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Speakers Who Don't Practice Sound Out Of Tune…

So what makes a speech a really good speech? Is it that you are “on fire” when you deliver it? Does your audience need to be “in the mood” to hear what you are going to tell them? Or is the magic of the words that you’ve put together that will allow you to connect with your audience and move them to action? Actually, it’s none of these – practice is what makes a speech work or not work. Do you know how to practice a speech?

Why Bother?

We all live busy lives. It can be hard enough to find the time to pull together a speech, let alone to find the time to practice it. Because of this, all too often speakers just decide to skip the whole practicing thing. Turns out that this can be a big mistake.

The thing that we seem to forget is that the first time that we ever give a speech will be the worst delivery that we ever make of that material. We’ll fumble over our words, get lost in our thoughts, and generally do a poor job of communicating.

What we need to do is to take the time to practice our speech before we give it. I often get asked just exactly how many times you should plan on practicing your speech. It turns out that the answer is 7 times.

I’m afraid that I can’t point you to any hard science that shows that practicing a speech 7 times is the correct number of times to do it; however, experience has shown this seems to be the right number. The first 5 times that you practice a speech you will find yourself making changes to it. The 6th time you’ll pretty much leave it alone and the 7th time you’ll find yourself being slightly bored while giving the speech. This is perfect, when you have reached this state you will be able to focus on your audience and won’t be worried about remembering what the next word that you want to say is.

5 Ways To Correctly Practice Your Next Speech

If I’ve been able to convince you that you need to practice your next speech before you give it, then this will lead you to your next question: “How?” It’s funny that in all of the material that has been published on speaking in which speakers are told that they need to practice more, there’s actually very little information available on just exactly how we need to go about doing all of this practice.

Speaker Roena Oesting has been taking a look at the nitty gritty details of just what makes for an effective speech practice session and she’s got 5 suggestions for us.

• Be Natural: In order to have the best chance of connecting with your audience, you are going to want your words to come across as being natural, not forced. This means that you’re going to have to stifle the urge to write out and then memorize every word in your next speech. Taking the time to practice your speech will help you organize your thoughts and this will eliminate the need to have the whole speech written out.

• Create An Outline: I like to think of a speech as being a length of rope – you start at one end and work your way to the other end. In order to mark your progress along this “rope speech”, it can be helpful to know how far you’ve come and how far you still have yet to go. This is where an outline can come in handy. Don’t make it too detailed – just include enough points so that you’ll be able to understand what you want to say and what the next point that you’re going to want to cover will be.
• End Strong: The folks who study stuff like this tell us that what your audience is going to remember after your speech is over are the last few words that came out of your mouth. This means that the exact words that you use to close your speech are very important – you can’t be pulling these guys out of the air. Instead, take the time to write them down and memorize them. This way when you reach the end of your speech, you are guaranteed that you’ll be able to finish strong.
• Begin Strong: Once you are sure that you can end on a high note, you next need to make sure that you can start off on the right foot. Once again, taking the time to write out your opening and memorizing it can make this much easier to do. The purpose of your opening is to answer the one question that is on the minds of everyone who is sitting in the audience: “why should I bother to listen to you?”
• Practice Early: Don’t wait until you have your entire speech written out before you begin to practice it – it will be too late then. Instead, once you have your opening, outline, and closing created take a moment to give the speech a run-through. By doing this type of early practice you can detect where there may be problems with your speech before you’ve spent a lot of time getting your words right. It’s much easier to change parts of a speech before you have a big investment in it.

What All Of This Means For You

Anybody can stand up in front of an audience and give a speech. However, it takes something special to deliver a great speech. It takes a real polished speaker to do a good job of this. The only way that you’re going to become an effective speaker is by learning to practice your speech before you give it.

When you practice a speech, you try out different ways of organizing your words. This allows you to come up with the sequence that works best for the audience that you’ll be addressing. We’ve discussed 5 ways to correctly practice your next speech. By doing these you’ll transform your speech from an ok speech to an OMG speech.

The really great speakers that we all can name don’t have any special magic when they gave speeches. Instead, they have practiced their speeches and they have arranged their words to have the maximum impact on their audience. By practicing your next speech you can follow in their footsteps and become a great speaker also.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: How many times do you think that you should practice a speech before you give it?

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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Are you ready to kick your speaking skills up to the next level? If you are, then do you know how to become better? If you are thinking that you need to get one of those “fancy word of the day” calendars to practice with, that’s not going to do it. In fact, the secret to becoming a better speaker has nothing to do with learning a new skill. Rather, it has everything to do with becoming better at something that you should already be doing – practicing your next speech.

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Just Creating A Presentation Is Not Good Enough, You Have To Practice It Also

So you’ve got a big presentation / speech coming up. How many times should you practice your speech before you give it for real? This is actually a very good question that most presenters either forget to ask themselves or come up with the wrong answer to. We all know that practice makes perfect so how can we tell when we’ve reached perfection with our speech?

