We all know an influential person. Not Hillary Clinton or Emma Watson-style influential, perhaps, but powerful on a small scale: the colleague whose brilliant ideas dominate every meeting, the friend who always ends up deciding where to go for dinner, the cousin who somehow manages to bring everyone around to their opinion on Brexit.

But why are some people naturally more influential than others?

According to a new study, it's all about your voice. Psychologists in the US have discovered that you can influence people simply by lowering the pitch of your voice in the first moments of a conversation. The study, reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, found that people whose voices went down in pitch early on in a conversation were more likely to be seen as “dominant and influential” than those whose vocal pitch went up.

Crucially, those seen as “dominant” were much more likely to be able to convince others to go along with their ideas - so if you feel that you don't get listened to at work, deepening the tone of your voice might be the way to go.

The one ridiculously simple way to influence people at work