Ep 43 How to Rehearse Your Speech

So how do you rehearse for a speech or media interview?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

For starters, the biggest stumbling block to rehearsal is simply deciding you're going to do it. Too many people take the attitude of, well, I don't want to be stale. I don't want to become stale. Let me wing it. I'll be fresher, I'll be better. That is absolute, complete, utter nonsense. How many of you really believe if you just dictate an important memo to a client, you don't spell check it, edit or review it, you send it as is, that it would be more impressive than if you took the time to write it, look at it, edit it, spell check it, improve the grammar, and then send out. Obviously, no one really believes that the first draft of anything is going to be better. So for starters, you just got to get over this notion that somehow you're going to be better off without rehearsing. Now, one of the stumbling blocks was with rehearsal is if you try to memorize. I do not, let me repeat, I do not recommend that in the process of rehearsal that you try to memorize unless you are a professionally trained actor and you've been hired to get the exact words of a script out. That simply doesn't apply to business people, people in civic life, government life, who are giving presentations. So certainly don't try to memorize even the first sentence or two. I don't think it's a good idea. It's good to focus on something interesting to say throughout your speech and to use the simplest words that come to you. Now, let's look at some of the common dictates you've heard about rehearsal. Things like, well, you should rehearse 10 times before you prepare for a speech or before you're fully prepared, or you should rehearse one hour for every minute of your speech, or you should rehearse in front of a mirror. All of these, frankly, are terrible pieces of advice. I'm going to dissect them. For starters, the idea that there's a number of times you need to rehearse. I do not find any validity to that. It's an artificial constraint, and after rehearsing 10 times, you're still awful. What good does it matter? Same thing with the axiom of a one hour of rehearsal per minute or whatever increment of time of your speech. I don't find that's particularly useful either, because you can rehearse for 50 hours if your speech is still awful and boring, and it's a boring day to dump. Well, then what good is the fact that you spent 50 hours rehearsing? Before I get into more than what not to do, let me focus on what to do. The number one thing to do is to rehearse on video until you like what you see. Now, that sounds simple, and that took me about 10 seconds to say that, but I could tell you right now, 99.99999. And I could say nines for a long time. A percentage of the world will never do that. Not because it's hard to do. It's just we're lazy. We're lazy human beings, and we've convinced ourselves that it's a better use of time to gather more data, rearrange bullet points, move the font size, move the logo from the left to the right. All these things that are essentially a waste of time. So, again, if you want to stop listening to the podcast now or stop watching the video on Facebook or YouTube now, and take away just the most important point of this whole show, it is rehearse your speech, your presentation, your media interview messages until you like what you see. Now, I'm going to go much deeper into techniques on how to do that in a systematic way. But that is far and away what is most important. Now, the problem many people have is they'll practice a speech and don't even bother recording it. Well, if you don't record it, you can't see how you're coming across. And that's one of the two big problems of practicing in front of a mirror. You practice in front of a mirror, you can't then watch it and experience it the way an audience member does. Therefore, you can't figure out what's working and what isn't working. The other problem with practicing in front of a mirror is you're doing something that you're not actually going to have to do in the real speech. If you're practicing in front of a mirror, you got to look at your face. So if I'm looking at my face, I can think, oh, my gosh, I've got more hair coming out. I'm getting a double chin. Is my nose getting crooked? Well, that's taking me away from thinking about my audience and focusing on my audience, and that's really where my thoughts should be focused. So I actually think it's a horrible idea to practice in front of a mirror. What you should do is just practice in front of your cell phone, but capture the video as well as the audio or an iPad or a laptop with a webcam or borrow someone. When I was starting out in this business back in 1984, video cameras were rare and expensive. Can't be said of that today everybody is surrounded by video cameras. Even if you're poor. I don't mean to sound uncaring, but I guarantee you somebody if you're watching, they're listening to this show, somebody you know has a cell phone that will capture video or some device you can buy a ten dollar webcam to plug into almost any computer and it will capture the video. So that's the first really big thing you've got to do is figure out how to practice on video. I'm going to give you more steps in just a moment.

Do you have a speaking related question for number one USA Today best selling author TJ for more than 30 years, Walker has been a public speaking coach and media trainer to presidents of Countries, Prime Ministers, CEOs, Nobel Peace Prize winners, professional athletes and Ms. Universes. Send your questions to infoediatrainingworldwide.com or on Twitter jwalker.

