Personal Competitive Advantage . . . with the Pause
Coca-Cola’s 1929 slogan was “The Pause that Refreshes” and likewise we can use the public speaking pause to especially powerful effect.
So, make friends with silence so that you feel comfortable in its presence.
Public Speaking Pause Power
The correct pauses imbue your talk with incredible power. With proper timing and coupled with other techniques, the pause can evoke strong emotions in your audience.
A pause can project and communicate as much or more than mere words. The public speaking pause is part of your nonverbal repertoire and a superbly useful tool.
The comfortable pause communicates your competence and confidence. It telegraphs deep and serious thought.
Pause power for personal competitive advantage!
Pause Power is underutilized today, but has served as arrow-in-quiver of the finest presenters over centuries. It’s a key technique to gaining personal competitive advantage. Presentation Master Grenville Kleiser knew this and he put it this way in 1912: “Paradoxical tho it may seem, there is an eloquence and a power in silence which every speaker should seek to cultivate.”
When you use the pause judiciously, you emphasize the point that comes immediately after the pause. You give the audience time to digest what you just said. And you generate anticipation for what you are about to say.
So save the pause for the moments just prior to each of your main points.
How do you pause? When do you pause?
Silence is Your Friend
A truly effective pause can be coupled with a motionless stance, particularly if you have been pacing or moving about or gesturing vigorously. Couple the pause with a sudden stop, going motionless. Look at your audience intently.
Seize their complete attention.
Pause.
You can see that you should not waste your pause on a minor point of your talk. You should time your pauses to emphasize the single MIP and its handful of supporting points.
Voice coach Patsy Rodenburg says: “A pause is effective and very powerful if it is active and in the moment with your intentions and head and heart. . . . a pause filled with breath and attention to what you are saying to your audience will give you and your audience a bridge of transitional energy from one idea to another.”
Finally, the public speaking pause can rescue you when you begin to spiral out of control or lose your train of thought. Remember that silence is your friend.
Need a life-preserver? Need time to regain your composure? Try this . . .
Pause. Look slightly down. Scratch your chin thoughtfully. Furrow your brow. Take four steps to the right or left, angling a bit toward the audience.
Voila!
You just bought 7-8 precious seconds to collect your thoughts.
Remember the especially powerful effects you can achieve in your business presentation with the public speaking pause. It’s a sure way to build your professional presence on the podium.
Whether the finance presentation class is in Philadelphia . . .
. . . or Mumbai . . . or Cali . . . or Chennai . . . or Singapore . . . or Izhevsk . . . I hear the same universal and eerie refrain from finance students everywhere—
“Finance is different.”
“We don’t do all of that soft-skill kumbaya presentations stuff.”
“For us, the numbers tell the story.”
The Talisman of Numbers
Numbers seem to enchant business-people in deep and mysterious ways.
It’s as if numerical constructs are somehow less malleable than the English language, less subject to manipulation.
Where business presentations are concerned, finance folks are not different, special, unique. They are not otherwise gifted with special powers or incantations denied the mere mortals who toil in marketing or human resources.
We all are subject to the same demands placed upon us by the presentations beast. These demands nettle us equally and indiscriminately during the finance business presentation process.
As with most things, there is bad news and good news in this slice of life provided here.
The bad news is that modern finance presentations are a vast wasteland of unreadable spreadsheets and monotonous, toneless recitations of finance esoterica. It seems that there must be a requirement for this in finance.
Finance Presentation Hell
In fact, many finance business presentations crumble into little more than meeting “discussions” about a printed analysis distributed beforehand. The presentation is picked apart by jackals with nothing on their minds except proving themselves worthier than who might be unlucky enough to be the presenter du jour.
A presenter or group of presenters stands and shifts uncomfortably.
Everyone else sits and interrupts with strings of gotcha questions. These questions are usually couched to demonstrate the mastery of the questioner rather than to elicit any worthy piece of information.
Several finance business presentation cliches guarantee this sorry state of affairs a long life . . .
“Just the facts”
Exhortations of “Just the facts” serve as little more than a license to be unoriginal, uninteresting, and unfocused.
“Just the facts”
Folks believe that this phrase gives the impression that they are no-nonsense and hard-core. But there is probably no more parsimoniously pompous and simultaneously meaningless phrase yet to be devised.
It achieves incredible bombast in just three syllables.
What does it mean, “Just the facts?” Which facts? Why these facts and not those facts?
Events are three-dimensional and filled with people. They require explanation and analysis.
Mere “facts” are flat, unemotional, and unsatisfactory proxies for what happens in the real world. “Just the facts” masks much more than it reveals.
“The numbers tell the story.”
This is a favorite of folks who seem to believe that the ironclad rules of presentations do not apply to them. “We don’t deal with all of that soft storytelling,” finance majors often tell me. “We deal in hard numbers.”
There’s so much wrong with this that it’s difficult to find a reasonable starting-point.
Not only do numbers, alone, tell no story at all . . . if numbers were conceivably capable of telling a story, it would be an incomplete story.
A story with distorted reality.
The end result of these presentation shenanigans is mediocrity and outright bad presentations. If firms want nothing more than a group discussion about a handout, with the only thing distinguishing the “presenters” from the audience is that they are standing, then so be it.
It may be useful. It may be boring.
It may be morale-building. It may be team-destroying.
It may be time-wasting.
But whatever else it is, it is not a presentation.
“Cut ’n’ Paste”
This is the heinous data dump that all of us see at some unfortunate time in our careers.
PowerPoint slides crammed with data in tiny, unreadable font. The display of these heinous slides is accompanied by a sweep of the arm and the awful phrase: “As you can see . . . ”
The cause of this pathology is the rote transfer of your written report to a PowerPoint display, with no modification to suit the completely different medium. The result?
Slides from Hell.
The Finance Presentation Good News!
In every obstacle exists an opportunity.
Because the bar for finance business presentations is so low, if you invest your presentations with the powerful principles that apply to all business presentations, your own shows will outstrip the competition by an order of magnitude.
This, of course, implies that your content is rock-solid.
It should be.
Your ratio analysis, your projected earnings, your sophisticated modeling should all reflect the superb finance education you have received.
Swim against the tide of bad finance business presentations and imbue your presentations with power and brio
But how you present that content is the key to presentation victory.
All of the presentation principles that we discuss here apply to finance business presentations.
Particularly the parsimonious display of numbers and the necessity for their visual clarity.
If anything, finance business presentations must be more attentive to how masses of data are distilled and displayed.
A situation statement must be given.
A story still must be told.
Your analysis presented.
Conclusions must be drawn.
Recommendations must be made.
And external factors must be melded with the numbers so that the numbers assume clarity and meaning in an especially powerful 3D presentation.
If you do the above, and nothing more, then your finance presentation will outshine the hoi polloi with ease.
But you can push even further, delving even more deeply into the masterful techniques and principles available to you, learning to use your tools skillfully.
You can rise to the zenith of the finance business presentations world because you are part of the tiny minority who seizes the chance to deliver an especially powerful presentation.
