CHAPTER 8

Rehearsal and Feedback

Practice. Practice. Practice.

You need to put in the time to be confident of a decent result. It might sound old fashioned and boring, but there really is no substitute if you want to be great. This is what will get you to mastery. Great speakers are made, not born.

You could of course just wing it and be okay. If you are really committed to mastering presentation skills, you have to be able to take a look at yourself and the gap between where you are now and where you would like to be. When you watch someone who is great at speaking, know that they still work on getting better every single day. It never stops.

Some key benefits to spending time rehearsing:

• Overcoming fears of speaking

• Keeping to your time slot

• Becoming familiar with your slide deck and content

• Providing a better audience experience and giving value

I have referred to Steve Jobs a few times in this book. If you watch some of the Apple product launches going back over 20 years, you’ll notice that even Steve gets visibly better over the years. He would have put in hundreds of hours of preparation for those product launch presentations over that time.

You don’t have that many hours. Here’s the thing, even if you put in just two hours of practice with two to three full run-throughs of your talk, you will be miles ahead of most other business presenters who will wing it. Typically, a lot of people focus too much on creating the slide deck and then think they can just use the slides as a teleprompter to keep them on track. They might spend a lot of money on designers, never thinking about proper preparation. There is almost an obsession about getting the slides right.

The more you practice, the more muscle memory you develop—like going to the gym and improving strength over many sessions. In your mind, you are creating stronger neural pathways, like the grooves in a vinyl record. When you build a strong foundation, you can relax in the knowledge that you know your content pretty well and have tested out how you deliver it, so that if something unplanned occurs, you can still cope with it.

This part of your preparation is extremely important. I can’t stress that enough. I do know, however, that there may be resistance to this for two reasons:

• When too rehearsed, you come across as stilted. Think about actors. They spend weeks learning their lines; and then when they perform it’s like it is for the first time, making it look effortless. It is the preparation that lets them be present, and in the moment, giving their audience a great experience. For that audience on that day, it will be the first time they see that performance.

• There just isn’t enough time to devote to rehearsal. Remember presentations are an investment of time for both parties—the speaker and the audience. If they have given up valuable time to come and listen to you, don’t they deserve something prepared to a high standard?

It is the practice that helps you sound spontaneous, so that in your presentation, you can check in with the audience and converse with them. Your rehearsal ensures you know your material really well and helps you iron out potential problems.

At the very least, learn to match your delivery with your slides. Otherwise, you risk losing your place. When that happens, it could have a dampening effect on your confidence, even if you are normally a confident speaker. If your slides let you down, you want to know you can still carry on.

At one of the law firms where I worked, we organized an annual conference for our clients at a prestigious location in London. The building itself was a big draw for our audience, as it had a lot of interesting history associated with it. The other big draw was a keynote speaker we had managed to persuade to speak at our event—he was one of the country’s leading experts in his field. My job was to brief all the speakers and make sure they had everything they needed, including loading their slides onto the laptop in advance. Not only did this speaker send his slides to us at the last minute late the night before, he turned up five minutes before he was due to go on stage. There was no time for a briefing.

About 10 minutes into his presentation, he somehow managed to hit the keyboard on the podium and knock his slide presentation out of slideshow mode. He kept trying to use his clicker to move the slides on, but of course that can’t happen if you are not in slideshow mode—he didn’t know that because he clearly hadn’t created his own slides and didn’t know the basics of PowerPoint. It’s an easy fix—just one click on the screen. But if you don’t know that, then it can interrupt your flow, making you lose your place. Which is exactly what happened—there were a few awkward moments for him and the audience. I rushed onto the stage and fixed the slides quickly, but not before he became flustered.

These things happen to the best of us—you just need to find a way of keeping your cool and regular practice goes a long way toward that.

Rehearsal lets you ditch the script and learn how to connect with the audience. The whole of point of preparation is to become so familiar with your material that you can then relax and be fully present with your audience—avoiding common mistakes such as talking to the slides. Depending on how much time you invest in your preparation, you will know what is on the next slide or which point to talk about next without checking. You internalize your content, so that it becomes second nature.

