Does the world need the sound of your voice?

Are you worthy of attention? Is it fair to expect an audience to listen to you banging on for half an hour?

If your answer is a modest 'umm, well, not really', then you're not alone.  Many of us fear speaking in public or appearing on TV and being unmasked for the charlatans we suspect we are.  And we know the world will survive quite happily with or without our contribution.

The trouble is if you don't appear to think you're worth listening to, then your audience will most likely agree with you and switch off.  Or switch over to someone who does appear to think they're worth listening to.

So how to build your self-confidence to a level that makes people think you're worthy of attention?

You could sign up for some assertiveness therapy.  But if you haven't time because you're on in five minutes, how about a quick fudge exploiting the fuzzy logic of human reasoning?

What we tend to do when we don't believe we're worth listening to - but have to do the interview all the same -  is rush it.  We try and get it over and done with as quickly as possible.  We reason something like this:

'I'm not worthy of attention, so if I speak really, really quickly, the audience will forgive me for wasting their time and I'll be OK.'

Sounds silly, I know, but it's human.

Meanwhile, your audience is also human.  Their fuzzy logic goes something like this:

'This person is speaking really, really quickly.  So she doesn't think she's worth listening to.  If she doesn't think she's worth listening to, she probably isn't.  So I won't bother.'

Now the good news is that by speaking really, really slowly, you can harness the same fuzzy logic to create a magical transformation.

If you speak slowly - holding your pauses - it shows you're comfortable with silence.  If you're comfortable with silence, it's because you expect people to listen.  If you expect people to listen, you're confident you have something to say.

By behaving like a confident person, you become a confident person.  In the eyes of the audience, that is, which is what matters when you're on TV.

The audience reasoning changes to something like this:

'This person is confident, so she knows what she's talking about.  If she knows what she's talking about, she's probably worth listening to.  So I'll listen.'

I am indebted to the Reverend Ian Paisley for the following quote, which is great for practising slow delivery.

'Today was to be the day when the gun was to be finally taken out of Irish politics.'

To say those simple words quickly is to kill them dead, removing their terrible significance.

But say them slowly and you feel the power.

Now this is a bit of a leap, but to test my suggestion, let's think of something really banal and give it the Paisley treatment.  For example:

'This (long, long pause) is a great (long, long pause) cup of tea.'

See?  It works.  The words are about the topic.   The silence is about you.  That's where the power lies.