There is a recording of me performing at a corporate event in Linz, maybe eighteen months into my performing life, that I can barely watch. Not because anything went wrong. The method was clean. The audience reacted. The evening was, by any objective measure, a success.
But the pace. My God, the pace.
I spoke at exactly one speed for the entire twenty-five minutes. Every sentence delivered at the same brisk clip. Every revelation, every buildup, every transition, every moment of supposed wonder — all at the same metronomic tempo. It was like listening to someone read a phone book at a jog. Not unpleasant, exactly, but flat. Relentlessly, unvaryingly flat.
I knew something was off when I watched the recording, but I could not articulate what it was. The words were good. The structure was solid. The effects landed. Yet the whole thing felt like a single long exhalation — no peaks, no valleys, no moments where the audience leaned in because the texture of the sound had shifted underneath them.
It took me another few months of study to understand what was missing. And when I found it, I found it in a single phrase from Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment that stopped me cold: “Predictability is poison.”
The Metronome Problem
Here is what I did not understand about speech pace when I started performing: I thought pace was something you calibrated once. You found your comfortable speed — not too fast, not too slow — and you stayed there. Consistency was the goal. Evenness was professionalism.
I was wrong about everything.
Consistent pace is not professionalism. It is monotony in disguise. When you speak at the same speed for more than about ninety seconds, the audience’s brain does something remarkably efficient and remarkably destructive to your performance: it stops paying attention to how you are saying things and starts processing only the bare content. The delivery becomes invisible. The texture vanishes. You become wallpaper with words.
This is because the human auditory system is wired to respond to change. Not to any particular speed, but to the delta — the difference between what was happening and what is happening now. A sudden acceleration after a stretch of slow, measured speech snaps attention forward. A sudden deceleration after rapid-fire energy makes every word feel weighted, significant, almost physical.
The contrast is the thing. Speed and slowness mean nothing in isolation. They only mean something relative to each other.
The Gas Pedal Experiment
After I started paying attention to pace as a variable rather than a constant, I ran an experiment on myself. I took a routine I performed regularly — something with about four minutes of speaking — and I mapped it out on paper. Not the words. The speed.
I drew a simple graph. Time on the horizontal axis, pace on the vertical. And I marked where I naturally sped up and where I naturally slowed down.
The graph was a flat line. A perfectly horizontal line across the entire four minutes. No variation whatsoever.
Then I took that same routine and made a deliberate pace map. I decided in advance where I would accelerate and where I would brake. The logic was simple:
Speed up during the setup. When I was building context, establishing the situation, creating the narrative scaffolding — that could move quickly. The audience does not need to savor every word of the setup. They need the information to arrive with energy and momentum.
Slow down during the moments that matter. When I was approaching a key beat, when the audience needed to process something important, when I wanted a single sentence to land with weight — that is where the brakes went on. Not dramatically. Not to a crawl. Just enough that the change in pace signaled to the audience: pay attention to this.
Speed up during excitement. After a reveal, when the energy in the room was high, when the audience was reacting and laughing and there was a natural momentum building — ride that wave. Match the room’s energy with vocal energy. Let the pace reflect the excitement.
Slow down for the next build. After the energy peak, bring the pace back down. Reset. Let the audience settle. Create the silence and the space that makes the next peak possible.
I rehearsed this pace map in my hotel room in Salzburg, standing in front of the bathroom mirror as usual, with a metronome app on my phone. Not to match the metronome, but to feel when I was deviating from it. The metronome was my awareness tool — it made my natural pace audible, so I could hear when I was speeding up or slowing down relative to it.
The First Time It Worked
The next time I performed that routine, I followed the pace map. And the difference was immediate.
During the fast sections, the audience leaned back. They were receiving information, being carried along, enjoying the ride. There was energy and forward motion. The setup did not drag.
During the slow sections, they leaned forward. Literally. I could see it happen. When my pace dropped and my voice took on more weight, the room shifted. People stopped fidgeting. Conversations at nearby tables paused. There was an almost physical sensation of attention concentrating in the room.
And here is the thing I did not expect: the transitions between fast and slow were themselves dramatic. The moment where my voice shifted gear — that was a performance moment in its own right. It was as if the change in pace was a kind of punctuation that the audience could feel even if they could not name it. Something just changed, their brains registered, and the registration itself was a form of engagement.
The Three Speeds
Over time, I settled into what I think of as three operational speeds, each with a different function.