Remember from the earlier section on designing slides—if you use mainly images and very little text, the audience will be looking at you and not reading from the slides. That means they expect you to acknowledge them and keep that connection going with your body language and eye contact.

Using Notes

There is nothing wrong with using notes in a presentation if that makes you feel more comfortable. Just be aware that every time you look at them, you lose eye contact with the audience and are in danger of breaking the connection you have with them. People can sometimes interpret lack of eye contact as a sign of low confidence, dishonesty, or insincerity.

Make the notes big, using only keywords and not a full script—that will help you avoid getting drawn into reading word for word. Have your notes out of sight on your laptop keyboard. That way they don’t detract from your presentation. If you have speaker notes under your slides in the bottom half of the screen, try to keep your reliance on them to a minimum. To add notes to each slide, just scroll down under the actual slide and you will see a white box, which you can type straight into.

My own process for learning new content for a presentation looks like this:

• Brainstorming every possible angle on a blank sheet of paper.

• Storyboarding key ideas and stories, putting them in the right order.

• Scripting out new parts of my presentation—I already have preprepared stories so don’t need to write them out or learn them.

• Rehearsing and recording my voice on my phone.

• Listening to my recording at every opportunity.

• Condensing my script into keywords in boxes on a single sheet of paper that can sit on a laptop keyboard.

That last step of getting my key points including the open and close onto one sheet of paper serves as my final roadmap. It’s the framework I can use for a 10-minute talk or a 90-minute talk. I just add more examples and detailed explanations for the longer version, but my framework stays the same. I keep that sheet so I can use it again if I deliver that talk elsewhere.

This process helps me to become so familiar with my content I don’t need the notes after a while. It may seem scary to lose the notes totally, but have a couple of run-throughs without them—you’ll be surprised at how much you remember. Then you can use a note card with just a few key words as a prompt.

Memory Palace Part 2

Earlier, we looked at the concept of organizing your thoughts and the method of loci.

Put it into practice by using the technique to map out your talk. Use a physical location you are very familiar with, such as your home or a route you regularly travel to work or elsewhere. Hang your key points around your home in different rooms, like in the story of the Greek poet Simonides where he used the seating arrangement in the banquet hall to remember the diners. Or, use key markers along your chosen route, such as distinctive landmarks or buildings, and pin your key points in order at each location.

For example, your opening phrase could be written on the doormat or on the door before you enter your home. You can use symbols, photos, or paintings to hang your ideas on.

Once you have created this palace, walk through it in your mind. If you think you have very little time to prepare a presentation, this is a technique that can help you become more efficient. Putting something unfamiliar next to something we know very well helps us remember new information.

This is a simple example using the office layout to plot out key stages of a leadership talk to memorize the order of the speech. Replacing the text bubbles with distinctive or ridiculous images will make it even more memorable.

Blank Screen and Remote Clickers

A great way to bring the audience attention back to you once your current slide has served its purpose is to blank the screen. You can do this by pressing “B” on your keyboard—this will give you a black screen. To get back to your slides, just press the same key again and you can continue with the slide show. If you want a white screen instead, use the “W” key in the same way. Practice using this when you rehearse—mainly because you get used to remembering to switch your slides back on again on the actual day!

Using a remote clicker can free you up to move around the room without being tied to the podium. It will let you be more natural in your delivery, and getting out from behind a podium creates a better connection with the audience, as there is no barrier between you and them. Again, something to rehearse with.

Quality Feedback

Improving as a presenter is all about getting quality feedback and making necessary adjustments to keep honing your craft. For that to happen, you want to get good-quality feedback.

Something really important to remember is that feedback is someone else’s perception of what they saw, heard, or felt. It is useful information for you to have, but what you then choose to do with it is up to you.

Let’s talk about feedback in general. Every time you present to an audience, you get feedback whether you consciously notice it or not. At a very basic level, the feedback you get is the reaction in the room through facial expressions, body language, and questions from the audience. If you hand out feedback or comment sheets (sometimes called happy sheets), you may gain some additional insights.

