Here’s your latest issue of Influence Anyone—where you get a playbook each week to shape decisions, change behavior, and become impossible to ignore, from Howie and the Behavioring Company team.
One morning, on a call with a client in central London, a voice coach heard a familiar complaint.
Her client is a technical leader, one who, by every measure that matters in his field the sharper of the two men in his boardroom. The problem was, his boss would fill the space every time and this leader’s expertise just didn’t seem to matter.
"He's like a magnet," she said. "And he's pulling energy away."
The coach was Caroline Goyder. She's spent nearly two decades getting people to find their voice and speak with confidence. Trained early on as an actor, she has since worked with CEOs, a president, and a queen, and written three books on the subject, including Gravitas. This week I finally had her on the podcast, and a few minutes in, she said something that has since stayed stuck in my mind.
Here's the I want to unpack for you today: it was never about his expertise, it was about his nervous system. As Caroline put it, "until he really accesses his body and his breath, no one in the room is going to take him seriously."
Which brings us to this week's influence anyone playbook:
How do you influence a room to take you seriously when you're the quiet expert?
Let’s get into it.
⚡️ 60 SEC INFLUENCE
The most powerful person in the room is usually the one who moves the least
Most people think the fix for being overlooked is to talk more, talk faster, or match the energy of whoever's dominating the room.
Caroline says that's backwards. "Power is still," she told me. "Everybody moves around power."
Here's the mechanism. Your voice rides on an outbreath. Every word you say is air leaving your body, which means your nervous system and your voice are the same signal. A tight, shallow breath makes your voice sound thin, no matter how good the content is. A slow, grounded breath does the opposite. "It slows your heart rate," she explained. "In-breath spikes heart rate, outbreath slows it." Slow the breath, and your nervous system sends the room one message: I'm safe.
And when you signal your safety, the room receives and feels the same way. That is what earns trust, even before you've said anything worth trusting.
This is why that technical leader in the boardroom keeps losing to the extrovert. He's leading with his brain, rehearsing the next clever thing to say, while his body stays tight and small. Meanwhile the guy next to him fills the room with his free flowing gregarious words without actually saying anything smarter.
Your instinct is to prepare better content. Prepare your body instead.
Try this: Before your next meeting, close your mouth for three seconds before you speak. Don’t try to look like you’re deep in thought, just breathe in. Then speak on the exhale, letting the out-breath run to the end of your sentence instead of clipping it short. You'll feel the stillness, your voice drop and people starting to lean in.
As promised, influence in 60 seconds.
The Influence Anyone podcast:
The full conversation with Caroline Goyder covers the back story of the prop she used from her TEDx talk (10 million views!), the "rehearsed spontaneity" trick she uses to sound completely off-the-cuff in high-stakes meetings, why she thinks most advice about staying calm before a big talk is wrong, and a grounding exercise she did with me LIVE (you can do it too).
🔎 DEEP DIVE
There's more to Gravitas than breath, though. Keep reading and you'll get into:
The trap most intelligent professionals fall into when trying to influence a room
The 2,000-year-old framework Caroline built her entire coaching practice on
The one variable in the Gravitas equation most experts never learn to manage (and why it's the one that truly matters)
Most professionals think the gap between the person who gets ignored and the person who gets the attention is a gap in knowledge, or how loud the person speaks.
That's not the case.
The mechanism. Caroline Goyder has coached everyone from corporate boardrooms to a head of state, and the pattern she sees is identical no matter who she’s helping. The client she was with the morning we talked is a genuine expert, "one of the top minds in his field," she said. He'd spent decades earning that. And in the room, he is mostly ignored, because "a lot of it is about physical presence. How regulated our nervous systems are, how we are listening, how grounded we are." His boss has none of his technical depth but all of the room's attention, because his boss has that regulation. "He's like a magnet," she said. "And he's pulling energy away."
