How do you feel when the speaker speaks too quickly? Have you ever felt that you might be speaking too rapidly?
Guess what? Being called a fast talker is not a compliment. A fast talker might remind us of the old style used car salesperson. Just keep talking until you wear the prospect down, sign the contract and kick them out the door.
That’s what If feels like to be besieged by a fast talker. We don’t trust the person and we stopped listening some time ago.
You might counter that it conveys energy. That’s true and energy is good. However, like hot pepper we can’t take too much.
Why might you talk slower when delivering a presentation?
You sound more confident.
You can enunciate your words more clearly.
The audience can listen with less effort and understand your words.
Your voice will be deeper in tone and more pleasant to hear.
You have time to breathe more regularly and hence feel less exhausted and stressed.
You have more time to think about what you are saying.
The audience has time to hear and think about what you said in comfort
Insert more pauses.
This is the simplest and easiest change. Stop speaking between key points, sentences and paragraphs. The pause could vary from one to three seconds. The pause might even be longer, five seconds or longer depending on the weight of the poignant point you stated or challenging question you asked.
Imagine the power of the contrast between your sprints and pauses.
Say Less
This is also simple and takes more effort. Remove the unnecessary words. Fast talkers tend to inject too many filler words because they are trying to make constant noise.
Become aware of and remove the useless words: um, ah, like, so, you know, whatever…
How do you start on this journey? Record yourself and transcribe it. Then highlight these verbal diarrhea words.
Getting rid of these words will make you sound more confident and intelligent.
Gain control of your speaking speed
Instead of making excuses for speaking fast, take control of how fast or slow you speak.
Take a piece of text and read it out loud at your normal pace. Record yourself and time it. Then do it again while speeding up. Then one more time while speaking uncomfortably fast.
Now repeat the exercise while speaking slower than normal. One more time while speaking uncomfortably slow.
Repeat this exercise every day until you have total control of your speaking speed.
It’s your voice and you own the throttle.
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