You are speaking faster than you think, and slowing down is not the fix

The short answer

Two things are true at once and people usually only hear the first.

You are almost certainly speaking faster than you think. It is the most common single finding when I record someone in a first session, and it is the one people are most reluctant to believe until the playback.

And “slow down” is still poor advice. A speaker running at one constant, careful speed for twenty minutes is easier to follow than a rushed one and much harder to stay awake through. What holds a room is change of pace: fast where the material is light or familiar, slow where it is dense or important. The instruction that actually works is not “go slower.” It is “go slower on the parts that matter.”

Why you cannot hear your own speed

Because you are not listening to your delivery. You are listening to your thoughts, which are running well ahead of your mouth, and your sense of pace is calibrated against them rather than against the room.

Under adrenaline the gap widens. The heart rate is up, the breathing is high, and the internal clock is running fast, so a delivery that feels measured from the inside arrives at speed. Add the very reasonable desire to get off the stage and you have the standard presentation: quick, even, and about fifteen per cent past what the audience can comfortably take in.

This is why I do not ask people how fast they think they speak. The answer is not available by introspection. It is available in about ninety seconds of recording.

The cost is not what people assume

Ask someone what happens if they speak too quickly and they will say the audience misses things. True, but it undersells it.

Speed removes pauses first. No pauses means no breath, which means the voice thins and the last words of each sentence disappear — and the end of a sentence is usually where the actual point is. It also means no processing time, so a listener who loses one idea has no gap in which to catch up and is now behind for the rest.

Then there is what it signals. Fast, unvaried speech reads as anxiety, or as someone hurrying to finish before they are stopped. Neither is the impression a senior person wants in a boardroom. The content can be excellent and the delivery will still say I am not comfortable here.

And it gets much worse across languages. A room containing people who work in English as a second language will lose a fast speaker before it loses a moderately paced one, and it will not tell you. This is the single most avoidable failure in international presentations that I see.

What good actually looks like

Not slow. Varied.

The pattern that works is roughly this. Take familiar context, transitions and things the room already knows at a decent clip, because dwelling on them wastes attention you will need. Then drop the pace, noticeably, for the sentence that carries the argument, the number, the ask, or the caveat. Come back up afterwards.

The change is what does the work. Slowing from a moderate pace onto one sentence marks it as important more reliably than volume, more reliably than gesture, and without any of the theatre. Audiences read a deliberate slowdown as this is the bit, and they read it without being told.

Which means the counterintuitive route to a delivery that lands is often to speed some of it up. If everything is at the careful pace, nothing is marked.

Speed is not the same as clarity

Worth separating, because they get conflated and the confusion sends people to the wrong fix.

Some people are hard to follow at any speed. That is usually articulation, not rate: word endings dropping off, consonants going soft, the mouth doing less work than the sentence requires. Slowing that speaker down produces slow speech that is still unclear, and they conclude that nothing helps.

The rough test is what happens when you deliberately halve your speed. If a recording of you at half pace is easy to follow, you have a pace problem and it is straightforward. If it is still muddy, the work is elocution — consonant precision and word endings — and pace is a side issue.

I have had clients spend a year being told to slow down when the actual problem was that their sentence endings were vanishing. It is not the same fault and it does not have the same fix.

How to change it

The tape is the whole method. Nothing else moves a habit this automatic.

Record two minutes of real material and listen back, marking every place the pace changes. Most people find no marks at all, which is the finding.

Then take one paragraph and mark it up before you speak: two or three sentences you will deliberately take slowly, and the rest at your natural clip. Record that. The slow sentences will feel exaggerated to you and will sound merely deliberate on the tape. That mismatch is the calibration problem, and running it four or five times fixes it more effectively than any amount of intending to slow down.

The structural version, if you want something that survives adrenaline: write the two or three sentences in your notes on their own line, with space around them. You will slow for them without having to remember to, because the page tells you to.

Where this sits

Pace is the second dial to work on, after pause, because pausing lowers your average speed on its own and gives you the gaps in which pace changes become audible. The four-dial framework explains the sequence.

There is a lesson on this in the free public speaking course, and it comes up in the first fortnight of the public speaking course, usually with a recording the client did not enjoy.

Common questions

Is there an ideal speaking rate?

Not a useful one. Published averages for conversational English vary widely by measurement method and by whether pauses are counted, and a target number encourages exactly the metronomic delivery you are trying to avoid. Judge it against a recording and against whether the room is keeping up.

Does speaking slowly make me sound more authoritative?

Up to a point, and then it reverses. A measured pace on the things that matter reads as considered. A uniformly slow delivery reads as laboured, and in a boardroom it invites interruption, because you are taking longer than the content warrants.

I speak quickly because I think quickly. Is that a problem?

Only for the audience, which is the only party that matters here. Quick thinking is an advantage; the fix is not to think slower but to add the gaps that let other people arrive at the same place.

What about on video calls?

Slow slightly more than you would in a room. Latency, compression and the loss of the small visual cues people use to signal confusion all mean a listener has less to work with and no easy way to tell you they are lost.