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.
“Man, it feels hot in here. My throat is parched. My hands are sweating and butterflies have taken over my stomach”. These are some typical symptoms of nervousness about getting up in front of hundreds of sceptical, beady eyed people looking up and boring a hole into us as the speaker at the event. We are concerned about whether what we are going to say is going to be well received or not. Our voice may waver a bit when we first start because of that nervousness and now we feel even added pressure, because this isn’t going so well.
What we are doing is digging a hole for ourselves to bury this speech, as an example of one of the dismal efforts by speakers who have little idea of what they are doing. The focus is on us. I saw this speaker from the USA, at a Chamber of Commerce event just have a meltdown because she was so nervous. Tall, well-coiffed, suited and booted, she looked the money. She was using slides and she started well. However, it soon became obvious that she had tried to memorise what she wanted to say, as she went through the slides.
Memorisation puts enormous additional pressure on the speaker, in fact, way too much pressure and sure enough she cracked. Suddenly she announced, “I need to take a breath”. Okay, we forgave her that one. But two minutes later she stopped again for another breath. Her credibility along with her message, just sailed out the window.
The whole affair was her focused on her. This is the issue with nervousness – we are the focus and not the audience. So many conversations are going on in our head, all centered on ourselves and what we are doing and how we are doing it. This is natural and nothing unusual. The point is to get beyond that self-focus. How do we do that?
A good starting point is to not try and memorise what you are going to say. Our American lady could have just spoken to the slides. You have to know your material, so this isn’t a big demand really. You know what you need to say, so just say it as each slide comes up.
The other key is rehearsal. She was giving this talk for the first time. She was practising on us, the audience and that is an extremely bad idea. We don’t rehearse because we have sucked up all the preparation time on getting the slides together. If she had rehearsed, she would have been more comfortable with the content for each slide and she could have switched the focus from herself to the audience.
The other key point is only we know what we are going to say. If we depart from our rehearsal content regarding comments on a certain slide, only we know that. If we carry on regardless, no one will notice and they will just accept this is what we wanted to say. Telling the audience “I need to take a breath” is an admission of defeat, lack of preparation and the self-induced collapse of professionalism.
I was giving a closing talk at the end of a convention and even though I had practiced this talk fifteen times, I still had trouble. For some unknown reason, in the moment of delivery I decided to go to point four and skipped point three. Now I kicked myself and had a short internal conversation, “you idiot, you skipped three”. I didn’t declare this to the audience. I just placed point three after point four and charged on as if it was all part of the grand plan and there was nothing amiss, nothing to see here. Only I knew I had mixed up the order and that is the important part. If things awry, keep it to yourself, because there is a microscopically slim chance the audience will ever notice.
Once we can get over our self-focus, we can really start working on our audience. We bring the big three to bear in them – our voice, eyes and gestures. Voice modulation keeps people with us. It also allows us to select certain key words for more emphasis, by either adding or subtracting volume – both work. A secret whisper is just as effective as a stentorian outburst.
When we add to the voice with our eye contact with members of the audience, that makes the message so much more individual and powerful. I don’t mean trying to take in the whole audience at one time with eye contact. I mean to zoom in on one person at a time, for about six seconds. They idea is to use both of our eyes to focus on just one point of concentration and that is only one of the eyes of that audience member. If we keep this single gaze for too long, the pressure is too great, so after around six seconds we need to move our eye contact to another audience member. Here is a funny thing. In a big crowd, the twenty people down the back sitting around that one person we have selected, will all feel we are talking directly to them.
So we are using our voice and eye contact for bolstering our message and then we add in gestures. We don’t point our finger at people, as that is too aggressive and seems almost accusatory. We open the hand up and turn the palm upward, as we indicate to that person sitting there in the audience quietly minding their own business. Why palm up? This is an indicator from prehistoric days of “I come bearing no hidden weapons. I come in peace and you can relax”. When we hit them with voice, eye contact and a gesture like this we have their undivided attention for our message.
