Three minutes of breathing before you take the floor

One Tuesday in November, in a windowless meeting room down by the docks, a man in his fifties said it out loud in front of his colleagues: I know my subject inside out, I rehearsed it three times in the car, and the moment I stand up my voice stops following me. Nobody laughed. That sentence comes up in roughly half the workshops I run, and I find it more useful than anything I might say by way of introduction.

I am not trying to make that reaction go away. I spent years attempting it on myself and never managed. What stays within reach when everything else races off is the breath. Three minutes will do, and you can take them in a corridor, or in the toilets, still the quietest room in most offices. No equipment, and nobody around you will notice a thing.

What the body gets up to before you open your mouth

To the nervous system, standing up in front of a group looks a great deal like danger. People are watching, your standing is at stake, and the body gets itself ready: the heart speeds up, blood heads for the large muscles, attention narrows onto whatever seems threatening. None of it is a malfunction, the body is doing its job perfectly well. The awkward part is that the whole arrangement was built for running or fighting, and you are asking it to deliver a carefully weighed sentence to a board of directors.

• The breath climbs into the upper chest and shortens, usually without your noticing.
• The shoulders and the jaw tighten, and the diaphragm loses its range.
• The mouth goes dry, the hands turn cold or clammy, sometimes both within ten minutes of each other.
• Attention swings inwards: you listen to yourself speaking instead of listening to the room.

Why the voice tightens

The voice is air given shape. For the vocal folds to vibrate without strain they need a steady column of air pushed up from low in the belly. When the breathing climbs into the upper chest that column goes short and jerky, the sound loses its support, the throat takes over and the larynx clenches. Hence the thin, slightly bleached voice that starts higher than usual and no longer sounds like your own. Plenty of participants tell me they can hear it happening live, which unsettles them further still. Sentences get shorter too, word endings are swallowed, and you catch yourself grabbing air in the middle of an idea. It took me years to stop working on people's throats. Everything gets settled lower down.

Three minutes before you walk in

1. 01Stand with your feet flat and hip width apart, one hand on your belly. Change nothing yet, just notice where your breath is sitting this second.
2. 02Breathe out first. Slowly, through parted lips, as if misting up a window. Emptying before filling unlocks the rest.
3. 03Breathe in through the nose for four counts, letting the belly open, then out through the mouth for six to eight. The only rule worth keeping: the out breath longer than the in breath.
4. 04Six to eight cycles at that pace, never forcing. If you run short of air, shorten the in breath, never the out breath.
5. 05Finish by saying two sentences under your breath, any two, placed on an out breath. The support has changed, and you will hear it before you touch the door handle.

The three reflexes that make it worse

• The big inhale just before you begin. It fills the upper chest, lifts the shoulders, leaves the ribcage stuck in a full position, and the voice sets off higher than it would have gone on its own.
• Stacking fast, deep breaths to 'get the energy up'. It speeds the heart and it magnifies the shaking. Keep that sort of practice for a warm up, never for the five minutes before you speak.
• Holding the breath while waiting your turn, which almost everyone does without knowing. The held breath keeps the alarm running, and the first word leaves on a supply already half spent.

One last thing, which I repeat in every workshop because it gets forgotten every time: this breathing is not something to discover five minutes before a board meeting. It settles in when nothing is at stake, two or three times a week, on the tram, in the bakery queue, walking along the Corniche if you happen to live here. The body needs to have done it before to find its way back on its own once the pressure rises. Try it on Thursday, on the dullest meeting of your week.