Silence Is Golden. Or Is It?

I am a huge fan of interjecting pauses during speeches and conversations. So much of what we say is lost and we often don’t even know if our beautiful words of wisdom land. If the goal is to persuade and motivate others, we need more than a barrage of words to parse out what in the world the speaker is trying to say. When we speak, we need to highlight the important phrases so others can remember them, and in turn, we can get others to act on our words.

One of the best devices we have for this in oral communication requires no words at all. In fact, the impact comes with the absence of words. I’m talking about the pause.

A recent example of the power of the pause came with a recent interview with Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. When asked by a reporter his opinion of Donald J. Trump and the state of disarray in the US, Trudeau took a twenty-two-second pause before responding. A lifetime on live TV. With that pause, Trudeau made absolute certain that his next words were not a kneejerk, impulsive, or otherwise canned reply to the question posed. With that pause, he let viewers everywhere know that he was carefully considering the question, and, in doing so, let the viewers take the breath they needed to also consider the depth and the import of the question. As a result, his measured reply had considerably more impact. 

It’s possible he was caught off-guard by the question, but as a seasoned statesman who’s been running his country while Trump has been running his own country into the ground, it seems unlikely Trudeau hasn’t been asked a similar question before. Equally unlikely is that he hadn’t before considered the disarray in the land to the South. 

A better bet is that he’s been wanting to say something deliberate about the state of the civil unrest in the United States and how our president chooses to handle it for quite some time now, and has been arguing with himself in his head what the right words to use might be.

After twenty-two seconds, Trudeau finally uttered the words: “We watch in horror and consternation with what’s going on in the United States.” See for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euu-i4zKpdk

Had Trudeau not paused, had he just jumped into the answer, I don’t believe he would have grabbed the headlines like he did. Intentional or not, too long a pause or not, it was remarkable in that we’re all commenting on it.

Take a tip from Trudeau. Build pauses into your strategic communication. How long is long enough? Two seconds doesn’t seem like a lot of time, but even a two-second pause can make quite a powerful statement. 

(Get more tips about getting out of your own way in Your Self Sabotage Survival Guide by Karen Berg: https://tinyurl.com/y786t4ax)