How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

by Scott Adams

For starters, it helps to learn to breathe from the bottom of your lungs, not in the upper chest area. Proper breathing has lots of other benefits, including stress reduction, increased and more efficient metabolism, and better physical stamina, so it’s worth learning.8 If you put your hand on your belly button and breathe correctly, that’s the only part of your torso that should be rising and falling. If your upper chest is expanding when you breathe normally, you’re doing it wrong. When you get your breathing right, your words will come out sounding more confident. Next, you need to pick a tone. Some voice experts will tell you that your best and most natural tone is probably higher than the way you normally speak. Many people have a natural tendency to speak lower to other humans than they might to a pet, for example. On some level, we all understand that lower voices confer some weight to what we say. The downside of a lower voice is that it’s difficult to hear words that match background noise.