• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Paddy Spruce | Confident Public Speaking

Confident Public Speaking

  • Home
  • About Paddy
  • Blog
  • Contact

tummy

The power of pausing

March 7, 2013 by Paddy

Tweet

If you get butterflies when speaking and don’t want them. Pause.

Let’s say you are about to start speaking and get hit with a thought like ‘I need to make sure I don’t stumble on the tricky word in the second paragraph’. Very likely when you get to the tricky word, you will stumble, especially if you rush at the word, hoping to get past it quickly.

An alternative is to pause and breathe in when you get to the word. Leave your mind blank. Give the word some space. Treat it as if it is an important word. Say it deliberately.

Pausing will help you engage your thinking brain. It helps to make a considered decision. It helps to avoid sarcasm. It’s better than biting your tongue.

Next time you are in a shop alone and the person behind the counter asks ‘Are you being looked after by anyone?’ Pause. Run through several possible responses. Choose the best one. It will only take seconds and get you into the habit of thinking before speaking. The opposite can get you in real trouble.

Contact me if you want some public speaking coaching to take your speaking to the next, comfortable level.

Paddy Spruce
03 9808 8990

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: butterflies, mistake, think, tummy

Footer

Latest Blog Posts

Allostatic load

Allostatic load is the wear and tear on our body caused by stress and worry. We can get stressed by dealing with actual events. We can also get stressed by imaginary events. Our body reacts the same to real or imagined events. Mark Twain wrote that we all have tragedies in our lives…some of which […]

A new normal

There is still time to establish your new normal. We are likely to get past coronavirus this year and settle back into what we call normal. There is still time to decide what we want this normal to look like. Do we go back to what we did before or do we deliberately decide what […]

Subscribe to my blog and newsletter

Subscribe to my mailing list

* indicates required

How to contact Paddy

Ph: +61 (0)418 996 970

Paddy is located in Melbourne, Australia and welcomes requests from beyond.

  • LinkedIn

Copyright © 2021 Paddy Spruce