We should probably start with the good news: even a little practice will probably make you better than most presenters. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to sit through a train-wreck of a presentation that clearly showed that the presenter had laid out some thoughts on paper, but had not taken the time to practice what he/she was going to say.

If you want to create and deliver a great presentation, there are three key interlocked factors that you need to make sure that you take care of:

1. Make sure that the speech plays to your speaking strengths. If you hate to give speeches, make sure that this one is as short as possible in order to minimize your time “on stage”. If you are good at telling stories, then include them in your presentation.
2. Establish good connections between the different parts of the speech. Ensuring that the speech flows smoothly and logically from section to section will make it much easier for you to memorize the flow of the speech.
3. Make sure that you have your speech down cold before you deliver it. You’ll know that you’ve been able to do this when you could recite it by heart if someone asked you to do so at a moment’s notice. This will ensure that when you deliver your presentation the words tumble out of your mouth automatically and with no effort.

I’m not sure if you really want to hear this, but you cannot over-rehearse a presentation. I know that you are dying for a hard number to hang your hat on so here it is: 7. I firmly believe that any presentation that you are going to deliver deserves at least seven practice runs by you. The first will be a flaming disaster and the seventh should be quite good. This means that your “for real” presentation will be (at least) the 8th time that you’ve delivered the material and it should flow from you quite naturally. Key point: if this is one of those career defining presentations then you should probably practice it at least 15 times in order to make sure that each and every word comes out perfectly.

So we’ve answered the question of “how many” times you should practice, now the follow on question is “how to practice”. The key to the first few run throughs is to make sure that you are in a secure environment in which you won’t be interrupted. For most of us, this means a bathroom that has a lock on the door. The added advantage of practicing in a bathroom is that there is a large mirror in front of you and you can watch yourself as you talk. I can assure you that it’s hard to do, but you’ll eliminate unnecessary moves and twitches quickly when you practice this way. Beginning speakers often want to make their presentation “perfect”. This means that when they are practicing, they will speak until they screw-up, grit their teeth and then go back to the beginning and start over. This ensures that it’s going to be hours before they can make it through the entire speech. I recommend a different approach: start at the beginning and just run though the entire speech until you hit the end. Yes, there will be screw-ups; however, just keep on going. Doing it this way will allow you to get a feel for the speech as a whole and you may end up changing big parts of it – no need to perfect something that you’re going to be changing anyway.

Last point: get feedback. If the first time that you get feedback is when you present to your “real” audience than you’ve made a mistake. I can’t begin to tell you just how important it is to get feedback from real humans as you prepare a presentation. Words and ideas that seem to flow together for you may turn out to be confusing gibberish to them. Your cutting and trimming to make your speech fit in the allotted time may have caused you to skip over important definitions and concepts that are critical to your audience’s understanding of your main points. It does not matter if the feedback comes from family, friends, strangers, or co-workers, just make sure that you get it.

How many time did you rehearse your last presentation? Did you feel that this was enough times to get it down or do you wish that you had practiced more? Who do you use as an audience for your practice presentations? Do they give you valuable feedback? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Well, at least I sure would like to be able to give a speech like he does. Just in case anyone has been living under a rock for the past week or so, Steve Jobs rolled out the next version of the iPhone at the WWDC 2008 conference. Steve, as always, did a great job of giving the Apple corporate pitch. Clearly he has a nature skill for giving a great speech. We may never be as good at public speaking as Steve is; however, we sure can learn from him. Here are five quick tips from Steve to you:

1. Benefits NOT Features: This is where Steve is at his best. In his speeches he spends his time talking about the experience of using the product, not how the product was implemented. Instead of talking about the 30GB memory size of an iPod, instead he’ll talk about the 7,500 songs that it can carry, or the 25,000 photos that it can carry, or the 75 hours of video that it can carry.

2. Practice and Then Practice Some More: Steve’s a CEO of Apple, a board member of Disney, and probably still runs Pixar. You’d think that he’d have a team of speech writers create his speeches and then he’d just grab it, scan it, and jump up on the stage and give it. Nope, it turns out that he spends hours upon hours practicing each speech. A 2006 Business Week article reported that Steve would spend at least four hours going over every slide and every part of a demonstration as he prepars for a presentation.
3. A Picture Is Worth…: Have you ever seen a picture or a video from one of Steve’s presentations? There are either no words or very few words on the slides that are displayed on the giant screens behind him. There are certainly no lists of bullet points. Steve (and his highly paid set of presentation artists) understand that it’s really his words that count — the slides are just there to support his message.
4. Energy + Enthusiasm = Passion: Every time Steve speaks, it’s clear that he loves being on the stage and talking to us. You can almost feel his excitement grow as he gets ready to share with us the next great thing that he has up his sleeves. His passion is contagious and everyone in attendance can’t help but catch it.

I’m not so sure about trying to emulate Steve’s trademark jeans & black shirt look for your next presentation. However, understanding how Steve is able to do what he does so well will point you in the right direction.

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