Why Don’t I Speak Well in Meetings? What Listeners Do to Your Confidence (and how to fix it)
Speaking and listening: public speaking is hard when listeners look as fed up as these ones do
The short answer: if you stumble, mumble or hesitate when speak to important people, or your English falls apart in meetings, the cause is not just nerves or your accent alone. Research shows that communication is built jointly, between the speaker AND the wit listener. When listeners seem distracted or judgemental, speakers lose confidence; when you know someone is really listening, speakers tell their stories, and explain their ideas, more clearly. Learning to read the room and do the work for your listeners SO THAT THEY BECOME BETTER LISTENERS is a trainable skill, and it sits at the heart of how I coach confident speaking and accent reduction
Obviously I talk all the time about how to speak well. But I’ve been reading a lot of research recently, on how we listen.
So this article is going to be a bit of a brain dump of all the things I’ve been reading and thinking about for the past few weeks - I won’t make it too boring, promise.
Wow, that was quick.
What I mean is, you’ve already started making up your mind about whether you want to keep reading - whether you’re bored or too pressed for time, or think it sounds dull, or realise you’re really looking for an article about how my coaching is going to transform your accent and make you sound impeccably British (that’s this one, by the way).
Think of two meetings you've had recently.
In the first, you were talking to a colleague you trust. You spoke with energy; you didn’t stumble or hesitate, and found the words you wanted. You may have a strong accent that many people around you aren’t familiar with, but you didn't think about it once.
In the second, you were presenting to someone senior. She glanced at her phone twice. About a minute into it, you lost your thread, your stumbled over a word, said ‘um’, and you heard yourself sounding exactly the way you were afraid you'd sound.
Same person. Same English. Same brain.
Many of the professionals I coach describe exactly this: "I’m fine with speaking in normal, but it’s when I’m under pressure that I don’t come across well."
The usual explanations are nerves, or your accent, or "I'm just not a good public speaker."
But the other explanation is sitting right in front of you: the person or people listening.
“communication is not solely down to the speaker; it’s something that speaker and listener build together, moment by moment”
What about the listener?
It’s not just me always saying it. There is a surprisingly rich body of research showing that communication is not solely down to the speaker; t's something that speaker and listener build together, moment by moment. Once you understand that, it changes how you how you prepare for speaking situations, how you speak, and (especially if you lead a team) how you listen.
With a script or without, good speakers create their speech with their listeners
Big speeches: the listener influences how the speaker speaks. If we can help listeners listen, we will speak better
The psychologist Janet Bavelas and her colleagues did a series of experiments where they asked people to tell a personal "close call" story to a listener. Some listeners were properly engaged. Others were given a distracting task (counting words in what they heard) so that they could only half-listen.
The stories told to the distracted listeners were noticeably worse, and the endings suffered most: the punchline fell flat, the narrator trailed off or fumbled.
Sound familiar? How often do you avoid looking around when you’re speaking in meetings, in case you see someone who looks bored or sceptical?
Their paper, "Listeners as Co-Narrators", argues that listeners are not passive receivers. Their small responses, a wince at the right moment, an "oh no", a look of real curiosity, actively shape how the story gets told.
So if you've ever thought "I'm much worse at telling this story than I should be", it may be that the listener didn’t reply encouragingly in a way that would have spurred you to more vivid storytelling.
Boring voice: if you expect listeners to be bored, you will sound boring
The other day I had a client observe that sometimes, in meetings, when we’re not sure our ideas will be well-receiving, or we’re worried we’ll rub colleagues or bosses the wrong way, we deliberately speak in an under-energised way. We don’t want to risk sounding ‘passionate’ about something if we think our passion won’t be shared.
But then we risk our good ideas getting overlooked, because the way we SOUND and LOOK when we talk about them doesn’t signal to the listener ‘this speaker has something of VALUE to say’.
A related study, by Anna Kuhlen and Susan Brennan, "Anticipating Distracted Addressees", found that speakers adapt their storytelling both to what they expect about their listener's attention and to how the listener actually behaves while they speak.
In other words, you are not only reacting to the person in front of you. You're also reacting to the person you predicted would be in front of you.
If you start speaking expecting listeners to be bored, you start speaking like someone who is boring. (I wrote an article about this back in 2024)
I see this all the time with clients who talk about important subjects, having already decided the listener doesn't really care. By the time they open their mouths, their delivery sounds like they don’t care. So why should an audience care about the words of someone who doesn’t care?
FOCUS: your listener will help you edit your thoughts in real time, if you let them
There is another experiment, which is strongly linked to my approach to focus.
Herbert Clark and Meredyth Krych had one person direct another in building a Lego model. When the person giving the direction could see the builder's workspace, the job went noticeably faster. They didn't just give the instructions more efficiently; they altered what they were saying mid-sentence, paused when the builder looked unsure, and corrected themselves when a piece was about to go in the wrong place.
Building through communication: speaker and listener co-create the act of communicating, if the speaker takes the focus off her negative inner voice
The paper is called "Speaking While Monitoring Addressees for Understanding", and the clue is in the title: good speakers speak and pay attention to the listener, at the same time. This is what meeting the listeners’ needs is all about.
