Pace speeds up under pressure for a specific reason: you’re running out of air, so you rush to finish the sentence before you have to take a visible breath. The result sounds less like confidence and more like someone trying to get off stage.
The uncomfortable truth is that your instinct for your own pace is unreliable exactly when it matters most. What feels like a reasonable speed under pressure is, to a listener, usually fast enough to strip out the pauses that make speech easy to follow.
Try this now. Read a paragraph of anything out loud, an email or a news article, at the pace you’d use presenting to your team. Time it. Now read the same paragraph again, deliberately at three-quarters of that pace, and time it again. Notice how much slower it feels to you versus how it would likely sound to someone listening, since a like-for-like recording almost always reveals the “too slow” version was closer to normal conversational pace than the first one.
The habit worth building is not “slow down in the moment,” which is hard to remember under pressure. It’s rehearsing at three-quarters pace often enough that your default shifts, so what used to be your rushed pace becomes noticeably too fast even to you.
