Have you ever wondered how pausing, now and then, might improve your speech?
Whether it's a formal speech or conversation, pausing is a great way to regulate your breath and keep your tone strong, but also adds some interesting structure and storytelling aspects.
Here's a few ways that pausing might help you be a stronger speaker, and also more interesting to listen to.
1. Pausing is like punctuation - simple breaking up of the text, creating space and emphasis as needed.
2. Storytellers can use pausing for amazing build-up to a key point or idea.
3. Pausing helps you breathe normally! Speakers, due to stress, can often speak too fast, lose breath and make errors in their speech. Pausing gives you a second to inhale and regroup before making the next point. Keeps you energized, too!
4. A great by-product of pausing is less need for filler words, like uh, or um. We use these words when we need to mentally catch up with our script, and pausing thus eliminates the need for these extra words that add little, and can even detract from the value of our speech.
5. Finally, the pausing gives form to the speech, as opposed to a disorganized verbal run-on sentence. We listeners perceive the beginning, middle and end, the subject and the verb, and the overall meaning much better with effective pausing.
So the next time you need to speak in front of a group or have an important conversation you can follow these ideas, and just pause time to time.
Remember to breathe!