Vanessa Van Edwards explains how pauses in speech signal confidence while rapid talking suggests nervousness. A strategic pause, especially with a raised eyebrow, can make you seem more assured and sometimes prompts a rude person to apologize or reconsider what they just said.
So using pauses in the right way actually signals confidence to the other person. Pauses signal conversational confidence. If you're nervous, you don't want to pause, so you speak really fast and you run all your words together because you're afraid that you're gonna run out of time or someone's gonna interrupt you. So when we hear someone speak too fast and not use any pauses, they're a little bit nervous. So using pauses in the right way actually signals confidence to the other person. Sometimes a pause can also help you identify bad behavior. So if someone says something offensive or rude, instead of jumping in and saying, how dare you, just Pause, raise your eyebrows, and wait. It allows them to hear their comment reverberate through the air, and I found that pausing often gets the bad behavior person to go, "I'm sorry, that came out wrong," or, "Oh, I didn't mean it like that." So try taking a breathing pause after someone says something they shouldn't have said or snaps at you or yells, and calm down.
