Do you hate rehearsing?

Rehearsal or Repitition?

Rehearsal or Repitition?

In my experience of coaching and training executives in multinational companies, the one major deficit that I find is the lack of proper rehearsal.  People are just not interested in putting in the time to rehearse their material.

If you have been involved in a sports team or theater then you will know that most of your time is spent practicing drills.  A sports team will spend most of the time working specific drills day-in, day-out before they get ready to work on their game practice.

More worryingly, I find that younger professionals are even more averse to rehearsal. Perhaps its the consumer, must-have the next new thing that influence this opinion.  Most success is hard work. And most hard work is spent mastering mundane tasks.

In presenting, effective rehearsing needs as a foundation a mastery of the content to be delivered. Most presenters don’t even reach this level. This is one reason why they struggle to deliver with confidence. It’s hard to deliver with style while you are still trying to recall the next sentence you need to deliver.

So where do people spend their time? Mostly making PowerPoint slides. A completely  inefficient use of time. A slidedeck is simply a tool to support your message and add visually memorable ways to recall your key messages. It is not the presentation.

A proven way to speed up the process of reaching a message is to “stand-and-deliver” the speech as soon as you have a basic outline. Record these early rehearsals five minutes at a time. Then immediately listen to the recording and note which areas sounded strong and flowed well. Make a note of them on your outline (or write it into a script if you prefer). Keep cycling through your presentation in this way until you have solid message that flows well through the presentation.  Once you have got to this stage you can work on refining the transitions and think about adding visual aids and slidedecks.

When it comes to rehearsing a voice recorder is your best friend.

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