The Power Pause . . . for Effect

PauseCoca-Cola’s 1929 slogan was “The Pause that Refreshes.”

Pauses can, indeed, be refreshing, and a judicious pause can refresh your business presentation.

Here’s how pausing can ignite, can inspire, can rivet an audience’s attention on the salient points that you want them to remember.

The prudent pause for reflection, for the audience to digest your message, for dramatic effect to emphasize what comes next . . . all add depth and richness to communicate to your audience gathered to hear something special.

Make friends with silence so that you feel comfortable in its presence.

Public Speaking Pause Power

The correct pauses imbue your talk with incredible power.  With proper timing and coupled with other techniques, the pause evokes strong emotions in your audience.

A pause can project and communicate as much or more than mere words.

Your Pause can Refresh your Audience . . . give it a chance to anticipate what comes next
Your Pause can Refresh your Audience . . . give it a chance to anticipate what comes next

The public speaking pause is part of your nonverbal repertoire.  It’s a superbly useful tool.

The comfortable pause communicates your competence and confidence.

The pause telegraphs deep, serious thought.

The Power Pause is underutilized today, but has served as arrow-in-quiver of the finest presenters over centuries.

Presentation Master Grenville Kleiser put it this way in 1912:  “Paradoxical tho it may seem, there is an eloquence and a power in silence which every speaker should seek to cultivate.”

When you use the pause judiciously, you emphasize the point that comes immediately after the pause.  You give the audience time to digest what you just said.

And you generate anticipation for what comes next.

So save this technique for the moments just prior to each of your main points.

How do you pause?

When?

Silence is Your Friend

A truly effective pause can be coupled with a motionless stance, particularly if you have been pacing or moving about or gesturing vigorously.

Couple the pause with a sudden stop, going motionless.

Look at your audience intently.

Seize their attention.

Hesitate.

Don’t waste this powerful technique on a minor point of your talk.  Time your pauses to emphasize the single most important point – your MIP – and its handful of supporting points.

Voice coach Patsy Rodenburg says:  “A pause is effective and powerful if it is active and in the moment with your intentions and head and heart.  A pause filled with breath and attention to what you are saying to your audience will give you and your audience a bridge of transitional energy from one idea to another.”

Pause, and You Accent What is to Come
Pause . . . to Accent What Comes Next

Finally, the pause can rescue you when you begin to spiral out of control or lose your train of thought.  Remember that silence is your friend.

Need a life-preserver?

Need time to regain your composure?

Try this . . .

Stop.  Look slightly down.  Scratch your chin thoughtfully.  Furrow your brow.  Take four steps to the right or left, angling a bit toward the audience.  Look up . . . and continue your talk.

Voila!  You just bought 7-8 precious seconds to collect your thoughts.

Remember the especially powerful effects you can achieve in your business presentation with the public speaking pause.  It’s a sure way to build your professional presence on the podium.

For more on superb business techniques like the public speaking pause, consult The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting.

Voice . . . for Personal Competitive Advantage

Develop your Voice for Advantage
Develop your Voice for Power and Impact

I often ask the rhetorical question “Do you have a case of Bad Presentation Voice.”

The question addresses the issue of your voice quality, one of the key issues in business presenting today.

“Bad Voice” is a problem that goes largely ignored.  For many reasons.

Pride.

Ego.

Sensitivity.

It remains a debilitating burden for many people who could otherwise be superb speakers.  And folks forfeit a key factor of potential personal competitive advantage.

Your Presentation Voice

Your voice can be a sensitive issue.

We tend to think that our voices are off-limits when it comes to changing, let alone improving, our presentations.

Business Presentation Voice
Develop a Powerful Business Presentation Voice for a Personal Competitive Advantage

We believe the voice is “natural” when, in fact, it’s likely the product of undisciplined and random influences – parents, peers, television, celebrities, radio, occasional mimicry.

The result can be awful.

