Embrace the Power of Pausing

"The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause." Mark Twain

?I’m always banging on about pausing. In fact, if people were only able to take one thing away from my workshops, I’d like it to be about the power of pausing. ??

Because Mark Twain was spot on. Rightly timed pauses not only give weight and impact to your words, they’re also crucial for clear, confident public speaking.?

Yet there are so many myths about pausing that rattle around our heads when faced with a pitch, presentation or public speaking engagement:?

“If I pause, surely people will think I’ve lost my thread?”

“If I pause, the audience will think I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“If I pause too much, won’t I send the audience to sleep?”

?Here’s the thing. Few audiences respond to a presentation or a talk by saying the speaker “paused too much”.? Pauses are a gift for those listening to you speak and they cost you, the speaker, nothing. For many of us, our mouths run ahead of our minds – we speak before we’ve fully thought through our phrasing which results in rambling, rushed and incoherent waffle. Runaway train spring to mind?

?But perhaps the reason so many of us find it difficult to pause is because:

“Pausing feels so goddamn uncomfortable.”

Research* suggests that most conversational speech consists of short (0.20 seconds), medium (0.60 seconds), and long (over 1 second) pauses. However, great public speakers often pause for two to three seconds or even longer.

For many of us, a two to three second pause can feel like an interminable silence, making pauses tricky to embrace. This is because we tend to think faster than we speak.

Further research** shows that the average professional speaks at a rate of 150 words per minute but thinks at a rate of 400 words per minute, with some suggesting the rate may be as high as 1,500 words per minute. Blimey – that’s one hell of a discrepancy. Which means it’s little wonder that when we’re speaking in public, our perception of time is distorted, and what feels like an eternity in our mind is actually a few short seconds for our audience.

The trick of course is to train yourself to be comfortable with those pauses, to stay present in the pause and to use pauses strategically.

Used wisely, pauses allow you:

• To collect your thoughts
• To emphasize a point
• To give your audience time to absorb a key insight
• To breathe (therefore reducing anxiety)
• To build suspense / create drama
• To notice what’s going on in the room and read the audience
• To listen
• To avoid using gravitas-stealing filler words (umm, ahh, like, basically, obviously - you know the ones)

If you'd like to see how pausing can help you stay calm AND have more impact when speaking in public, try the following tips:?

1. Practice pausing in low-stakes everyday work situations – when introducing yourself to a meeting for example.
2. Simply close your mouth and breathe - give enough time to breathe in and out.
3. Commit to pausing at the end of sentences.
4. Stay present in the pause. Don’t fiddle or flap; pause with calm, considered confidence.
5. Trust it is never as long as you think.
6. Pause instead of using filler words - people won't notice or will think you're considering your next words carefully.
7. Keep practicing – the more you pause, the more natural it will feel and the easier it will become.

Remember that well-timed pauses create a blissful listening experience for an audience. They create neat, bite-sized chunks of meaning that allow your audience to digest what you have to say, moment by moment, thought by thought.

So forgive me if you come to one of my workshops and I'm still banging on about embracing the power of pausing. I bang on about it because I know that pausing can be the difference between an 'ok' public speaker and an awesome public speaker.

Go on. Try it.

Pause.

Feel the power.

Keep your audience hanging on your every word.

Feels good, doesn’t it?

*ICSA – International Speech Communication Association

**Quantified Communications and Missouri University