Could this kind of rehearsing make you look inauthentic? It won’t. Just the opposite. Having everything down cold will make you a more confident presenter. A confident presenter feels comfortable and comes across as natural. An audience picks up on these signals quickly.
Practice improves performance in every field of endeavor. That’s why the world’s greatest athletes, musicians, and other standouts spend countless hours perfecting their craft. The late, great Steve Jobs, one of the outstanding presenters of our generation, spent days on end rehearsing important presentations. He also required the outside speakers at Apple AAPL -1.33% presentations to practice at length.
There’s another benefit to rehearsing in a real-world mode. It gives you a fresh take on your presentation, so you can emphasize what’s important and cut extraneous material more easily than if you practice with only silent sit-down readings. You’ll feel so confident that you’ll be able to adapt the presentation to match the mood of the moment as you move along. Some of Bill Clinton’s best presidential speeches departed at many points from the official versions given to the media beforehand. He was so confident in his material that he moved easily from a prepared script to make it even better.
Here’s how to perfect your presentation by practicing it in a real-world way:
Location, location, location. Practice in a place as similar as possible to the one where you’ll be presenting. Visit the real place in advance if you can, and go through your final rehearsal there. Be sure to rehearse with the audio-visual equipment you’ll be using. Never use technology you’re unfamiliar with.
Voice check. Practice delivering the presentation in the voice you’ll actually use. Don’t stay at the same volume throughout, of course. Increase or decrease it, and change your pitch as well, to emphasize your important words and phrases. Listen to TV newscasters, and you’ll see they emphasize quite a few words even in the same sentence.
Posture and movement. Stand tall. Expand your chest. Lean slightly toward the audience. Keep moving, comfortably and with authority. Underscore your important points with natural hand and arm gestures and changing facial expressions. Make the movement appropriate for the room—large-scale in an auditorium, less so in a smaller space. Project energy. Keep things lively.
Keep your eyes on the audience, not on your visuals. You can practice doing this by setting up chairs on which you tape pictures of faces. Speak to those faces as you rehearse, making real eye contact. Look at one face for as long as it takes to say a phrase, and then move to one of the others in another part of the room.
Tempo. Stand and smile at the audience for a moment before beginning to speak. Show you’re happy to be there. Vary the pace of your talk. Emphasize your important points with dramatic pauses. Perfecting the tempo will help you breathe naturally and decrease any anxiety you may be feeling.
Slim it down. As you keep rehearsing you may learn that you’re presenting too much information. Eliminate anything that’s redundant or off the point, in both the words you say and the slides you show. Make your sentences simpler. The perfect verb or noun doesn’t need a modifier. You’ll get points for closing down before your time is up and using the saved minutes for question and answer.
Get help. When you’re ready, rehearse with a live audience, people who can listen with the eyes and ears of your intended audience and give you a frank appraisal of how you’re doing. Ask them if you’re using non-words (um, uh), using dated terms or concepts, saying anything that’s unclear or offensive, exhibiting any tics, or causing any distractions you’re not aware of. Rehearse the Q&A part of the presentation, too. Ask the practice audience to throw you some curveballs, and practice replying with concise, persuasive answers.
Leave enough time for your real-world rehearsals. You should spend more time rehearsing than you did preparing the presentation. The most successful presenters spend much more.