Many influences in our culture have, in the last decade or so, urged on us a plaintive, world-weary whine as voice-of-choice.

Thus, voice becomes a matter of style – not just in the slang we use, but in the way our voices sound when we use that slang.

So what’s a “Bad Presentation Voice?”

Do you swallow your voice in the back of your throat so that you produce a nasal twang?

Is it pinched?

Do you use your chest as the resonating chamber it ought to be, or does your voice emanate from your throat alone?

High-pitched.  Small.  Weak.  Pinched.  Nasal.  Raspy.

Unpleasant.

Next time you stand in line at the convenience store, listen to the people around you.  Focus on the voices.  Listen for the trapped nasal sound, the whine of precious self-indulgence.

Or the sound of air rasping across vocal cords.  A voice that has no force.  No depth.

Cartoon Presentation Voice

A voice you could swat away as you would backhand a fly.

A voice from reality television.  A cartoon voice.  A voice that can even hurt your social life.

The cartoon voice is more prevalent than you might imagine.  Several reasonably-known celebrities have cartoon voices, and they usually dwell in the wasteland of reality television.

Two champions of the squeaky, whiney cartoon voice are people who appear to have achieved questionable fame for all of the wrong reasons:  Kim Kardashian and Meghan McCain.

Their voices are barely serviceable for even routine communication.  They embody all that is wrong with regard to acquiring a powerful business presentation voice.

They exhibit habitual pathologies of the worst sort.

But . . . my Voice is “Natural!”

If you want to become a good speaker, but you do not accept that you can and should improve your voice, it means that you are much like an un-coachable football player.

Oh, you want to become a superb football player, but you refuse to listen to the coach.

He tells you to develop your muscles and coordination in the gym, but you refuse.

I’m sure you see the absurdity in this.

The same is true when it comes to your presentation voice.  Voice is an extremely personal attribute, and people don’t take criticism lightly, perhaps viewing it as a self-esteem issue or an attack on personhood.

It’s not.

Don’t bristle at the notion that you should strive to develop a mellifluous and compelling presentation voice.  This is naiveté and vanity and ego masquerading as who-knows what.

It’s a self-imposed handicap and an excuse for inaction.  You hold yourself back.

It’s also a manifestation of fear.  Clare Tree Major observed this fear almost a century ago in college students of her time:

“People are exceedingly sensitive about changing their methods of speech for fear it will bring upon them the ridicule of their families and friends. . . . Charm and grace and beauty will come only when speech is unconscious – not while you have to think of every word and tone.  If a thing is right, there can be no question of affectation.  It is a greater affectation to do the wrong merely to pander to the less cultured tastes of others.  If you know a thing is right, do it.  If you have not this ideal and this courage, then it will waste your time to study correct speech. ”

What is your voice but a means of communication?

Does it have purposes other than speaking or singing?

Other than communicating?

And if we consider this carefully, it’s easy to see that clear communication depends upon the timbre of your voice.

It does matter what others think of your voice, since you use it to communicate, and it is others who receive your messages.  Doesn’t it make sense, then, to cultivate the most effective voice you possibly can?  So that you might communicate most effectively in especially powerful business presentations?

Put another way, doesn’t it make sense to eliminate what is unpleasant, ineffectual, shrill, and dissonant from your voice, if possible?

For more on developing personal competitive advantage with an especially powerful business presentation voice, consult The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting.

Make the Right Presentation Choices

especially powerful presentation choices
Choose well, for an especially powerful presentation

To deliver an especially powerful presentation means that you must choose correctly more than 100 times . . . it means that you take the correct presentation choices from start to finish.

Of course, it may not be exactly 100.

It could be 120.

Or perhaps 80.

Regardless, every time you deliver a presentation, you choose repeatedly.

Dozens of times.

Invisible Presentation Choices

And most often, you’re unaware of the silent, invisible choices you make.  Instead, your presentation simply unspools on its own, chaotic, willy-nilly . . . sometimes for the good, more often badly.

