To influence your audience and have them think, feel and take action, you must engage your audience, give them time to reflect on what you’ve said and relate it back to their own lives. Rushing through your speech does not offer that opportunity. Pause does.
Pause, expressed in silence, is more than silence. As Dale Carnegie put, “It is silence made designedly eloquent.” Every eloquent speaker knows and has mastered the power of pause.
- Pause to build suspense
Before you have the chance to influence your audience, you must first have their attention. That’s not enough. You must be able to maintain their attention throughout your speech, constantly getting your audience interested in what you say. To achieve that, think about the most intriguing movie you’ve ever watched. What was it that kept you engrossed? That’s right. All great movies are filled with suspense that gets you hooked and wondering what’s going to happen next. To keep your audience’s attention, you need to create suspense. Pause builds up suspense. The next time before you reveal your solution to their problem, express your insightful viewpoint, or deliver your punch line, pause, and then enjoy the anticipation in your audience’s eyes.
- Pause to allow reflection
Your audience needs time to digest what you’ve said and evaluate it against their own lives. You therefore need constant pauses for them to reflect. Thiagi, a renowned expert in learning, said, “People learn from reflection.” If you don’t give your audience time to reflect, you create no impact. The problem many speakers and presenters share is to cram too much information in too little time. As a result, they have to rush through and end up losing the audience. Before you craft your speech or presentation, list the major takeaways you want your audience to get and structure your speech or presentation around that. It could be problem-solutions or three-initiatives, etc.
There are definitely more than two ways in using pauses. If I list them all, it’ll only confuse and discourage you. In fact, your focus in giving a speech is not on when and how to pause, but on whether your audience could follow you, understand you and will be inspired to change the way they think, feel or act. When you have that in mind, you’ll master the power of pause and leave a lasting impact in the people who listen to you.