Tj. You're fat, you're dumb, you're lazy, you're uninteresting, you're old man looking. You sound trite. Well, you know what? If I tell myself that after watching the rough draft of my speech my first practice on video, I might be accurate. I hope not, but I might actually be accurate. The problem is that's not going to help me. That's not going to make me feel better about this process. It's not going to help me build momentum and figure out how to improve the speech. So what I do when I am rehearsing with clients is exactly the same thing I recommend they do when they're practicing and rehearsing on their own. And that is tape your speech, record it on video the first time you're looking at it. Focus just on what you like. Fixate on your strengths. What were the interesting parts? What was memorable? What worked? That's far more important than saying uh oh. At 3 minutes and 22 seconds in, you said um. At 7 minutes and 28 seconds, you stammered and said uh and you repeated a word. I'm not worried about things like that because ultimately that isn't what makes a speech interesting or boring or memorable or forgotten. That's not the stuff that really trips people up. First and foremost, you need to focus on have you made the ideas that you truly care about interesting, understandable and memorable? If you do that, all these other performance issues. Oh my gosh, I was playing with my ring finger or I was twitching a little, or people saw me picking up papers for a minute. All of those other things will be forgotten. But by practicing on video, you can, on your third or fourth or fifth draft, figure out, oh, I don't like it when I twitch and play and fidget with my ring on my finger. It's distracting if I am playing with paper. So if you are willing to put the time into it, you can weed out all those other issues as well. And that is critically important. More tips in just a moment.

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I can talk about the importance of rehearsal and why you should rehearse your speeches, your media interviews, till I'm blue in the face. Here's the problem. Here's the logistical problem. If you don't put on your calendar time to rehearse, it's never going to happen. Especially if you work for a larger organization, a business, a government, corporate government entity. The human tendency is to think of the deadline as you know, I'm giving the speech at 9am Then the deadline is 9am so at 8:59am you're still adding bullet points, you're still tweaking the the size of the font. And you may have every intention of rehearsing, but you just never get around to it. It's not going to happen unless you tell yourself rehearsal isn't a nice to have. It's not a luxury, it's a have to have. I give you no better example. And folks, we're not being partisan here today, but I am going to give you the example of former President Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan, acting background, had a respect for communication. So when he had a big speech like the State of the Union address, he would give his speechwriters a deadline. The speech has got to be ready a week in advance. Certainly if there was huge international breaking news, an edit could be made at the last minute, but 98% of the speech was done a week in advance. So he could then spend time rehearsing. He would read the speech out loud for hours every evening in the residency of the White House. He would also spend an entire day doing videotaped rehearsal. And that way, when he was actually reading the speech off the teleprompter to the American people, he didn't sound like he was reading because he had a comfort level with the words. He had a relationship with the words. He had his Emotions in sync with what he was trying to convey. But it would not have happened if he had just said, okay, let's rework and rewrite and rewrite the speech until an hour before speech time, and then I'll do a quick run through. It would be a different experience even for someone who was as gifted a communicator, Ronald Reagan. So the first thing you've really got to do if you're serious about rehearsal is you've got to put it on your calendar. It's like anything else if you tell yourself, yeah, I'm going to go to the gym. I'm 40 pounds overweight. December 15th. Yeah, starting January 1st, I'm going to go to the gym, workout, be healthy in the new year. That's a very fine ambition. It's wonderful. But if you don't actually put on your calendar and figure out the days you're going to the gym, it ain't gonna happen. You and I both know that, right? It has to be not just a general, fuzzy, vague, abstract goal like being healthy. It's got to be, I'm going to go to the gym from 5pm to 6pm every day. If it's going to be meaningful change in your life, it's exactly the same thing we had speech rehearsal and media rehearsal. You've got to put it on the calendar. Now, I'm not a big fan of exact, precise axioms like, well, if you spent two hours writing the speech, you have to spend exactly two hours rehearsing. I find that a little bit too simplistic. The main thing is give yourself enough time to rehearse the speech, to look at it, to tweak it, change it, improve it, to keep doing it until you love what you see. That's the real magic of rehearsal is when you've practiced so many times on video. You get to the point where you're watching your rehearsal on video and you can say, wow, if I can be half as good as that guy, if I can be half as good as she is going to be the star of that conference. When that happens, then you know the rehearsal has concluded, you are ready and you are in good shape. You're ready to go for that presentation. Now, it's not that different when preparing for a media interview, but when you're preparing a media interview, you need to state your messages and your sound bites. And if you want to take it to an advanced level, you need to have someone actually ask you questions. Watch the whole thing on video, judge it from the standpoint of style and substance. And then what you've got to do is isolate every single answer and figure out would you be happy if that were the only quote in the story? If that were the only sound bite to get on the BBC tonight or Al Jazeera or cnn? And once you get to the point where you're completely comfortable with how any quote could be taken out of the context of the whole interview and put in a story, then and only then, are you ready to stop rehearsing. I'm TJ Walker. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success, especially if you rehearse.

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