13. Do You Know the Way to Spanish Bay?: The Correct Way to Practice

The Inn at Spanish Bay in Pebble Beach, California, is 85 miles from the heart of Silicon Valley. This proximity, along with its first-class golf course and attractive seaside location, makes the resort a popular destination for conferences run by the Valley’s many technology organizations. As a presentations coach, I am often invited to such conferences to give a presentation about how to give a presentation. I usually deliver the same subject matter, adapted for and oriented to each unique audience. My subject matter is drawn from material I have been delivering for more than two decades, and so I am quite familiar with the content.

Nevertheless, I practice each of these presentations thoroughly, utilizing a technique I recommend to every client I have ever coached and I now recommend to you: Verbalization, which means speaking your presentation aloud in advance just as you will to your actual audience, and doing it many times. This powerful rehearsal methodology has analogues in sports, music, theater, and adages: Practice makes perfect.

Unfortunately, the way most businesspeople rehearse their presentations is by clicking through the slides and saying something like, “Okay, with this slide I’m going to say something about our sales revenues ... and then with this slide, I’ll say something about our path to profitability ... and then with this next slide, I’ll show a picture of our lab and talk a little about R&D.”

Sound familiar? As a form of rehearsal, it is completely unproductive. Talking about your presentation is not an effective practice method for presenting, any more than talking about tennis would be a good way to improve your backhand.

An even more common presentation practice is mumbling. The presenter clicks through the slides on the computer or flips through the pages of a hard copy of the slides while muttering unintelligible words. Neither of these methods is Verbalization. Both are counterproductive because they reinforce negative behavior.

Jason Trujillo of Intel Corporation described this behavior as “practice makes permanent,” a variation of the 2,000-year-old words of Publius Syrus, “Practice makes perfect.” If you mumble, you reinforce mumbling. If you Verbalize your words just as you will say them in front of an actual audience, you reinforce the correct words.

As a demonstration of the power of Verbalization, let’s turn to a literary device used by Robert Greene in his bestselling book The 48 Laws of Power. Mr. Greene describes each of the laws and then proves the power of the law by illustrating the consequences of what he calls “transgression of the law.”^F13.1 Here’s what happened when I transgressed my own advice and failed to practice my own presentation aloud in advance:

Of the many presentations I have delivered at the Inn at Spanish Bay, four were to the annual conferences of one major investment bank. Each of those four conferences had the same agenda, so each of my presentations covered relatively the same content. True to my own advice, I practiced my presentations aloud and did so during the nearly two-hour drive from my Silicon Valley office to the resort. (The advent of Bluetooth made speaking alone in my car appear less strange to other drivers on the road.) I Verbalized each of those annual presentations—except for the fourth.

Just as I was about to leave for that event, an important business matter arose and I had to spend most of the drive time on my mobile phone dealing with the matter instead of Verbalizing my presentation. Having transgressed, I paid the price. When I got to the hotel and stepped up to the dais to speak, my delivery was choppy. Imagine that: My delivery was choppy with familiar content, and I am an experienced presentations coach who presents almost every business day of his life.

Do as I say, not as I did on the way to Spanish Bay: Verbalize for every one of your presentations.