A short instructional talk by TJ Walker about breathing techniques for presentations. Walker advises speakers to breathe as they would in a natural conversation—using pauses as punctuation—to avoid speaking too quickly, to give the audience time to process, and to manage nervousness.
Chapters
So what's the best way to breathe when you're giving a presentation? Especially if there are more people than usual in front of you and you know you're going to feel a little nervous? Well, it's actually the same way to breathe when you're having a conversation with your best friend. If you're having a conversation with a friend about something you care about, you have to think about breathing. It's literally involuntary. You breathe naturally during pauses in the conversation, pauses in your sentences. You say a thought, you breathe. You have to think about breathing. What happens when you're giving a presentation, especially if it's to an audience a little larger than normal, or if it's a high stakes presentation. Maybe it's a one on one on a job interview and you're just feeling tense. There's this desire to let me hurry up, get as many right things out, as many facts out as quickly as possible, and no one can accuse me of leaving anything on. And before you realize it, I'm out of breath. You've got to fight that impulse and realize that if you speak too quickly, you are stripping your words of their punctuation. I could convey more information to you on a page of paper. If I didn't use a single period, a space between words or commas or paragraph breaks. I could put more words on a sheet of paper. But would you get more out of it? Would I communicate more? No, it would just be this mass jumble of words. It would be too hard to process. Even though the person receiving it reads English, if there's no punctuation, it's too hard to deal with. That's the problem with speaking quickly and not breathing at the right time. And the words come out faster and faster and faster and faster. And the person listening can't process. You need pauses for your audience to understand you. Now, the beauty of pauses is it also gives you time to breathe. You want to be able to breathe. You want to change the speed of how words come out of your mouth. Sometimes it's okay to be a little more excited and speak faster. But then contrast it with a pause. Contrast it by then speaking a little slower about a subject matter. Now you have time to breathe. I don't want you to have to spend too much time thinking about breathing when you speak. But if you find yourself out of breath, that is a fantastic warning sign to tell yourself, timeout, going too fast, need to slow down.