We have moved the focus off ourselves and how nervous we are feeling, to actively engage with the whole audience – one person at a time. We transport ourselves from a focus on “me” to “you” and we will be so much more effective as a communicator when we make that transition.
What do we bring to our presentations? Usually we have two things – information and a point of view. For a lot of presentations, the information element becomes a data dump. This is very boring and tedious for the most part. The issue should always be “okay, what does this information mean and what does it mean for the audience?”. We should always try and break numbers down to word pictures because once we get into big numbers the level of abstraction goes through the roof. For example, for you, what exactly is a billion or a trillion of anything? It is very hard to understand that many zeros. This requires some level of interpretation and once we get into interpretation, we get into debate.
Having a point of view is the other pillar of talks. We want our audience to do something, think something or feel something. We believe something to be true and we want to alert our audience to this valuable morsel of wisdom. As soon as we start venturing down this path, we trigger a degree of debate in the minds of the listeners. Their experience may be different or missing. They may even have different information, data or “alternate facts”, the latter otherwise known as errors and falsehoods.
Whether we are pouring on the data and then adding an interpretation or elucidating our point of view, there is a good chance that when we get to the Q&A component of the talk, we will flag some opposition to what we have said. I am often surprised, listening to the Q&A for my own talks or those for others, how often the questioner has missed the point or misinterpreted what was just said by the speaker. Obviously if they have misunderstood what we are saying we have to correct them. This is where we can bridge into argument with some members of our audience. How should we approach this?
If you are strong in your advice and opinion and then just roll over at the first whiff of opposition to what you say, the listeners conclude you are a flake and don’t believe what you are promulgating. So you cannot ignore or agree with what was said, if it contradicts your line of argument. You have to stand your ground and back up your assertions. The problem becomes where is the line between an assertion and an attack on the questioner.
There are two levels here. What we say and how we say it. The worst outcome is when we become spontaneous and engage our mouth, before we turn on the brain completely. Blurting out a response, especially an emotional response, to someone questioning what we have said is bound to end in a trainwreck of our reputation. This is easier than you think. You are isolated, standing on stage and everyone is looking at you and you hear the sound of that incoming heat seeking missile aimed at you and what you have said. We can take the comments personally and feel we have defend our good name and off we go on the counterattack. This is definitely one approach to avoid.
Instead, we should use a trigger in the form of a cushion, to break the mouth-brain cycle and reverse the order. A cushion is an anodyne statement which will not prove or disprove what they said and being rather neutral, won’t inflame the situation. An example would be, “That is a point we should explore a bit further”. In the few seconds we take to make that statement we switch gears to engage the brain about how best to answer the question/attack from the listener. A considered answer is always the preferred methodology for speakers and sometimes we just need to buy some time to move from our emotional state to a more logical construct.
Now we are better armed to answer the point. The key is to not debate them. We do not want the proceedings to derail into a dialogue between the speaker and one member of the audience and allow everyone else to leap for their phones, during this boring, self-indulgent interlude in the talk. There are other people waiting with their own questions and we have a hard stop for the talk. We must keep within that time frame or we risk upsetting everyone in the audience, if we make them late by going over our allotted time. They don’t blame the questioner – they blame us.
We should answer their question or complaint to the best of our ability and then seamlessly and velvet like, glide into the next question by saying, “who has the next question?”. In my view, we should never ask the person with an opposing opinion, “Does that answer your question?”. Some people who teach presentations skills disagree and believe we should take this high road to show how balanced we are. I wonder how many public talks they have given, rather than just teaching presentations skills? In my experience, all you are doing is opening a can of worms and the debate rapidly spins out of control into an argument.
If we have a questioner with an agenda, they won’t let go so easily and may try to chime in before we move to another question. They will demand we debate them on their enquiry. This is bad form, cringe worthy and drives up the tension gauge in the room, but that doesn’t stop some people. This is when we hit them with “Thank you. I see you are passionate about this topic and in order to give others a chance to ask their questions, shall we continue this discussion together after the talk? I am happy to stay on after the event has finished”. They have nowhere to go with this clever volley return.
