Welcome back to another Little Snippet.
Just before we dive in, I really hope you've been enjoying the little snippets over the last few weeks and I will be back next week on the 15th of January for the first full length confident business English episode in 2025.
Really looking forward to seeing you there.
In this little snippet, what I'd really like to do is focus on a big pain point that I know you have, which is essentially how you speak, how you sound, how you come across when you're in front of your colleagues in meeting, speaking English.
I'd like to focus on a very easy, quick technique that you can use to improve your speaking, and it's not actually about speaking at all.
In fact, it's about the complete opposite, staying silent.
There was an interview with a guy I follow on Instagram called Alex Hormozi.
I don't know if you've heard of him.
He runs a business empire in the US and I really like his sort of snippets and advice about business.
I think he's got a really interesting perspective.
I listened to an episode with him where he was having an interview.
The interviewer asked him a question and before he answered the question, he was silent for about five seconds.
And at first I was like, oh, I must have paused the episode.
But what he was doing was just pausing, thinking and then answering.
And at the beginning it kind of threw me off because I thought, OK, why is he not just answering the question?
But then afterwards he was like, wow, it comes across as really powerful, really in control.
Now, I'm not saying that that's necessarily going to work in your team meeting if you're sitting there for 10 seconds thinking about your answer, but I think there's something to take away from that.
Recently, I joined an organization called Toastmasters.
If you haven't heard of this, it's a organization around the world.
And there are different clubs.
And in this club, what you do is essentially practice public speaking.
I know it sounds hideous, but I promise it's fun.
The best benefit about it is you're practicing public speaking out of the work environment.
One of the things I have learnt and I've been going for a couple of months now is the power of pauses.
When I've been watching the speeches of other people, pauses are so effective.
I want to give you a term that comes up a lot in Toastmasters, in our group anyway, which is pregnant pauses.
This is where you just hold the silence.
A little bit longer.
This has added benefits for you as well, because if you pause at points within your speech or presentation, it's going to give your brain time to reorganize itself and get ready for the next sentence that you want to say in English.
And what I really encourage you to think about is how can you implement pregnant pauses in your speech to good effect?
All right. See you in the next one.