The limitation of these kinds of feedback forms is that they are dependent on the individual audience member being honest and detailed enough. Plus, of course, the response you get is influenced by the set of questions included on the form. These sorts of forms are filled at the end of a seminar when people are getting ready to leave or move on to the refreshments part of the event.

There is generally a scoring section that looks similar to the following example:

It might be nice to get a high score of excellent or similar, but what does that really tell you? Someone’s version of excellent is not that same as the next person’s. It is still valuable to collect this type of information because you can get a sense check of going in the right direction.

Read on for more valuable ways of getting quality feedback.

Video Recording

The best way to see and hear what others will is to video record yourself practicing your presentation. It will give you the opportunity to listen to your material as spoken out loud, as well as see what you are doing with your body language. You could just use you smartphone or laptop to do this. No one else needs to see it if you don’t want to share it, and you can delete it afterward. You could also keep it stored somewhere to reflect back on and see how much you have progressed over time.

You may find that you need to exaggerate your movement and gestures—what we think is going on in our minds often is not really how it plays out. It’s a similar concept to using pauses—what seems like an eternity to us is really only one or two seconds in reality.

Feedback from Colleagues

Get feedback from peers whose opinion you respect. Rehearse in front of them and get them to ask you questions, so that you can practice that part as well. This also works really well for a pitch presentation—your dress rehearsal with the team can be a useful opportunity to test tough questions that may come up from the audience.

Mental Rehearsal

Visualization, sometimes referred to as mental rehearsal or imagery, is a very powerful technique.

What it is: Basically, it’s a technique for using your imagination to create the outcome you want. It’s like a mental warm up.

In her book, Creative Visualization, Shakti Gawain gives lots of practical advice on how to use visualization. She first wrote the book in 1978 and has since sold several million copies worldwide. It falls into the self-help category, which perhaps not everyone is open to; however, you may want to check it out.

For those of you who are interested in more research-based evidence, we can look at the sports industry. Many top sporting stars have openly shared about their mental preparation in the lead up to major games or events. The use of imagery—rehearsing a positive mental experience to enhance their ability to achieve a desired outcome—has been the practice of sporting legends from boxer Muhammad Ali to tennis player Andy Murray.

Visualization is not just something that is only found in the self-help section of the bookstore. Golfer Jack Nicklaus said he never hit a shot before visualizing it first. According to Harvard Medical Magazine (Susan Karcz, editor), it is commonly used by sports psychologists and coaches today:

https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/play/competitive-edge

Michael Phelps, USA Olympic champion with 23 Olympic gold medals, is arguably one of the most successful athletes ever. In his book, No Limits (Michael Phelps and Alan Abrahamson—Simon and Schuster 2008), he talks about his rigorous training routine which consists of eating, swimming, weight training, and sleeping. He also describes something else—visualization. He imagines the perfect race in minute detail—every stroke.

For Michael Phelps, visualizing is an essential part of his preparation—to visualize how he wants things to go and also imaging scenarios that could go wrong, so that he can be prepared. He can have a plan. Since that book came out, Michael retired in 2012 and then came back out of retirement for the 2016 Olympics building on an already amazing record and career.

If this technique works for world-class athletes, why can’t it help you and me? Try the following visualization exercise.

Some people find it difficult at first to use this technique—they struggle to close their eyes and bring up clear images. That’s okay—you don’t have to see images in your mind for this process to work. If you don’t see pictures, you may get a feeling or sense of what the scenario might look like. Earlier in Chapter 2, we looked at the way people process information in their own preferred way—they may be visual (pictures), auditory (sound of the audience applauding loudly), or kinesthetic (a feeling of confidence or sense of achievement). The imagined scenarios can include any of the senses.

To put it more simply, we all use our imaginations all the time and so this is nothing new. What I’m suggesting here is that if used consciously with deliberate intent, it can help increase your confidence in speaking and help you improve your delivery.

Much of the time we operate on autopilot, unconsciously going about our day without taking a few moments to check in with ourselves as to what outcome we want. Whichever way you approach this technique is fine. The most important thing to remember is to use multiple senses—sights, smells, sounds. The more detailed your imagined scenario, the better.

