The Art of Strategic Pause

A Masterstroke in Influence, Persuasion, Manipulation, Negotiation and Debate

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Tactical pauses are those times in a sentence or a paragraph when you artfully insert a nanosecond of silence, like a ninja, into your dialogue, a simple but effective method, used as a weapon in the armoury of social interaction.

This technique is effective where control is the goal, and whenever we want to influence, persuade, manipulate, negotiate or debate. Tactical pauses allow you to make your impact as a path from Zero to Hero.

Influence

Strategic pauses also can create meaning by recontextualising speech, accenting our words within a frame of silence. Silence opportunistically usurps the significance of speech itself — and can do so strategically, by skilfully inventing gaps in an ongoing speech pattern.

One way to create a strategic pause is simply by lengthening the length of some syllables. Doing so can dramatically emphasise a particularly significant word or idea. A good conversationer doesn’t respond immediately Happily, we can spread a pause out by lengthening it before we eventually return to our speech.

Skilled conversation can assemble such pauses strategically, capturing my attention for a gossip. Silence…