How to increase your gravitas as a leader
By Caroline Goyder
What is Gravitas?
Gravity. Gravitas. The clue is in the name. The Roman virtue gravitas existed long before Isaac Newton named the universal force, but great minds think alike. Gravitas is about roots and wings. Roots, because gravitas gives you a solid foundation to express yourself with confidence and authority. Gravitas flourishes when you stop struggling to be someone else and plant deep roots in who you are. Wings, because as G. K. Chesterton put it: “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”
We can all have gravitas when we speak. Gravitas is a trait – software, rather than hardware. You can learn to carry yourself with authority, to speak with gravitas and confidence, to influence others. When it comes to gravitas, it helps to remember the old maxim: “If you think you can, or think you can’t – you’re right.” What matters is that you flip the switch on how you see gravitas. When you realise it can be learnt, that changes everything.
The first thing to understand is the gravitas equation. This underpins everything.
Knowledge + purpose + passion (– anxiety) = Gravitas
This trinity of knowledge, purpose and passion is key. They are the pillars on which gravitas rests. The more you strengthen them the more you find your gravitas. And, unlike many other things in life, these three are enhanced by the passage of time.
There is a set of strategies, assessive skills that any sportsperson, any actor, musician or opera singer will use. And they are skills that anybody can learn.
Identify your audience and message
The first part of the gravitas toolkit for me, and this is not always the first part of the toolkit for other people, is to really step into the audience issues. That’s not a new idea, it is something that we talk a lot about in terms of influence. For me as a performer, if I think it’s all about me, that the spotlight is on me, particularly as an introvert, that’s horrible. It would be very off-putting and I would feel very self conscious, very nervous.
Flip the spotlight. “How can I help?” takes us into compassion which is a very generative, powerful space. We are at our best in compassion. Put yourself into the shoes of that person or audience. By juggling that risk, worrying about their decision, trying to reconcile a couple of different pressures on them, you start to realise that actually your job is to help them rather than to get it right yourself. And if you go in thinking, how can I help? it really flips that mindset.
Get physically present.
I learned this as an actor - if I have to do any kind of speech or pitch or meeting or interview, I will spend a bit of time in the morning, personally for me, it’s yoga. I do some very relaxing, grounding yoga, which is just about breathing and getting into the body. Get up early before the mayhem of your morning kicks off. If you can carve out half an hour just to get physically present, that sets your state up for the rest of the day. And it gives you a kind of groundedness that relaxes others as well.
Understand your strengths (and weaknesses!)
Understanding your strengths and weaknesses in terms of your style is really important. We all have habitual ways of showing up which might not necessarily be you. There’s a Walt Whitman quote: “I contain multitudes”. We all contain multitudes and can all flip, we can all change our style according to the situation. If you are going into the room with a very senior person in finance for example, then you’re going to want to go in with an authoritative credible style. And that has a certain low voice tone that communicates power.
A quick way to do this is to focus on the task in hand. So rather than focusing on building a friendship with your audience, investors, team, , you focus on getting a task done, which works well in finance as it’s an area traditionally inhabited by tasky people. A simple trick is palms down. The ‘palms down’ gesture often takes you into a more ‘task’ style.
If you think of when you gesture - have your palms facing to the floor. If I say the days of the week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, there is a sense that my voice is more newsreader. And that style has a certain strength, which is one of the ways we survive in life. We can either survive by strength or warmth.
If you need to find more warmth, you just turn the palms up and imagine talking to old friends. This softens the energy, it softens our eyes and shifts the hormones in the system. And it’s that which changes the voice.
When you walk into a meeting, think: Do you need to play strength, palms down, focus on the task? Or do you need to play warmth, palms up, focused on connection, on warmth. And then it’s about finding the balance and the pose.
Observe, and learn
Actors traditionally learn a lot from observing the animal kingdom, you will often see groups of young actors sitting watching the animals in zoos. Silently observing their behaviour, their relationship with the other animals, what stances they take and how they assert their power over others. But you don’t need to visit a zoo to understand how posture and body language affect reactions.
