Speaking-

Practice, Practice, Practice...

then Improvise

Advise from Expert Speakers.

You have heard the old adage that people are more afraid of speaking in public than they are of death. Speaking in public can be a terrifying experience, but it doesn’t have to be. The difficulty of your talk will likely be tied directly to your level of preparation. The single most important tool that any speaker has is practice.

I just recently competed in a humorous speech contest. The challenge was to speak to roughly 200 people while staying within a 5 to 7 minute time window. In preparation for the competition, I practiced my speech over 50 times. That may be overkill for many speaking engagements, but it illustrates the fact that you can never practice too much. You have control. You can decide how polished you want your talk to be, and then you can act accordingly. The more practice you have, the more comfortable you will feel with your material. The more comfortable you feel with your material, the better equipped you will be to focus on the delivery.

That said, though you have practiced your presentation forward, backward, upward, downward, inside, outside, and upside-down, something unexpected will inevitably happen. Just expect it. If you’re giving a presentation at work and you have your PowerPoint presentation on your Laptop, you may get to the conference room and find that there is no projector.

  Perhaps the projector is there, but there is a road crew breaking up the road outside with jackhammers. Maybe it is just that there are more or fewer people than you expected. In each case, you will have to modify your approach to achieve a successful outcome; you will have to improvise.

At my speech contest, for example, I did not plan for enough laughter. I was under a seven minute time restriction, and going over time meant being disqualified. With about a minute to go, I had about a minute and a half of material. Since I had not allotted enough time for people to laugh during the presentation, I ended up having to wrap up my speech more quickly than I intended.

You may think that improvisation is not your strong suit. The good news is that for many people, improvisation is a learned skill. That’s right…it’s all about practice! When I say that it is all about practice, I’m speaking on two levels. First of all, the more opportunities you have to improvise, the more comfortable you will be with changing directions while in flight. However, it is also important to keep in mind that the more preparation you have put into any presentation, the better you’ll be able to improvise with that specific presentation.

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