Rather than conceive of the presentation as a series of choices, many folks view the presentation as an organic whole.

As something we simply “do.”

It’s presented as something that can be conducted via a series of “tips.”  You’ve seen the articles on presentation tips.

Or business presenting is discussed as a “soft skill,” something you can pick up along the way.  Perhaps in one of the ubiquitous and uninspired “communications classes.”

We receive vague instructions in a communications class, a place where mystification of the presentation is perpetuated, the myth of the “soft skill” is maintained, and presentation folk wisdom reigns . . .

“Make eye contact!”

“Move around when you talk!”

“Don’t put your hand in your pocket!”

Advice that is obscurantist at its best and can be downright wrong at its worst.

Not a “Soft Skill”

The delivery of the Business Presentation is not a “soft skill.”  Approximately 80 percent of the presentation process is definable as a series of choices each of us must make.

And if you choose badly, you deliver a horrendous presentation.

How can you choose wisely if you don’t even know what the choices are?  Much less the wise choice at each step along the way?

We seek easy solutions, the quick fix, the “secret” to turn a drab, staid, listless presentation into one that brims with vigor, zest, and elan.

An especially powerful presentation.

especially powerful presentation choicesFailing that, perhaps just something that can flog a bit of life into our tired efforts.

One evening, we may see a memorable, delightful, scintillating presentation.

It’s a show that engages us, that sparkles with memorable visuals and that implants core ideas and powerful notions in our minds.  A great presentation!

Why was it a great presentation?

Many folks answer with one – maybe two reasons.  This is akin to medieval alchemists searching for a method to transform lead into gold.

A shortcut to wealth.

And so we contrive abstractions and unsatisfactory responses:

The speaker was interesting.  The topic was relevant and au courant.  Torn from today’s headlines!

It was the audience . . . he had a good audience!

But none of these easy answers yield something that we can actually use . . . something we can operationalize in our show.  This is because no easy answer exists.

No one reason.

No single technique.

There is no business presentation alchemy.  Except in the notion that we must get lots of things right.

The superb business presenter does 100 things right, while the bad business presenter does 100 things wrong.

What are the “100 Presentation Choices?”

Is it exactly 100?

Of course not, no more than great writing consists in getting exactly 100 things right, instead of getting them wrong.

For any talk, it could be 90, or it could be 150.  Or something else.

The “100 things” trope suffices to convey that great presentations are planned and orchestrated according to set principles that can be learned, and those principles consist in proven practices.

Lots of them.

Practices that replace unthinking habits.

Techniques of posture, voice, syntax, gestures, topic, presentation structure, your expression, confidence, your movement . . . all of these done well or done poorly combine to yield either an especially powerful presentation . . .

. . . or a dud.

Especially Powerful
Scott’s Lessons: An especially powerful source for Abraham Lincoln

Go to Scott’s Lessons, the book that inspired and taught Abraham Lincoln as he grew into one of America’s great orators.

There, you’ll find a wealth of powerful techniques to transform even the most mundane of speakers into a champion.

More than 100 techniques?

Surely.

The important lesson is that great presenting is assembled from the verbal and non-verbal construction materials we select.

Lots of mistakes make for awful shows.  But getting those 100 things right can yield a show that’s spectacular for no single, discernible reason.

That’s the power of synergy.

Take just one aspect of your show – the way you stand.  Have you ever thought about it?  Where you stand?  How you stand?

If you’ve never given it thought, then you’re likely doing it wrong.

To learn how to adopt the perfect (for you) stance, go here and the secret shall be revealed.  And you’ll have learned a handful of the essential 100 presentation choices to launch you on your way to deliver especially powerful presentations and to develop a personal competitive advantage.

The next step, of course, is to actually do it.  In your next presentation.

More of the 100 Presentation Choices that constitute especially powerful business presentations here.