The Power of Pause

The power of the pause, the significance of silence. I am amazed at the number of speakers who seem to forget to breathe when they go on stage. It sounds something like this. I'm going to talk continuously right now because I'm so excited about the message that I want to give you. And I'm going to do it so much that I don't even get to breathe. And when I don't get to breathe, it's really hard for you to listen, and that's going to be really difficult. But even more than you not listening, I'm probably going to pass out. Now, quite aside from your need to breathe, there's another great reason for pauses and silence, and that is to let ideas sink in. Very often, especially if you've dropped something poignant, if you've really shared something powerful, the audience needs to soak it in. They need to think about it. Have you ever had this experience where somebody says something to you and then you find yourself re listening to what they said, not because they said it again, but because you replayed it in your mind? Well, if you don't leave some silence for the audience, if you don't have a pause for the audience, they don't get to re listen to you, and therefore they don't get to remember that idea as deeply as they might otherwise have done. So leaving pauses and leaving silence is incredibly important. But do you want to know why people don't do it? I'll tell you. It's an odd thing of time distortion. If you are empathetic at all. And if you're here with me now, my guess is you are, because very often people with that active empathy are the ones that want to go out and share something. So if you have an engaged empathy, then here's what happens. You walk on stage and you have a sense of connection with the audience. In other words, you can maybe feel a little or maybe even a lot about what they're feeling. But with time, that becomes quite tricky because what that means is that if you are silent for one second, you feel the silence the way they experience it. And let's say there's 60 of them in the audience. All of a sudden, one second of silence for you kind of feels like a minute. Isn't that true? Like, if you watch somebody on stage, you'll see that they're quite reluctant to leave silence. And that's because that silence is. Feels huge to them because they're sensing it through the audience. There is a fabulous comedian, I'm a huge fan, and what I'VE noticed on some of his specials is he will land an incredibly funny joke, but he'll jump into the next one too quickly, robbing the chance of the audience to really enjoy the joke the first time and, of course, to even laugh properly. So leaving silence and leaving pauses is very important. The challenge, of course, is, is that they feel much longer than they really are. So here's a great exercise I'd love you to do the next time you're giving any kind of presentation. Walk on the stage, take a couple of deep breaths, count to 10 before you say a single word, and then begin. And I want you to notice that that will actually help you to create a stronger connection with the audience. And by the way, at the end of the talk, I want you to ask a few people, did you notice that it took me a while to start? And I'll tell you that they will either say no or. Or they will say, yeah. It created real intrigue and mystery. The next thing I want you to think about is exactly this. When you say something that you believe was important, let them sit with it. And I want you to notice why we get out of the habit of doing this. Because if you're out for dinner with friends and you leave an important point and you leave in a moment of silence, what happens? Somebody jumps in. But when you're on stage, they're not going to do that. Silence and pauses are magical. Sa.