Hi! This is Alex and welcome to 10publicspeakingtips.com. This is a free video lesson. Today's lesson is all about preview, it's about posing. In out seminars or engagements or you are giving a talk a lot of us are afraid to pause or even take a two to three second break, just a catch our breathe. All of us have these doubtful feelings, these insecurity feelings that if we don't push out any interesting words or we fail to 100% captivate out audience at all times during the talk, they are going to get up and they are going to leave you in an empty seminar room. This doesn't happen. You are allowed to pause. There are some common trait very, very confident speakers is when they are giving a talk, they have long pauses. They have these pauses. When they are talking they stop, just it catch with their thoughts, and it looks like to the audience that they are thoughtful, that they are recollecting from memory.
I used to have this high school teacher. His name was a Mr. Grand, and he looked a bit like Danny DeVito. He was very shorts, stocky and he didn't have a neck and he pulled me aside one day after I gave a short presentation and it says to me, Alex, a lot of us, we feel as though we are falling to when there is very long awkward silences. You know if might take a breathe and you start freaking out thinking my God! I am taking a pause here. People are thinking I have lost track of where I was talking. He says most of us feels as though, if we take a short break, we start feeling fear and we start getting nervous and our palms get sweaty and we start -- our mind start wondering. He says, those pauses usually last only a two or three seconds, and we think we have paused for a long time. In fact, it's only two or three seconds. So, don't freak out.
The next time you give a talk focus on breathing more deeply, so take it a deep breadth maybe a ten second breath, look around the rooms scan the room, make eye contact to people, you are allowed to breathe. It's actually little creepy. It also shows that you are a little bit nervous, if you constantly push outwards and you are afraid to stop talking. People are not going to walk away, people not going to get up and leave you in an empty seminar room. It just doesn't happen in the real world. So, don't be afraid of taking breaths, don't be afraid of having long pauses. Just watch, go to any seminar and watch a very good public speaker and you will notice that they will pause a lot and they will scan the room. It makes them look a lot more collected, a lot more organised, a lot more powerful and authoritative, if they pause.
My name is Alex Brian, and if you haven't yet gained instant access to a free 30-minutes audio on public speaking, the ten principles of public speaking head over to 10publicspeakingtips.com. So it's like time full. I hope our paths cross again many times in a future.
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