Hello again friends. You're about to do lesson five in the course. So let's
just jump right.
In and our last lesson, we looked at organizing your thoughts clearly.
In lesson 5, we'll look at effective pauses. Concise tip number five is pause
to add emphasis. And this really is a conciseness tip, however, it's going to
make you sound much more clear and certainly much more confident. Pauses in
the wrong places can make you sound long-winded. Pauses in the right place
make you sound clear and concise. And good pauses emphasize your points and add a
confident cadence. It gives your speech a rhythm or a tempo that those
professional speakers and those leaders have. Pauses are really like a secret
weapon in communication. Ralph Richardson, a well-known actor on the stage and
screen from years ago said, "The most precious things in speech are pauses."
And I could not agree more.
Strategy number one. Pause at the end of sentences.
That's where your pauses belong. It makes you sound more confident. It lets
listeners accept and remember your message. During that pause they get to
process it for just a moment and it gives you a natural stopping place to
end you're talking turn.
That's one of the goals of being a concise, clear, and confident communicator.
Is you make your point, and as we said in an earlier lesson, then you zip it. And it
allows you to have a back-and-forth or a dialogue with other people because the
pause gives them a place to jump in.
So let's listen to where the pauses are here. We have a few items to cover today.
We'll look at our social media campaign. We'll look at our overall growth. And
Erin will take suggestions about changes to the website. Now these pauses
are in the right place. They're where the punctuation is at the end of the nice
concise sentences.
These are good examples of concise sentences. From an earlier lesson. And if
we were to visualize this, it looks a little bit more like bullets in a list
where the pause comes right at the end of that bulleted item and then you go on
to the next item.
These are like headlines that we talked about in an earlier lesson.
Or, even they're not funny, but the length of a punchline for a joke and that's
where the pauses belong. Pauses at the end literally punctuate your statements for
listeners. It helps them separate the ideas because you have with the sound of
your voice separated your ideas.
You should only pause for about one second, just long enough to say the word
pause in your head.
Sometimes people pause for two or three or more sentences [seconds] to add that dramatic feel,
I don't think that's necessary in most cases. Just long enough to say the word
"pause" or "period" in your head.
Strategy number two. Avoid mid-thought pauses. Pauses in the middle of your
statements really make it drag. And it'll sound labored and long-winded even if
you're not using a lot of words. So let's listen to what it sounds like when the pauses
are in the wrong place.
We have a few items to cover today we'll look at our social media campaign we'll
look at our overall growth and Erin will take suggestions about changes to
the website. So it doesn't sound right. It sounds like we're hanging, we're waiting
for that next moment that just, oh finish your thought, and you may have
listened to people in conversation with a pause in the middle. And it can take an
ordinary sentence and make it really sound extra-long. So we want to pause in
the right places. Strategy 3 is to pause to separate key ideas. When you were, for
example, giving a roadmap to set up a meeting or presentation, we want to pause
between items. In that meeting or presentation and anytime your listing
items--two or three or four items--you want to pause where the commas are. So
here's a sentence. Eighties rock is the best because it has loud drums, crunchy
guitars, and soaring locals. So we're pausing where we see the punctuation
would naturally be. And it gives it that nice confident sound where the ideas are
separated. Some people, by the way would say screeching locals instead of soaring
vocals but I was trying to be kind because I'm a big fan of eighties rock.
So pause in the right place for clarity and emphasis. Our take-away strategies are
to pause at the end of sentences. Avoid mid-thought pauses that give it that
dragging sound. And to pause to separate ideas in a list, especially things
like a preview statements in a presentation or when you're setting up a meeting.
Your task is to practice pausing in all your communication to have that clarity
in the next few days. It's also going to sound, makes it sound much more confident,
much more concise for your listeners. Up next we are going to work on avoiding
fillers and I look forward to seeing you in that lesson.