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When you pause, you establish the pace from the beginning of your talk. You let the audience know that the information is going to be coming at them at a pace that they can handle. You let them know right up front that you will be delivering your story in the form of a newspaper - not a textbook.
So to put the process all together, speaking properly is about is finding one person, giving one thought, and then taking one pause. One pause long enough for them to ingest the last thing you said, reference it and catalog it, before you ask them to open up to new information.
When you engage these behaviors, you will find that your relationship with the audience changes in many ways. Not only does the group dynamic change, but also the types of feedback you get from the group, because in many cases, you'll find people in the audience who've been through lifetimes of presentations and never felt engaged at that same level.
When you master Lock, Talk, & (especially) Pause, what you find is that people actually come up to you at the end of the meeting say things like, "You know, Jane, I've heard this information before, but nobody's ever explained it in quite the same way. Somehow, you made it all understandable". Or, "Somehow, I felt that you really cared about my understanding what you had to say. This was a great presentation". That "somehow" was your giving them the ability to actually hear what you said.
The positive feedback is a good thing, too, because the more of it you get, the more it will reinforce your desire to hone The Skills every time you speak. And you will get a little bit better every time you do. In fact, speaking well is a lifelong process - but one that just keeps on getting better as long as you do it.
Mark Twain gets a lot of quotes attributed to him that he never said, but one of the things he did say was:
"The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause".
Way back then, Mark Twain knew good old Rule #3, that people only START listening when you STOP talking.
Master of the Pause
When we ask our on-site participants to name the person they consider to be the most effective speaker in public life today, Bill Clinton is the name that most often rises to the top. People think of Bill Clinton, regardless of his politics (which we won't discuss here) as a great public speaker. And the reality is Bill Clinton was some poor kid from Arkansas who made it to a pretty high office because one thing he figured out how to do is speak.
Bill Clinton is thought of as a great speaker for good reason. Bill Clinton is the Master of the Pause. There's no speaker today who knows more about how to get a message across by saying a few words and then pausing to let it sink in. In fact, Bill Clinton probably says fewer words between pauses than any other politician. [Editor's note: Barack Obama is fast on his heals, but still has a ways to go before he can steal the mantle. We suspect history will weigh in on this in time.]
When you listen to Clinton speak, you find yourself not just hearing what he just said, but also waiting in anticipation for his next words. And that is the second reason that the pause is so vital. When you don't give the audience frequent breaks in the stream of your words, foremost on their minds is when you are going to stop talking so their brains can have a rest.
But when you fill your stream of thoughts with opportunities for them to rest between each one, you will find your audience actually waiting to hear your next words. They are primed to listen, so the impact of the words when they do arrive is much, much greater.
Bill Clinton learned The Skills, and learned how to be a master, by listening to his hero in life - John F. Kennedy. Coming up, you will hear for yourself how each of these masters deliver their words not to hear themselves speak, but with their audience's ability to hear and comprehend foremost in mind.
Bill Clinton is an effective speaker because he gives everyone in the audience all the time each needs to absorb what he said before he asks them to pick up on the next thing he's going to say. He gives them the time to absorb it, process it, and form a clear picture of the words before he asks them to take in new information.
Bill Clinton, and Jack Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King and just about anybody that has ever really moved you by their style of speaking all know one thing: the most effective thing you can do when you speak is to NOT.
It's common to believe, when you listen to great speakers at work, that certain people are simply born with the talent to speak well, and therefore no amount of training or practicing is going to transform you into a great speaker, no matter how hard you try. And while it's true that both John Kennedy and Bill Clinton have what most people don't - charisma - their ability to speak as they do was not part of what they were born with.
Bill Clinton was not always a great speaker. He was guilty of several bad practices, one being common to the political class: Clinton actually thought people wanted to hear elected officials go on at the mouth for one, two, or even three hours. The truth is you rarely hear someone say, "That was a great presentation - I only wished he would have droned on for another hour or so". And FDR is famous for his advice to public speakers: Be sincere; be brief; be seated!
Brevity is the soul of wit, but it's also the heart of a great talk. President Ronald Reagan, the person for whom the name "The Great Communicator" was coined, had a strict limit of 45 minutes, but preferred to stay under 25 whenever possible.
Another annoying practice of Clinton's was the repeated use of his forefinger to point at the audience when he spoke. People tend to feel uncomfortable when pointed at, and we know how important it is for audience members to feel comfortable. His handlers never could break him of the general motion, but they were able to train him to crank that finger back into his hand and then lock it down with his thumb.
You can probably easily picture Bill Clinton with his fist moving up and down, thumb pointed outward as it held a firm grip on his finger, declaring to the assembled press, "I did not have relations with that woman, that Monica Lewinsky..."
Finally, like most people, and by far the majority of politicians, he would rarely stop the word flow once he started. As charming and charismatic as he was with individuals, when speaking in public, he did not understand the essence of the pause. But his handlers knew the respect he had for his "mentor", and so they sat him down and had him watch videotapes of JFK over and over again until he got it.
A New Style
Clinton's speaking style is really a modernized version of Kennedy's. But JFK was one of the most influential speakers of the 2oth century, in that he really introduced the "humanistic" style of public speaking. Prior to Kennedy's showing the world the power of an authoritarian's speaking to his "subjects" on equal terms, we had the "oratory" style, best exemplified by Winston Churchill.
Churchill spoke to us from on high - Kennedy brought speech down to the level of the common man, and people loved him for it.
We are not suggesting that every time you give a speech or deliver a presentation you should speak as if you were the president of your country. We use these two men as examples because they learned just how powerful the pause can be when needing to persuade others to see things as you do. The reality is that few people will ever use as many pauses when they present as these and other Masters of The Skills, but then most people don't average 10,000 or so people in their audiences.
But we want you, from this point forward, to be constantly hearing these cadences in your head when you speak, with the understanding that you'll be gaining more and more message uptake the more you strive to hit their stride. Right now, we would wager that you probably average no less than 25 words between pauses, and that many of you don't pause at all. If you want to be a speaker who can truly lay claim to having The Skills, you must work to incorporate the pause at least at the end of every thought.