Bill Bradley, also known as Dollar Bill, the Ivy League star of the now bedraggled New York Knicks, once said, “When you’re not practicing, someone somewhere is, and when the two of you meet, assuming roughly equal ability, the other guy will win.”
I’m a speech coach and I tell my clients the same thing. Even Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher who wrote the book on The Art of War agrees with me. He said every battle is lost or won before the battle starts.
It’s the same for speeches and presentations, and it’s probably the old 80/20 rule holding sway: 80% of success depends on preparation, 20% on performance.
Why Don’t We Rehearse?
So why do so many of us fail to heed this advice?
First of all, most of us in business have not had careers in the performing arts, so we are unaccustomed to the rigors of rehearsal.
We find it humbling, exhausting, and scary. Who wants to stand in front of their peers and take feedback?
Many of us are busy and can’t make the time. We slap slide decks together, make a few changes, and trot out the pitch, hoping we’ll somehow make it through.
Some of us are so shy we refuse to invite anyone to help us practice, fearing they will see how terrified we are.
And the rewards of rehearsal are not immediately apparent, so to avoid the unpleasantness, we decide to wing it.
I’ve had clients say, “I don’t want to rehearse, I want to keep it fresh,” when the fact of the matter is, until you know your talk inside out, it won’t be fresh. Rehearsal enables spontaneity.
When I ask clients if they rehearse, they tend to say, “Well, I looked over my slides.”
“But did you verbalize it? Did you figure out what you wanted to say on each slide? Did you stand up and speak it aloud six or seven times in front of somebody who knows you, your audience, and your topic?”
The answer usually is, “No.”
In fact, I think many of us sit in our cubicles, mumble to ourselves as we leaf through our slides, and call it rehearsal.
The Best Way to Rehearse
So what are the best ways to rehearse?
The only scientifically proven way to improve is to rehearse under performance-like pressure. That means in front of people who know you, the topic, and the audience.
By rehearsing, you slowly transfer control of the content from your cerebral cortex to your cerebellum, the part of your brain responsible for lightning fast motor activation. The cerebral cortex is good at general stuff, like slowly practicing a new piece of music, but not so good at intricately timed things.
You want to get the better-equipped part of the brain doing the job. When people are learning something new, they show high levels of activity in the cerebral cortex, whereas when they perform a task they already know well they show more activity in the cerebellum.
Second, make time! I suggest start hatching ideas for a new talk at least two weeks before it’s to be given. Recognize that one bad presentation won’t ruin a career, but it could do some damage, and dog you for years.
On the other hand, giving one great talk allows you to demonstrate not only your expertise, but more importantly, your leadership qualities.
Rehearsal doesn’t have to be painful. You invite the people you trust to sit in on your practice session You tell them what you want them to do. You can ask them to hold comments until the end, or give them as you go along. You can ask them to give feedback on content and/or delivery.
Opportunity to Convince Yourself
Keep in mind that the first person you have to persuade is you, and rehearsal offers you the best chance of convincing yourself. Rehearsing helps you scratch and claw your way into belief.
W.B. Yeats, the great Irish poet, said, “I always think a great speaker convinces us not by force of reasoning, but because he is visibly enjoying the beliefs he wants us to accept.”
Rehearsal is a period of incubation, of giving birth to an idea that you believe in. You and your team will add and delete material. You’ll discover better ways to make your point, eliminate extraneous information, and find personal stories, metaphors and analogies to make your talk more vivid and memorable.
I don’t recommend memorizing a script: I recommend internalizing it. It takes great acting to make memorized words sound freshly minted, so don’t try to memorize. You only need to know the journey you are taking your audience on, the points you want to make, and the evidence to support those points.
By internalizing your talk, you will be more or less free to look at your audience, see their faces, read their expressions, and turn your talk into something more than a monologue.
For the audience, the most important real estate in the room is your face. The more you connect with your listeners, eyeball to eyeball, the more they will take away from your talk.
Rehearsal enables spontaneity. Rehearsal reduces anxiety. Rehearsal strengthens your belief in your message. It increases your confidence and sense of ease. Rehearsal is the work, performance is the play.
The science is indisputable. The only way to excel is to rehearse under performance-like pressure.