How to Harness the Power of the Pause

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In the last Body Talk Brief, we covered How to Improve Your Speaking Voice with communication expert David Tyler. One of David’s suggestions had nothing to do with your voice at all, but rather, knowing when to not use your voice. At Body Talk, we call this “the power of the pause.”

Public speaking is incredibly challenging for most people, and one of the fears that speakers face is that they will forget what they’re saying and be trapped in a seemingly never ending awkward silence. We want to invite you to embrace that silence. Silence can be an audible highlighter pen, drawing attention to the key focus of your presentation. It can be an invitation to the audience to participate in what you’re saying, even if they aren’t responding out loud. It can even help you appear more human, adding a dose of authenticity to your speech or presentation.?

With enough practice, you can learn to use pauses with power.

1. A pause can help you remember what you were going to say next.

Most people fear freezing up in front of an audience and forgetting what they were going to say. Rather than letting panic take over, use the pause as an opportunity to take a breath and gather your thoughts.?

Part of the reason we sometimes forget what we were going to say is that when we’re nervous, our body tenses up, and we hold our breath, causing less oxygen to get to the brain. Pausing for a few seconds may feel like hours for you, but the audience may not even notice. It’ll be worth it to take a couple of breaths and get yourself back on track.?

2. A pause can add weight to what you’ve just said.

Sometimes powerful or dramatic statements can be leveraged even further with an audience by adding a pause after saying a key message.

You’ve most likely seen actors do this during a monologue. They say something crucial to the development of their character, then pause, leaving the audience to really absorb the impact of what was just said. Shakespeare even wrote these pauses into his verse. When he breaks the pattern of his iambic pentameter, scholars argue that the remaining empty beats without text are meant for pauses. In Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” he says:

“To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause—there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.”

Each line contains 10 beats except, “Must give us pause—there’s the respect.” This was a direction to the actor to give that line more weight with a brief pause before shifting to a new idea. A dramatic pause between thoughts can help your audience to lean in a little closer with excitement. If the Bard can do it, so can you!

3. A pause can help you reduce the number of filler words in your speech.

Sometimes we choose to vocalise our pauses instead of allowing them to just be. This sounds like “um” or “err” most of the time. In other instances, it might be repeated words such as “actually” or “obviously.”

Vocalised pauses can be distracting to audiences and even annoying depending on their frequency. It’s okay to simply have a brief pause and allow it to act as just that — no drama, no ulterior motives, no tension.

Sometimes silence is more powerful than words.

In order for your key messages to land, you need to allow space around them. See what happens when you apply the power of the pause!

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