Episode #335: Don't Forget To Pause When Presenting

Don’t Forget To Pause When Presenting

Nervousness drives speed when we are speaking. Without even realising it, the adrenaline pumping through our veins is speeding everything up. Once we get on a roll, it is hard to get off that speeding, runaway train. The speed may not always be driven by nerves though. Sometimes expertise can be our downfall. I was listening to a speaker being interviewed on a podcast and I was vaguely wondering why I was having trouble understanding what she was saying. It slowly dawned on me that she spoke for long passages, quite quickly, injected no pauses into her flow and she also had an accent when she spoke in English. That combo was a message killer. She was quite expert in her field, so she certainly had a lot to say and was confident to say it.

The content wasn’t satisfying though. Why was that? She was making me work too hard to get her message. She had “message giver” consciousness but she didn’t have any sense of the “message receiver” side of the equation. The podcast host just let her ramble on and that didn’t help either. If he was a bit more experienced, he would have realised she needed to speak in segments, rather than in one long monologue. He could have helped her to package up her message into more bite sized pieces. Even without speaking fast and having no pauses, her message was going to be hard to grasp anyway, because she was providing a lot of content. This massive content hits us like continuous waves and each successive wave wipes out what came before it, so it is hard to internalise.

From this perspective, we realise that having a lot to say and a lot of knowledge doesn’t mean anything in terms of message delivery, unless we know what we are doing. So whether it is nerves or knowledge, driving the problem, we need to give the audience the chance to chew a bit on what we just said. This is where the pause comes in. Once what we have said has sunk in, they are ready for the next section.

If we are to stop the runaway train, we have to inject some silence into the proceedings. This presumes we notice what is going on. I doubt our speaker on the podcast had any clue on how she was coming across. She was powering away, ignorant of whether the way she was delivering the talk was effective or not. Unless she recognises herself in this podcast of mine, she is probably still clueless and is likely to remain that way.

This is a big danger, because we can spend our whole career or big chunks of it doing things the wrong way. Most people around us are equally untrained, so who is there to give us the necessary feedback to be able to adjust and fix the issue? Usually there is no one around, so off we go, year after year, repeating the same fault.

It doesn't matter whether we are speaking, answering questions on a panel or in a podcast, we have to be in control of the delivery. We need to break our talk up into small packages for delivery and we need some “white space” between them. The pauses are usually not overly dramatic and long. A five second pause sounds entirely normal and unremarkable. Ten seconds or more however and the audience wonders what is going on. Have we forgotten what we want to say or are we lost in our flow, is there something wrong?

On occasion, we may use that doubt and employ a long pause for dramatic effect.

If we feel we are losing the attention of or concentration from our audience and we see they are getting distracted, we need to get them back to listening to us. A longer pause has the effect of a pattern interrupt and those who have tuned us out, thinking about something else, become puzzled by the change. This pattern interrupt forces them to come back to us to find out what is going on. Or we may use the longer pause to let a rhetorical question hang in the air for longer than normal. This creates some tension in the room because there is now a question as to whether we the audience, have to come up with the answer or whether the speaker is going to answer that question. This tension is very useful for keeping the audience’s attention focused on our talk.

Soundbites, followed by pauses, may be useful for media interviews, but they don’t work well in speeches. We need to make sure we have enough substance to our points, to back up any statements we may be making. So the balance between speaking and non-speaking periods needs to be considered. We can inject short pauses for audience comprehension purposes and still keep the flow going.

Don’t forget to pause when you are delivering your talk. If you do, then you can be much more confident that the message you want to get across will be percolating away nicely in the brains of the audience.