Scientist Amy Cuddy has also done a lot of research into the ‘power pose’ and its effect on our emotional hormonal balance. What she realised was that in the animal kingdom, when animals are frightened, they tend to either puff themselves up and make themselves big, if they want to fight. Or if they want to run away or hide, they make themselves small. So she looked at what happens when humans make themselves very big. When we as human beings make ourselves tall, that ramps up testosterone and it damps down anxiety.
So simply by standing up straighter, doing what she calls the power pose, shifts your hormonal state and gives you a sense of more confidence.
It’s a kind of still grounded power, that says I am worthy of your attention. And it is important to keep that power relaxed. Because as soon as tension hits the system, then we start to play I’m bigger than you that can have a negative effect.
So if you do your grounding work at home and then you do your power pose and it comes from a really relaxed place, that’s when it’s most powerful. It’s a kind of strong ease where balance is everything.
We want to have a calm, strong sense of ourselves and a trust in what we offer, and then we want to be able to open up to others.
You can learn so much from watching others so take time to start gravitas-spotting. If you can see gravitas in others you have the beginnings of finding it in yourself. So let’s start looking and we’re going to use an exercise to help us do this. You can do this exercise using a video clip of yourself but it’s easiest to observe someone else. (Don’t choose an actor in role for this exercise. Gravitas requires people to be themselves and. You have to speak your own words.)
It is probably easiest if the person is on TV, but they could be in a public space (if you are surreptitious about it) or you could use a radio clip – it’s incredible how much you can glean from someone’s voice. When you watch TV or see people present, notice how they are doing. Do they have good levels of knowledge, purpose and passion? Is there anything missing? Is their anxiety getting in the way? Start to think about how they would be different with, say, a little more purpose. But remember this is not about perfection. Perfection is deadly dull. The point of gravitas is that it reveals the person, warts and all, and the essential characteristic of gravitas is that the purpose and passion come through and aren’t blocked by too much anxiety or self-consciousness. They are who they are. They let it be that simple and that powerful
Warm up your voice
The voice is also a very unrecognised, underestimated part of who we are, certainly in UK culture. Although there are other cultures where it is more recognised. By simply putting the radio on or putting a favourite CD on and singing, really singing, you are opening up your voice and, in turn, dialling up your confidence. It doesn’t matter if you hit some bum notes, there’s a resonance in your system. You are literally resonating your system. So then when you walk into a meeting with someone that you need to impress, where you need to feel confident, your voice behaves like a warmed up engine. It just starts and it makes you feel more present. It makes you feel more resonant in that space and that has a huge effect.
The voice is just air hitting the vocal folds, vibrating in the body. By simply getting that air onto the vocal folds, making sound, you are warming it up. This means that when you get into a room your voice will be there for you. It won’t be squeaky, it won’t be thin. It will have a lovely round resonance that will make others feel good.
Pause more
When we pause we stop and think, we breathe in. And what that does is refuel the voice. So you are re-fuelling, your brain is being oxygenated… and they’re having time to consider what you’ve just said.
Pauses are good for a couple of reasons. When we pause, what we’re doing is closing our mouth really simply and inhaling. We’re breathing. Because we speak on the out breath.
So when we stop and think, we breathe in. And what that does is it refuels the voice. It refuels the brain. It’s a little pit stop in our speech. For the audience, it has a different effect. The audience, it gives them time to think about what you’ve just said, so you’re re-fuelling, your voice is being re-energized, your brain is being oxygenated, they’re having time to consider what you’ve just said. It also says that you have an ease and control. You’re not worried. You don’t have to fill the silence and that is really powerful.
And finally, just before you go through the door, a very good piece of advice for making a good impression – with gravitas – is to be responsible for the energy you take into the room. Set your intention. What do you dream of happening in the room? Take that energy in with you.
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Caroline Goyder is the founder of Gravitas Method, and an expert speaker and voice trainer. Caroline also worked for more than a decade at London's Royal Central School of Speech and Drama as a voice coach. Her TEDx debut on The Surprising Secret to Speaking with Confidence has been viewed almost 11 million times and rising. Clients have included Cabinet Ministers, a Queen, the magician Dynamo, and businesses as varied as Mastercard, Netflix, and Balfour Beatty. She's the author of best-selling books Gravitas and Find Your Voice and the creator of two new self-paced courses Master Your Speaking and Master Your Meetings.