Of course, just like sitting on the couch imagining doing abdominal exercises to get a six pack won’t work without putting in some physical effort, you can’t create a great presentation without preparation. The practical and the imagination processes together strengthen your performance. That is why, the rest of this chapter walks you through the benefits of physical rehearsal.

Tripping Up

Don’t sweat the small stuff—all this preparation will help you cope with things going wrong. Your ability to recover is the key to maintaining audience connection and their confidence in you.

Should something go wrong on the presentation day, don’t apologize. Just acknowledge it, if it is something technical for example, and move on. If you left out some of your content, most of the time no one notices as only you know what you forgot to say. You can always bring it in later and say something like “just going back to that last point...” or save it for the Q&A section and slot it in there.

Long Term

I have mentioned Toastmasters International (www.toastmasters.org) a few times—both from my own experience and through the 2016 world champion’s winning speech. If you haven’t come across Toastmasters before, it is a nonprofit international organization comprised of speaking clubs in every major city in the world. It is the best-value personal development program you can get these days. You can pretty much find a club that suits your location at a time that works for you. They run most evenings of the week and sometimes as breakfast or lunch meetings. Many companies start their own clubs in-house just for staff. Check out their web link for more information.

The great thing about these clubs is they provide an opportunity to work on your speaking skills in front of a live audience who are encouraging and will give you feedback. There is a misconception that this kind of speaking club attracts members who are already good at giving speeches. That’s not true. People come from all walks of life and all types of professions—from executives to students. Most people who come along for the first time are nervous about speaking. There are a few who are confident, but want to learn how to write speeches or incorporate humor. You also learn how to think on your feet and speak off the cuff.

If you want to work on your skills outside of work, then finding a Toastmasters club could really help to ramp up your skills. Other ways in which you can find opportunities to practice some more are by asking to take a slot at a team meeting or even just asking a question at a conference in a room with a large audience. There is absolutely no substitute for a live audience to practice in front of.

Call Backs

When you are so well prepared and can be fully present in the moment, there are even more things you can do to increase your impact. If you are in a lineup of other presenters, making reference to what someone else said earlier will help you connect better with the audience, especially if it was something funny. You can benefit from the earlier reaction from the audience by reminding them of that moment. This is referred to as a “call back.” You can do something like this only if you are relaxed enough to sit through other presentations and listen without worrying about your upcoming presentation.

Timing

One really important benefit of rehearsing is being able to speak for the time you have been allocated—no more, no less. If you go over, your audience won’t thank you. Without walking through your entire talk and speaking it out loud, how would you know how long the entire thing will last? With experience, prepared vignettes, and so on, you can get a fair idea, but most of us can’t be that accurate on time without testing our material fully. If you are over or under on timings in rehearsal, you can go back and adjust your material.

Sometimes, you will be given even less time than you prepared for because the previous speaker went on too long or an additional item suddenly appeared on the meeting agenda. Your preparation will help you trim material and fit in the new time slot. You will know how long each segment is and can decide which ones to cut, so that your key take away still makes sense—you are still able to take your audience from A to B, as discussed in Chapter 2.

Finally, build in a one-to-two-minute cushion, so that you aim to finish slightly earlier than your total time slot. When you give your presentation live, it may take you longer to get through your material.

Key Points

• Rehearse to feel more confident and remember your material better.

• Record your rehearsal on video, so that you can see and hear what the audience will experience.

• Practice in front of colleagues and test out tough questions the audience might ask.

• Try the visualization technique to help with confidence.

• Use the memory palace technique to remember your key points.

• Know the timings of every segment of your talk, so that you know where to cut on short notice.

Links

Harvard Medical Magazine

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/harvard-medicine/harvard-medicine/play/competitive-edge

Toastmasters International

www.toastmasters.org

Books

Gawain, S. 2002. Creative Visualization. Uttarakhand, India: Natraj Publishing.

Phelps, M., and A. Abrahamson. 2008. No Limits. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.