Why the brain does this. This isn't shallow, and it isn't new. Long before we had language, survival meant reading a stranger's body in a split second — calm, or dangerous, or about to get you killed. Evolutionary biologists call this rapid threat assessment, and it still has this wiring even though we’ve swapped the savanna for boardrooms. Before anyone can evaluate the logic of your argument, they're running that same prehistoric program on you: calm, or a threat, or a liability about to make things worse.
Malcolm Gladwell has a name for this in Blink: thin-slicing — the brain's habit of reaching a confident judgment from a tiny sliver of information, almost instantly, before you're even aware you've made it. His favorite example is a study by psychologist Nalini Ambady, who showed people silent two-second video clips of professors teaching. There was no sound or slides, just body language. And then asked them to rate the professor. Their ratings nearly matched the scores students gave after sitting through an entire semester of that professor's class. Two seconds, zero words, and the gut had already decided.
A voice that's tight, fast, and thin registers the same way, unconsciously, as a body under stress. And a body under stress doesn't get trusted no matter what the mouth attached to it says. Caroline's version of this, said plainly: "Until he really accesses his body and his breath, no one in the room is going to take him seriously."
The trap the smartest people fall into. Here's where it gets counterintuitive. The instinct, when you feel unheard, is to go inward. Go rehearse the argument again, sharpen the wording, and get it exactly right. Caroline calls this out directly: focus on yourself, and "your voice kind of disappears, it gets a bit flatter." The audience can immediately feel that the person has “left”, even while he’s still talking. The fix? Run outward instead, toward what conductor Ben Zander calls being "in contribution, not competition." "Competition spikes the nervous system," Caroline said. "It causes all sorts of trouble." The expert who is trying to compete and convince the room by piecing together the best argument is going to lose people. The one genuinely listening for where he can help is the one the room leans toward. So if you feel ignored, go outward, not inward.
A lesson from the stoics. Marcus Aurelius asked it two thousand years ago: how can we lead others if we can't first lead ourselves? Caroline's method is to start with something physical. Lead yourself by leading your breath. In for four, out for six, then in fo four, out for eight. Longer exhale, slower heart rate, calmer voice: a signal the room reads before you've said anything. That's the whole trick behind negotiator Chris Voss's late-night FM DJ voice. It’s not about a vocal affectation, it’s signalling a calm nervous system. (Check out minute 22 in the podcast where Caroline does a breathing exercise with me live.)
What makes up gravitas. Caroline built her Gravitas equation out of Aristotle’s teachings:
Gravitas = Ethos (credibility) + Pathos (emotion) + Logos (logic) - Anxiety
Anxiety is the one variable most experts never learn to manage, because they were trained to manage the other three instead. "Anxiety puts noise into the signal," she told me. "People are busy, even unconsciously ,working out whether they can trust you." You don't need more ethos. You need less noise.
Application:
Before you speak in a high-stakes room, spend ten seconds on your feet and your breath, not your talking points.
When you feel the urge to out-argue someone louder than you, redirect it: observe and listen to what’s going on around you. What's the one thing you can say that actually helps this room right now?
Practice your exhale — longer, slower, on purpose — until it’s stable and feels purposeful.
Say less, and let what you do say land on a full breath instead of a rushed one.
Your job was never to out-talk the other people in the room. It's to become the person the room's collective nervous system decides it can trust.
🔥 IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
The Borrowed Years Rule (from a hospice nurse)
Don't borrow from a future that might not exist — start on a Tuesday, start scared, just start. It struck a nerve: 35,711 impressions and 38 comments in under a week.
💸 SPLURGE
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I don’t know about you, but when I’m thinking, I need something in my hands, it helps me focus. These Speks magnetic stones does it for me. Feeling the tiny pebble-like magnets between my fingertips and sometimes grasping the whole lot in the palm of my hands, it’s soothing yet stimulating.
If you’re looking for desk fidget, this one rocks (get it?)
I have the Coral
Professionals of influence, I’ll see you next Sunday! 😉
Are you a "professional of influence" ?
Change behavior, change lives 🤘🏽
Howie Chan
Creator of Influence Anyone
P.S. I’ve been building something and I can’t wait for you to see it soon…