Did you ever notice the sound of an aha?
Seriously, what do you hear while it clicks for you?
I bet it’s …
silence.
At least that’s what it sounds like for me. Almost every aha happens when I have a moment to think, let something sink in, connect the dots.
Maybe that’s why so few presentations create one. They simply don’t leave that space. They talk past it and fill every silence. The bigger the moment, the bigger that temptation: Don’t leave it to chance. Make sure they get it. Keep talking.
An aha, however, needs what I call a moment of intensity.
You make a point. And then you shut up.
And I know how that feels. It’s terrible when you try it for the first time. Even just two seconds of silence feel like an eternity when you’re standing in front of an audience, all eyes on you.
But it’s in that moment when they connect the dots. Not you for them. They themselves.
Too many communicators rush past this moment. They can’t stand the silence. And so they jump to the next point. Or repeat the same point again with slightly different words, perhaps more data, or another metaphor.
If your goal is to wow the audience, it’s a different story. That’s more like a rollercoaster ride where you want to quickly lead them from one sensation to the next.
Or if your goal is persuasion. In that case, you absolutely don’t want to give them time to think because that would mean giving them the chance to find the hole in your argument. You’ll want to move so quickly that your audience can barely keep up and has no time to think unguided.
But if your goal is genuine insight, then the moment of intensity is your best friend. You’ll gain something that no wow and no persuasion can give you. The insight becomes theirs. They see it for themselves.
And that’s why they’re so much more likely to actually mean it when they say finally agree. And why it’s so much more likely to stay with them after the talk.
The one thing that makes this an almost unbearable thought for the persuader is that it requires trust.
Trust in your audience. Trust that they’re smart enough to connect the dots. Trust that their conclusion will be just as good as yours. Trust that they will make the right choice when they see it.
The persuader doesn’t have that trust and so they can’t let the audience arrive at their own conclusion.
The irony is that their argument gets weaker from it. Persuaders understand their audience well enough in one sense: to know which buttons to press. But that keeps them from asking another question: what would make this a genuinely good choice for the audience?
Rather than fix a hole in their argument, they reach for a persuasion trick to patch the hole.
But if you start from understanding who’s actually there, what genuinely matters to them, how they see the world, and how they themselves speak about it (so you too can speak their language), then you’ll get what the persuader never will: trust in return.
The moment an audience feels that you’re on their side, that you trust them, they will trust you back.
And all it took was a moment of silence.
Keep lighting the path,
Michael
PS: The hard part isn’t really trusting your audience. It’s understanding them well enough to know what will happen in the moment of silence. The Clarity Lab gets you there for your next talk. If yours is after the summer break, now’s the time to think about it.
