PausingWhy, When, Where, & HowPausing in a presentation is like a pit stop for the mind. It is a stop for both your mind and the mind of your listeners. It allows you to punctuate what your saying, transition into new thoughts, emphasize and add drama. It is a way to deal with circumstances and most of all for the audience to have time to mentally respond. Imagine going on a coast to coast trip, in your car, never stopping to stretch your legs, eat or other necessities. You would not be a very happy traveler. Those breaks, keep you alert, fresh. They prevent blood clots from prolonged sitting without movement. Those stops allow you to smell the roses. They allow you to stop and…well, you will have to go to this place by your self. When we deliver our speech, we take our audience on a mental trip. Would we ask of them something we ourselves would not do? Take that little break. A Break for the Mind Of course a break for the mind could amount to several parts of a second split into a thousand parts. The best can speed type over 300 words a minute and read over 600 words a minute. The rest of us struggle along. We think at about 400 words a minute. The average rate of speaking is about 125 words a minute. Our think to speak ratio doesn’t mean we have a license to talk non stop. For an informational, motivational, or persuasive speech, the little pit stops allow the mind to stop and smell the roses of your speech. Or it may be stopping to eat a bite of mental food. That brain food it eats, your speech, needs to be digested. How fast can it digest? Since the brain is running at 400 and our mouth at 125, our goal is to monopolize on the balance of the remaining 275 words. We want to capture that ability to process those extra words. Remember to eat is not to digest or process. To be effective, that processing needs to be on our speech. It needs to be processing on the words we use. Otherwise all 400 words will be used up by other programs running in the brain if our talk is of no interest or even boring. How do we get it to use that extra word processing band width of the brain focused on what we are saying? Use the pausing pit stop. Pauses serve several purposes that work as a mental pit stop for both speaker and listeners. Reasons for Pausing
Pausing to punctuate is a simple grammatical rule. Know the rule and you will know when to pause. The Sentence Stop Sign Period (.) is the stop sign. This is where the voice takes a downward turn in tonality or inflection if you’re making a statement. A question would take an upward turn. Some may remember the Monty Python line, “Sir, by what name do you go.” The reply, “Some call me Tim?” How would your audience know that this statement was punctuated as a question? Through a combination of tones and that stop sign to allow them to process the information. Try it. Say out loud, ‘some call me Tim’ with a downward or decreasing tone or inflection. Now make it into a question by asking ‘is your name Tim?’ with an upward or increasing tone. Either way you do it, you come to a stop. Your up or downward tone is how you indicate a question or statement. The stop sign, the period is the point to allow your audience to pause. Slightly more for a general question. Slightly less for a general statement. Other Sentence Traffic Signs Comma (,) the pause is more slight allowing for more info of the same thought. Quotations (“) tells your audience it is someone’s statement. A strong pause should set them off. Many experienced speakers avoid using or gesturing air quotes. Rather they make the quotes with their voice. Pausing for Transitions These pauses, usually a bit longer than a punctuated pause, allow for the mental traffic of all that has been said to clear for the next traffic to pass through. The transitions should be few so, these should be too. How Long, How Often? The length of pause is of importance here also. If it lasts to long, it will appear as thought you don’t know what to say next. As you gain mastery you will discover your own unique voice. If you want a general guideline, start by counting to your self, “one one thousand, two one thousand, and three one thousand.” Three seconds for transitions should suffice. You want to get to the point where you can look at the audience and feel what they feel as you speak and as you pause. Also make sure you do not do it too often. It may make the talk drag. This is where your audience to process what they have heard. Even though we can process 400 words a minute doesn’t mean we can remember 400 words. We remember thoughts. At best, your audience will only remember 15-25% of what you say. It benefits you audience by allowing time for the mind to process what is being said. It benefits the speaker too. If asking a question, your stopping allows you a second to look at your audience. It gives you a second to physically and mentally take a deep breath. The trap...human reasoning is the more we talk the smarter we sound. That is a fallacy. If what we have to say is important, allow time