whenever I offer a speech client the simple advice to "make sure you breathe," I can see that look in their eyes. I imagine them wanting to say, "Are you kidding me? That's something I do automatically!" That's true. It is also true that if they passed out from public-speaking anxiety, they would continue to breathe involuntarily too. There is breathing automatically, and then there's breathing effectively. In both obvious and subtle ways breath support and well-timed breathing increase your ability to communicate with authority and presence.

Sneak a breath. Let's start with the understanding that it's okay to show that you are, in fact, breathing. People often convince themselves that they should "catch a breath" under their listener's radar. They mistakenly believe that