One of the most important skills to master when you're overcoming your fear of speaking, is how to breathe properly. It's amazing how bad we are at breathing, you think that we'd be able to do it naturally. But in fact, we unlearn how to breathe. And ideally, what you want to do is breathe like a baby. What do I mean by that? Well, when we become adults, we often start to breathe very high in the chest.

But that's not good if we're feeling afraid, because it only tells our brain that we're more panicked than we really are listening to this sound in the chest. That is the sound of panic, isn't it? So I want you to try and avoid breathing into the chest as much as you can. So if you put your left hand on your chest, ideally, this shouldn't move. This whole area here should be nice and still you notice that when I'm speaking, it's not going up and down. So nicely Relax, stop here in the chest.

And then take your right hand and place it on your diaphragm. Now this is a mobile muscular sleeve underneath the ribs that supports your lungs in pumping out the air. So put your right hand on your diaphragm and remember that right is right. And you want to ideally breathe into that hand. Nice and easy. In and out, breathe low, breathe like a baby.

Well, people find hard about this as they often do it the wrong way round. So as you breathe in, the diaphragm should be moving out. So your hand should be coming out when you're breathing in. And as you breathe out, you're encouraging the hand in the diaphragms moving in and up. So take a bit of time now to practice that. It's not very familiar for most people and it can take you a little while to get used to it.

Health and Safety warning if you do feel dizzy, just take a break. Because breathing deeply is quite strange for most people if you haven't done it for a while. Now once you've mastered breathing low, you'll notice how relaxing that is and how much it supports the voice. People often like my voice, and I always say that because it sounds as though it's coming from the ground. Remember what I told you about heavy legs, you have heavy legs, and you combine that with low breathing that it sounds as though your voice is traveling through the body and out without any tension getting in the way and obstructing the voice. So breathing is a great way to make your voice sound more interesting and avoid that monotone and also a great way to help you relax.

If you want a quick shortcut to feeling better, especially just before you're going to go on stage, I recommend using a yoga breath called Jaya breathing. It's thought to access the parasympathetic nervous system which is basically like taking a chill pill. So here's how you do it. Put your hand in front of your mouth and breathe as though you're going to frost up a mirror like this. And then what you need to do is close your mouth around that same breath like this. So the breath is slightly Audible, I sometimes call it the Darth Vader breath.

And this is very relaxing for the body and mind. So I recommend that you do this while people are applauding before another speaker or just when they're applauding for you to go on. You take a nice you Jaya breath. And as you breathe out, just say to yourself down, down, down. So you're asking your body to go down, let the tension go down, the adrenalin go down, the nerves go down. That will put you in a really good space for speaking.

Now the third part of breathing is to get ready for speech. And what we want to do with speaking ideally is to bring the voice forward so that it has a nice rich tone and it has a good volume. A great little tip for doing this is to hit. Do you remember when you were a kid and you took a bite valve off, and then it would make a really strong hitting sound. And if you were anything like me, you were scrambling to get the pump on to the tire. Well, it sounds like this.

And what I'm doing there is I'm breathing into the diaphragm and then with my right hand, I can encourage the diaphragm in very gently, but I'm making a very specific sound. And I'm trying to get that to carry across the room. So when you practice your head, I want you to think about hitting the back wall with it. This is the beginning of voice projection. It also gets rid of nerves because again, it gives a focus to the voice that stops your voice shaking for example. So when you go on to Speak, a great way to stop your voice being shaky is to really push the air through when you're speaking.

And that all comes from this practice of hissing. So truly, that those different exercises a few minutes a day, and I think you're going to find that's going to have a really remarkable effect on your nerves about speaking