TJ Walker argues that claims of "no time" to rehearse are excuses, comparing them to avoiding cleaning the garage. He explains people prioritize easy, low-value tasks to avoid important rehearsal and recommends scheduling short, regular rehearsal blocks on your calendar (even five minutes before an interview) to ensure practice happens.
Let's address time. People tell me all the time, teacher, I love to rehearse, I love to practice, I love to do a training, but there's no time. This is a lie. That's like me telling my wife I have no time to clean the garage. I have plenty of time to clean the garage. I just don't want to do it. So I actively use my brain to come up with excuses not to clean the garage. But I'm lying if I say I just don't have time to clean the garage. Now, on any one given day, if I'm dashing to the airport to go off to a training, yes, sure, in that particular case, I don't have time at that moment to clean the garage. But if cleaning the garage ever became a priority of mine, it would be very easy to do in any given week. It could be done regularly, once a month, once a quarter. It could be done easily. I just don't want to do it. But at least I'm honest enough to admit I just don't want to clean the garage. And I'm a liar if I tell anyone that I can clean, that I can't clean the garage. I want you to be as honest when it comes to time for rehearsing. There is time for rehearsing, but you have to make time because the natural inclination is to look at any excuse possible to avoid the thing you don't want to do. I may go around the house and pick up trash or empty the trash baskets just to avoid cleaning the garage. Yeah, maybe it's productive for me to empty a trash basket, but if I'm always doing that to the exclusion of cleaning the garage, then the garage doesn't get cleaned. That's really what's happening to so many people when it comes to their rehearsal time. What happens is people tell themselves they have to gather more facts. Let me write the speech more. Let me rewrite it. Let me gather more information. Let's rewrite the talking points another time. For this media interview, let's get more input. Let's brainstorm on more possible questions that we can think about for this meeting interview rather than actually rehearsing. There's always time to rehearse for anything that's important. But if it's important, it's got to go on your calendar. You're like me, I'm sure there's certain important things you have to do. You put on your calendar, you got to go to the dentist or you have to go get a physical. You put on the calendar, you have a quarterly meeting with your board of directors. You don't just forget it or say, oh, there's no time. You put it on your calendar. If you want to practice your media interview, your speech, your talking point, you got to put it on a calendar. And it may be just five minutes at 10:55, because you know you've got that interview at 11, but if you put it on, it will happen. So that's the first step. You have to actively schedule, put it on your calendar to rehearse and practice.
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