Slow Down!
You have an important presentation to the leadership team next week to update them on your latest project. You gather your data, prepare projections, identify your takeaway messages, build your slides, and rehearse. You’re all set for your important communication opportunity.
When the time comes to present, you get up and start your presentation. But once you start, you can’t stop...not even to breathe. You’re off to the races. You easily finish in the time allotted, and when you ask for questions, there are none.
Was it good? Probably not.
When you race through a presentation, as often happens when a presenter is nervous, time conscious, or worried that they may be losing their audience, you become your content’s worst enemy.
Your points become indistinguishable from one another, your thesis gets buried, and all the supporting evidence gets lost in the barrage of words. Nothing stands out. Nothing sticks. Your communication opportunity has been lost to excessive speed.
Harvard Professor Carmine Gallo studied effective speaking rate and discovered that the best presenters speak about 150 words per minute. Of course they slow down and speed up to change emphasis, but 150 words per minute was a sweet spot.
Rate of speech isn’t the only problem. When speakers fail to pause between ideas or content areas, their message can get lost.
Pausing between ideas provides the listener with an opportunity to catch their breath, store the last idea, and prepare to receive new information. The pause is a refreshing break in what would otherwise be a firehose of information.
To help ensure that your communication effectiveness is not sacrificed to speed, here are some tools to help you present at an effective rate.
MARK YOUR SPEECH: If you are someone who prepares a complete script, think about writing it this way:
By inserting marks like these / between every phrase / and then going through / and rehearsing the presentation / by taking a pause or breath at each one of these marks / you will start to get a sense / of what speaking slowly / feels like.
Of course, this is going to feel and sound extremely choppy; you may even begin to feel like Captain James T. Kirk from the Starship Enterprise with his staccato speech. But practicing this pausing exercise during rehearsals does a miraculous thing when the actual presentation rolls around--it slows you down.IT SHOULD FEEL LIKE MOLASSES: How do you know when you are going slow enough? We tell our clients that it should feel as though they are speaking through molasses. If it feels like you’re speaking at a comfortable rate, you’re going too fast. That’s because you’re the speaker--you know what you’re saying and what comes next. This familiarity makes your rate of speech seem much slower to you than it does to your audience. Present with your audience in mind and deliver content as if you’re wading through molasses.
BREATHE WHEN SHIFTING TO NEW CONTENT: Presentations naturally have sections. When you shift from one section to another you have the perfect opportunity to pause, take a breath or two, and then restart your presentation at a slower rate of speech. Use content shifts to stop, take a breath, and slowly restart your presentation. Not only will these pauses help you from racing out of control, they will also help your audience better internalize all of your talking points.
USE TECHNOLOGY: You have a huge advantage when it comes to awareness and slowing down--technology. By recording your rehearsals on your computer or phone, you can watch yourself. You can hear your rate of speech and whether or not you’re pausing between content areas. Recording yourself and watching the video back will help you become self-aware and ascertain whether you are making progress in your effort to slow down.
Whether presenting virtually or in-person, speed is a speaker’s worst enemy. Speaking at a comfortable rate will help ensure that your information sticks, that you project confidence, and that your audience stays comfortably engaged. So slow down, take your time, and make it easy for your listeners.