We recently caught up with Viv Groskop, author of best-seller How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking, and host of the How to Own the Room podcast (2.5 million downloads), to discuss resilience, risk-taking, building confidence in group settings and why imposter syndrome is not real.
What do people struggle most with when it comes to “owning the room”?
It drives me mad that a lot of people still have a very narrow definition of “confidence” and of “public speaking.” Both these terms are incredibly loaded. There’s no consensus on what we mean by these words and yet they often have negative connotations. We assert constantly that both are important in working life but we rarely go any deeper. What do people need this “confidence” for? What’s the purpose? The words “public speaking” make a lot of people shudder. But the truth is most of us are doing it all day every day: on Zoom calls, in meetings, in pitches.
My mission is to get people to completely open up how they define confidence and how they relate to being themselves in front of others. The ultimate dream for me is to help people understand their own strengths and use them — so that they can just get on with their work. So many people are harbouring multiple unnecessary insecurities and telling themselves inaccurate, time-wasting stories about their imaginary deficiencies.
Why is a workshop setting a good place to boost confidence?
One of the best ways to identify your strengths and figure out how to turn up the volume on them is in a group with others. In a group others can often see what you yourself cannot (for example, that although you may think your nerves are highly visible, no-one else has even registered them). Workshop groups also build resilience: you get to see that it doesn’t really matter if you mess up a bit because you yourself witness others “messing up” and know that it makes very little difference. We are far more forgiving of others than we are of ourselves — and when we can see that in action, it builds tolerance for “failure” and fosters the ability to risk and try again.
Obviously the environment needs to be safe and boundaried: group settings with work colleagues are very much not the same as a therapy group. There are very few opportunities in modern working life to ask questions about what works and what doesn’t in terms of how we present ourselves to the world and how we interact with each other. When you can open up that possibility and see yourself reflected through your colleagues’ eyes, it’s very powerful. The work culture and tone of a place surface very quickly in these settings.
What’s a buzzword or phrase you wish we could ditch?
The obsession with “imposter syndrome.” I once did an event where I asked a room of around five hundred women: “Who has experienced imposter syndrome?” Virtually every hand went up. Then I asked, “Who has never experienced imposter syndrome?” One woman tentatively raised her hand. She actually came up and apologised to me afterwards — which made me laugh. But I feel like she was the only one telling the truth: that it’s OK to feel secure in your knowledge, your skills and your experience. This should, in fact, be the default experience if you enjoy your work and are good at it. (And if you don’t and you’re not — choose another career!) When virtually everyone reports a “syndrome” or a hang-up, all they’re really saying is that they are suffering from the human condition. We all doubt ourselves, we all have moments of insecurity, we all have bad days. Some people are simply more open about it than others. I don’t think it’s helpful to pathologise completely normal, everyday behaviour. And the difficulty with “imposter syndrome” is that it can mask deeper issues that need discussion. Do you mean you feel unwelcome in your place of work? Do you have a boss who is belittling you? Do you keep failing to deliver on key targets? Are you struggling to make it through the day? These are specific issues that have nothing to do with “imposter syndrome.” Even the academic researchers who coined this phrase in the 1970s have disowned it. Time to let it go.
What’s the last book you read?
I just finished Terry Szuplat’s Say It Well: Find Your Voice, Speak Your Mind, Inspire Any Audience. Szuplat was one of Barack Obama’s longest-serving speechwriters and this is everything he knows about every kind of public speaking, from the tiniest of personal moments to huge speeches with a global audience. He’s a really useful guide as he admits that he himself is a reluctant speaker who has had to learn how to overcome his nerves. (He’d rather write the speech than give the speech.)
I’m obsessed with the team the Obamas built around themselves. I interviewed Michelle Obama’s speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz on the How to Own the Room podcast about how they came up with phrases like, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ The Obamas are the benchmark for relaxed confidence and clear speaking. Obviously they’re both natural speakers and they are blessed with a great deal of innate talent. But both they and all their speechwriters have been very open about how their impact was achieved by trial and error, by hard graft and by teamwork. This overturns so much about what we imagine successful speaking to be. We think it’s an individual thing and that it “just happens.” The reverse is true: with the support of others and with the right work, anyone can project this level of confidence.
If you could go back in time and give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?
I tell other people (and myself) this all the time: “It’s not about you. And no-one cares about you — in a good way.” So many of us — especially in this era of digital distraction — are gripped by the idea that other people are watching us, judging us, evaluating us, forming opinions… And the truth is — and, again, I do mean this in the nicest way — that no-one actually cares about anything that you do as much as they care about themselves. I learned this from ten years in stand-up comedy. If you are bombing or a joke didn’t land or it’s just not your night, people in the audience are more likely to be thinking about how they are getting home that night than they are to be thinking about you. No-one cares. Let it go, move on, deflect, try again. Don’t make everything about you.
For more information on Viv Groskop’s speaking topics, workshops, availability and fees, contact leo@vbqspeakers.com