We should back up what we are saying and try to defend our point of view, but not let the presentation slip into a slugfest of contrasting opinions. We are the speaker, so it is up to us to control the flow and the architecture of the talk. Audience members are under no such restrictions and can do whatever they like. We can debate the point, but we should always avoid lapsing into argument. This is the sign of the amateur when presenting, because they don’t know how to control the street fight, which can be thinly disguised as the Q&A.
Normally a talk for a business audience will be around 40 minutes long. That seems a lot until you start putting the talk together and you always feel you don’t have enough time to include all of the cool information and stories you have at your disposal. The absolutely wrong way to start is to harvest slides from previous presentations and then start cobbling together all of the visual pieces and make that the talk. Why? The format for a presentation has various cadences and we need to master each stage. That requires planning and rehearsal. I would guess 99% of business talks are given once - on that day, to that live audience. What that means is that the talk wasn’t refined through rehearsal to make it sparkle and for it to fit perfectly into the time allowed. Businesspeople buy bespoke clothing and shoes, because they want these items to fit perfectly and we should apply the same logic to making our talk fit perfectly for our audience.
The start and end are two specific cadences with clear purposes and so are easy to understand. ADD or Attention Deficit Disorder is now a global pandemic infecting all of our business audiences. That is why the opening has to break through that attention deficit problem and grab everyone’s attention. The process starts from the moment we arrive before the audience, to check all the tech is working and to start engaging with the listeners as they enter the room. We want to build a personal connection, which will make it more likely they will actually pay attention to us when we start.
It also continues the moment we are being introduced. Often there is a lunch before our talk and we are placed on the table with all of the big shots. I don’t recommend getting up from the table and walking to the stage. As soon as the MC begins our introduction, we should stand up and off to the side, so that we are clearly visible to everyone right from the start. This gives the audience the chance to look us up and down and get through that initial judgement they make on how we are dressed and how professional we look. It also makes it smoother and quicker to mount the stage when it is time to start.
We get straight into the opening, using our blockbuster statement to grab attention, to tantalise the listeners with what is to come and then we can introduce ourselves and thank the organisers. Preferably someone else is switching the slide decks over or getting ours slides up. We don’t want be distracted from focusing on our audience, especially at the start, when all of those first impressions are being created. This standing up, getting on stage and getting started takes around five minutes and we try and break the forty minutes into eight five minute blocks. Our talk has been rehearsed, so we know exactly how long each section takes.
We are doing all of the talking and that can be tiring for an audience to sit there and listen to us blabbing away. We need to have it planned such that we switch up the action roughly every five minutes. This is using what is called a “pattern interrupt”, so that the listeners are not getting what they expected. Expectation in audiences can lead to them day dreaming and leaving us, as their thoughts take over. They stop taking in what we are saying or even worse, they are now looking at their phones. We might use a great visual we have selected or we might change our energy during the delivery. Classical music has it cadences from highs to lows to highs, to make sure we don’t get bored listening to it. Our talk can copy this idea. Maybe we drop our voice down to a conspiratorial whisper or we raise it to stentorian heights – it doesn’t matter, because the point is to use our energy to create a change, which adds interest to what is going on. We don’t want to be predictable, because this is when attention will stray on the part of the audience.
The end cadence is actually split into two parts – before the Q&A and after the Q&A. We can use a summary of our key points or a call to take action and man the barricades. We need to put a bow on this talk and draw the whole apparatus together so that the main message remains the message the audience retains. We switch over to Q&A, which invariably will take the whole talk off track and there is no way of controlling that. What we need to do though is to repeat our summary or call to action. We must monopolise the messaging after the Q&A, for that audience and make sure they get what we want them to get.
Naturally the talk won’t fit into precise five minute segments, but the key is regularly change the content, the energy, the delivery, the flow so that we keep a stranglehold on the attention of the audience and no phones are being surreptitiously engaged instead concentrating of us. There is no doubt that this outbreak of ADD, combined with the mobile phone, has made our task as speakers, so much more complex and fraught. We can rage against the inequities, or we can adjust what we are doing to overcome these challenges.