Last week’s post discussed the public speaking problems caused by a speaker’s predilection for moving continually during a presentation. This week’s post, which owes everything to speaking guru Anett Grant, talks about the virtue of the strategic pause.
A pause is “much more than just a chance to catch your breath. Deployed the right way, it adds drama, weight, and clarity to your message” says Ms. Grant. Essentially, a pause is punctuation, and it does three things.
A pause allows you to transition from one idea to another, like the break between paragraphs. In writing for the web, for example, we’re urged to break content into short paragraphs. Small chunks of content tend to grab a busy or distracted reader’s attention better. As Ms. Grant puts it, “Think about the difference between reading a page-long paragraph versus just a few short paragraphs.”
Well-timed pauses help you pace your presentation. Too-frequent or too-long pauses can make your audience impatient. But if you don’t pause or rarely pause and move quickly through your presentation—what Ms. Grant refers to as “over-caffeinated barking”—your audience can disengage. Strategic pauses at the end of important ideas create a more natural rhythm. (Two-second pauses are optimal.) Test your presentation before going live to see how pauses work for you.
Pausing creates dramatic contrast, which Ms. Grant equates to the “fourth wall” in theater. This convention creates a sense of intimacy that “declaimed speeches” do not. With well-placed pauses, you keep your audience engaged, and, I might add, don’t wear them out with artificiality. This “looser, more dynamic style” is where business speaking is going today.
Mastering the pause is well worth your time. Truly good salespeople are pause artists. They’re masters of the full stop, too. They go for the close, and they stop talking. The next time they speak is to offer up thanks for the order.
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