The first is what I call conversational pace. This is the speed at which normal, engaging conversation happens. It is my default, my home base, the pace at which the audience feels they are simply being talked to by another human being. Most of the performance lives here.
The second is what I call the push. Slightly faster than conversational, with more forward momentum. I use the push when I want to build energy, when I am stacking details, when I want the audience to feel the accumulation of evidence or the escalation of a story. The push does not feel rushed — it feels excited. Like I am telling them something I cannot wait to share.
The third is what I call the drag. Noticeably slower than conversational, with more space between words and more weight on each syllable. I use the drag when I want a sentence to land. When I want them to hear every word individually. When the moment calls for gravity.
The key is that I rarely stay in any one speed for more than thirty seconds. The movement between speeds is constant but not random. It follows the emotional logic of the material. Setup gets the push. Buildup gets conversational. The moment of importance gets the drag. The aftermath gets the push again. And the cycle repeats.
The Counterintuitive Slow-Down
Weber describes a technique that I initially resisted because it felt backwards: when you sense the audience slipping away, when their attention starts to drift, slow down instead of speeding up.
My instinct when I felt the audience losing interest was to accelerate. To cram more energy in. To speak faster, louder, with more intensity. But this is exactly wrong, because the audience is not drifting because you are too slow. They are drifting because you have been too predictable. More of the same — faster, louder, more — does not break the pattern. It doubles down on it.
Slowing down breaks the pattern. The sudden shift in pace — from whatever speed you were at to something markedly slower — sends a signal. Something has changed. The brain perks up. The new pace, by virtue of being new, recaptures attention that the old pace had lost.
I tested this during a keynote in Vienna. I was twenty minutes into a forty-minute talk, and I could feel the room starting to drift. The post-lunch slot. Warm room. Heavy meal. The usual battlefield conditions.
My instinct screamed at me to pick up the pace, to inject more energy, to fight for their attention with volume and speed. Instead, I did the opposite. I slowed down. I lowered my voice. I let silence stretch between sentences.
And the room came back. Not all at once, but within about thirty seconds, I could see postures shifting, eyes refocusing, phones being put down. The change in pace had done what more energy never could — it had interrupted the pattern that was putting them to sleep.
Pace as Emotional Instruction
Here is what I have come to believe about speech pace after years of experimenting with it: pace is an emotional instruction to the audience. It tells them how to feel about what you are saying, independent of the words themselves.
Fast pace says: this is exciting, this is fun, this is building toward something, keep up.
Slow pace says: this is important, this is serious, this deserves your full attention, sit with this.
The words can say anything, but the pace tells the audience how to process those words. I can deliver the exact same sentence at two different speeds and create two entirely different emotional responses. Said quickly, with energy and forward motion, the sentence feels like a stepping stone — important only as part of a sequence. Said slowly, with weight and space, the same sentence feels like a destination — something to be considered on its own merits.
This means that pace is not just a delivery variable. It is a compositional tool. When I map out the pace of a routine, I am composing the emotional experience just as deliberately as when I choose the words or plan the physical actions.
The Practice Protocol
If you want to work on pace variation, here is the exercise that helped me most.
Take a routine you know well. Record yourself performing it at your natural pace. Then listen back and mark, on a piece of paper, every place where the pace changes. If your graph is flat — and it probably is — you have found the problem.
Now decide where the pace should change. Mark it on your script. Write “PUSH” where you want to accelerate. Write “DRAG” where you want to slow down. Then perform the routine again, following those marks.
It will feel exaggerated at first. It will feel like you are overdoing it. You are not. What feels like a dramatic shift to the speaker barely registers as a shift to the listener. You have to push the variation further than feels comfortable before the audience perceives it as intentional rather than accidental.
Record yourself again. Listen back. You will hear the texture that was missing before — the peaks and valleys, the push and pull, the breathing quality that makes a performance feel alive rather than recited.
The Living Voice
A performance with no pace variation is a performance that is technically alive but emotionally dead. It delivers information but not experience. It communicates content but not feeling.
When you vary your pace deliberately — speeding up to create energy, slowing down to create weight, shifting constantly so the audience never settles into a pattern — you create something that is almost impossible to ignore. Not because any particular speed is compelling, but because the movement between speeds is itself a form of storytelling.
The contrast is the texture. The change is the message. The variation is what makes the voice feel human instead of mechanical.
And a human voice, in all its unpredictable, shifting, breathing complexity, is the one instrument you already own that the audience cannot stop listening to.
You just have to learn to play it.