A speaker doesn’t pay attention to the needs of the listener tends to focus on her own needs - or rather the needs of the neurotic and negative little voice in her head.
We’ve all been there; you turn your attention inward to that voice (How do I sound? Did I pronounce that right? Is my accent too strong? am I boring?) and your listener is reduced to an awkward bystander, while you have a side-conversation with that inner voice. You stop thinking about listeners’ needs and focus on listeners’ judgements. And their judgements, which can only ever be imagined, are different to their needs as listeners.
This is the trap I was talking about in How to Sound Human: Finding a 'Real' Voice in Public Speaking. When we slip into a "professional voice", we're focusing on how WE want to sound, instead of on how the listener needs us to sound; and the listener starts to feel forgotten.
Listeners’ workl: A speaker making eye contact with a colleague in a meeting, adjusting her explanation as the colleague responds
Clear speech is built together, not delivered alone
The fourth study, Herbert Clark and Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs's "Referring as a Collaborative Process", is my favourite, because it changes what we mean by "being clear."
Pairs of participants were given a set of abstract, awkward shapes and asked to get their partner to identify each one. At first, speakers laboured through long, hesitant descriptions (something like "the one that looks like a person ice-skating, with the arms out in front"). The partner asked questions, offered guesses, and corrected. Over several rounds the description shrank to something like "the ice skater", a label the pair now owned together.
Meaning, the authors argue, wasn't carried over from one head to another. It was established between two people, through a sequence of small exchanges.
This matters enormously if you speak English as an additional language, or with an accent that your listeners aren't used to.
It means that being understood isn't a pure test of how closely your pronunciation matches a standard. It's also a function of whether the listener is finding it easy to pay attention, whether you are in tune with those ‘needs of the listener’ I always talk about.
It doesn't mean pronunciation doesn't matter. Of course it does, and clear, confident pronunciation is the work I do every day with speakers of Russian, Chinese, French, Spanish, Polish and Italian (see my guide to ‘BBC’ British English pronunciation tips for professionals).
But it does mean that accent work and communication work belong together. A speaker with excellent pronunciation who ignores their listener still gets misunderstood. A speaker with a noticeable accent who reads their listener well, pauses, checks in and builds shared vocabulary is often understood with ease.
Listeners who aren't used to your accent are having to do more ‘work’ that usual to recognise the sound you’re with the English sounds they hear most of the time. In accent reduction coaching I work on the specific sounds, stress and rhythm patterns that most affect clarity for speakers of your language, but it’s not just ‘elocution lessions’; we look at how speakers with any accent need to bring the listener with them when they speak, and practically how to do that.
Four things to try this week
None of these requires you to change your accent or your personality.
1. Find a friendly face before you start. In any room, find the person who is most engaged and speak to them first. Their supportive presence will give you a taste of the kind of active listening that we would all love to have, all of the time, and it can help us to get comfortable with taking our attention off the judgmental voice in the head.
2. Pause and look. After delivering a thought, pause: it’ll give you time to take a breath and NOTICE your listeners. A pause isn't dead air. It's time for your listeners to think about what you’ve just said, and time for you to think about what you’re about to say. It’s also a chance to see how it’s landing; can I move on, or do I need to say more on that point? (I've written more about this in The Power of Pauses.)
3. Invent nothing, deny nothing. Why pretend you find pronouncing tricky words, tricky? If a word is crucial and tricky to pronounce, or specialised, share that with listeners: ‘this is a bit of a mouthful but here goes…’). Especially if it’s a word that require more explanation, then like Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs's "ice skater", it becomes common ground between you and listeners, to puzzle it out.
4. Invite the repair. Replace "Is that all clear so far?" (which invites a polite yes) with "What questions does that raise?" or "Where would you like me to say more?" You've given listeners permission to get clarification.
Frequently asked questions
Why do I speak more fluently with some people than others? Because speaking is collaborative. Research on conversation shows that listeners' attention, expressions and responses shape how a speaker constructs and delivers what they say. A listener who is engaged and non-judgemental tends to make fluent, confident speech easier. One who seems distracted or evaluative tends to make it harder.
Does a strong accent make it harder to be understood? It can, and focused accent training helps. But being understood also depends on shared context, your listener's attention, and your ability to monitor and adjust as you speak. Strengthening those skills often makes an accent far less of an obstacle.
How can I speak more confidently in meetings? Stop trying to perform and start paying attention to your listeners. Find an engaged face, pause to check understanding, define key terms early, and invite questions in a way that makes asking easy.
Where this leaves you
If you've ever walked out of a meeting thinking "why didn’t that go as well as I hoped? Why didn’t I sound as confident as I felt?", I hope this offers a kinder explanation than "I'm just not good at this." Confidence in speaking is partly built in the space between you and whoever is listening, and that is a skill you can train.
This is the kind of work I do with clients: not just polishing pronunciation, but helping you to read your listeners, and stay focused under pressure from that negative inner voice.
Want to find out how this could work for your own speaking?
Book a free 1-hour online taster session with me, or Sophie, or Nathalie, and we'll look at how to apply this to the way you speak at work.
Explore more about my accent reduction coaching or my effective speaking coaching.
For more of my recent writing on speaking, try How to Send Better Voicenotes.
Thanks for reading :)