for it to sink in. So make it stand out. Too many words spoken with out adequate pausing is usually a sign of too much material. For Emphasis & Drama This is a really long pause. It will be limited to truly significant statements. This is not something that would be used in every speech you give. It allows for anticipation by the audience for something to be said. It also allows the audience to take in what has been said. Imagine you just informed someone their mother just died. You would not keep talking. You would give a moment to let the news sink in. That is what this is all about. I saw it best used when a speaker was explaining compassion and empathy. He paused and looked down at his notes. The pause continued as he lifted up his notes and looked at other pages. A look of ‘where did I put that…’ came across his face. Then in what seemed an eternity, he had that light bulb over the head look on his face. He held up one finger as if to say, “Ah ha.” He then reached into his pocket to pull out a piece of paper. He then asked the audience if they were starting to feel for him. This pause probably took less than a minute. But it effectively illustrated to the audience the quality of empathy. It created drama. Imagine a speaker who doesn’t know his next line. If you were a speaker how would you feel? Pausing for Audience to Mentally Respond As you will learn on this site, the biggest aspect of motivational and persuasive speaking is power statements and power questions. To enhance the informational speech, questions are employed as if to open the storage bins of the mind for the information you wish to place inside. Questions need answers. If you want to give answers, they need to be ready to receive them. You need to allow time for them to process the question. If you give an answer, they need time to process and decide what they will do with it. If we remember 15% of what we hear, of the 400 words we can process a minute, only 60 will be remembered. Allow place for that memory. Example: Imagine your giving a lecture using as a reference Robert T. Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Your theme is asset management. You ask the audience a question to draw them into your theme that poses a dilemma for them. You know that unless they read the book, they will not know the answer. So allow a pit stop for the mind. You ask, “Is your home an asset or a liability? What would most people say?” At the asking of the question, mentally say to your self what the answer would be. Say it slowly and distinctly. Say to your self, “Well, most people would say it is an asset. But the fact that he is asking the question means it may not be. Hmmmm.” That would take between 5 to 8 seconds. Allow the audience to have that kind of time. A word of caution here. Overusing will result in the lecture feeling like it is being dragged along. These need to be for key points, used judiciously. It is just like an auto race, if you make too many pit stops, you will finish last, if at all. Pausing for Circumstances You may face interruptions that will require a pause. To keep talking would often be useless as the audience will be distracted anyway. Interruptions may be a baby crying, a loud truck or train passing, a jet flying overhead. Although rare, interruptions do happen. If you cannot raise your voice to compensate, then it is time to pause. One of the worst distractions a speaker can be faced with is someone in the audience getting ill to the point of needing an ambulance. If the person is still conscious and awaiting care to arrive, some experienced speakers have chosen to keep talking. It may be a hard call to make. If you chose to keep going and a large number of the audience is aware of the problem, what should you do? Again, some experienced speakers explain why the show must go on. Even though your reason may be that you want to accomplish your goal, that would not be the best reason to explain to the audience. It will make you sound heartless. You might say something like, “To minimize the embarrassment to our dear colleague, (dear friend, our visitor, etc) lets continue so we can let the ambulance crew best do what they do. Your effectiveness has been compromised either way. This allows you to keep going. It allows your audience to know what is going on. It makes it easier for the ambulance crew to accomplish their mission, which they will appreciate. Most of all, it does something for the patient. For the person who is ill, it sends a message that what is going on is not so bad. It alleviates the stress of feeling like they ruined things for everyone. Naturalness is more than natural speaking. Do you know what it is and how to develop this skill? Public Speaking Volume if mastered improves Naturalness and Pausing. Do you know how and when to master this skill. Enthusiasm and How to Attain It is another related speaker skill to learn. Do you know what it is? Do you know how to use it in your public speaking? 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