You know that woman who walks into a meeting, speaks in a normal voice, barely gestures – and somehow everyone leans in? She is not necessarily the most senior, the loudest, or the one with the fanciest title. Yet when she opens her mouth, the room rearranges itself around her.

According to psychologist Eva Glasrud, there really is one thing people like that almost always do. It is not a secret vocabulary or a perfectly timed joke. It is a tiny, almost boring habit that changes how powerful, clear, and charismatic you seem the second you start talking.

Why Slower Speech Reads As Power

Status, Silence And The Talking Stick

“People who command a room usually know how to slow down when they speak,” Glasrud revealed in a new interview. The logic is pure psychology. A professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business has made a similar point: powerful people do not rush, because they are not afraid someone will grab the metaphorical talking stick away from them.

Lower status speakers do the opposite. They cram everything in before they are interrupted, racing through sentences, apologising with their tone before anyone has objected to the content. The result is verbal small print – you sound like you are sneaking your ideas past the group, not owning them.

Confidence You Can Hear

Fast talking is often read as anxiety. On stage, it is practically a confession: I am terrified and I want this over with. Slower speech communicates something else entirely – that you are confident your idea is worth the room’s time. You do not need to spray it out like a fire hose. You can put down one clear thought, let it land, then move to the next.

What Psychology Tells Us About Pace

The Numbers Behind Charisma

Glasrud notes that former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, who used to race through presentations, now speaks at about 150 words per minute – roughly the pace of a good audiobook. Communication expert Carmine Gallo, author of Talk Like TED, suggests many great talks sit around 190 words per minute, depending on personality.

For comparison, an auctioneer can push 250 words per minute. Impressive, yes. Easy to follow in a strategy meeting? Not so much. Once you hear those numbers, it is obvious why your manic, breathless status update is not landing. No one can absorb it.

Your Audience’s Brain On Fast Talk

There is also a cognitive angle. When you speak quickly, listeners have to work harder just to decode your words, leaving less bandwidth for actually thinking about your ideas. Slowing down, and adding micro pauses, gives their brains room to segment, process and remember what you said.

Executive coaches see this every day. Leaders who bombard their teams with ratios and acronyms lose them by slide three. The moment they slow the pace, cut the noise, and tell a simple story around the numbers, attention snaps back.

How Leaders Use Slow Speech To Become More Credible

From PowerPoint To Presence

One European executive coaching firm that trains senior finance leaders found a striking pattern. When clients learned to speak more slowly, embody their message and stop hiding behind spreadsheets, they were later rated as about two and a half times more credible in key meetings.

The content of those meetings barely changed. What changed was the delivery: fewer rushed caveats, more grounded sentences; fewer monologues of figures, more pauses to underline one decisive point. In the language of leadership, pacing is posture.

A Quick Boardroom Reframe

Picture two versions of the same update. In the first, you rattle off, “Revenue is up, costs are flat, we need to adjust pricing in three markets,” in one breath. In the second, you look around the table and say, “Revenue is up. Costs are flat. That is why I am recommending a price shift in three markets.” Same data. The second version, with deliberate gaps, feels like leadership, not a disclaimer.

Do You Secretly Talk Too Fast

A One Minute Pace Check

Try this tonight. Record yourself speaking for one minute about something simple, then roughly count the words. If you are closer to auctioneer speed than audiobook pace, your audience probably feels like they are sprinting to keep up.

Then play it back at half volume. Do you sound confident and considered, or slightly panicked? Most people are shocked by how rushed they seem on tape, especially on Zoom where nerves quietly spike.

Everyday Red Flags

There are other clues. Colleagues ask you to “back up a second.” People stop taking notes because they gave up tracking you. Questions come in that you know you already answered. Those are not intelligence problems on their side. They are pacing problems on yours.

Train Yourself To Slow Down Without Sounding Boring

Start With Breath And Micro Pauses

Charisma is not about dragging every syllable. It is about crisp words with a little space between them. Before your next presentation or tricky conversation, consciously exhale, then start speaking. At punctuation – comma, full stop, new slide – let there be one heartbeat of silence before you continue.

Borrow The Audiobook Rhythm

Glasrud suggests using audiobooks as your internal metronome. Listen to a narrator you love for a few minutes, then read a paragraph of your own material out loud at that same pace. It will feel embarrassingly slow. To your listeners, it will sound clear, confident and oddly captivating.

Anchor Your Key Sentences

Finally, choose the one or two lines in any meeting that matter most – the decision, the ask, the boundary. Deliver those a shade slower than the rest, with a clean pause afterwards. You are teaching the room that when you choose to take up space with your voice, it is worth listening.

Try This In Your Next Meeting

Own The Silence, Own The Room

You do not need a deeper voice, a Ted Talk, or a personality transplant to command an audience. You need the courage to stop sprinting through your own ideas. Slow your next sentence down by just a notch, let the silence sit for a second, and watch who leans in.