Because speed does not signal confidence to a room. It signals fear. The faster you speak, the less authority you have, and the instinct that feels like taking control is actually the thing giving you away.
Here's the mechanism. When you feel the room's attention slipping in a second language, the body does one thing automatically: it speeds up. More words, faster, no pauses, trying to hold the room before it drifts away. It feels like control. It reads as fear. The room feels that fear before it hears a single idea, and once it feels the fear, the idea barely matters.
Here's the dangerous part. The harder you work to sound in command, the faster you go. The faster you go, the more authority you bleed. Your own effort becomes the leak.
The leaders who own the room move the other way. They slow down. They let one sentence land before the next begins. They are not afraid of the pause, because the pause is where authority lives.
Authority is not in how much you say. It is in how willing you are to stop.
Slow the first sentence. Not the whole talk, just the opening line. Say it at half the speed you want to, and let the last word land before you move to the next one. That single slow sentence tells the room you are in control of the moment, not chased by it.
This is one piece of a larger pattern PACE calls the Translation Tax, the processing cost of a second language under pressure. If this sounds familiar, take the two-minute self-assessment to see how much of it applies to you.