Practice

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm:

In anyone’s preparation for an oral presentation of any kind, there is a gap between the time when you know what you want to say, and the time when you’re really ready to get up and say it. During that gap, the greatest imperative is to make yourself comfortable and familiar with your material. Assuming that you don’t plan to simply read from your notes or to fully go off-the-cuff, you need a way to commit your content to memory in some way or other. Experienced speakers have their own ways of doing it, but there are some tried and true ways of creating that familiarity. One good rule of thumb is that the more active you are at it, the better. For example, one study (Grilli & Glisky, 2012) looked at subjects with and without memory problems and found that for both, the best way to remember new content is to imagine oneself acting it out. That step of mental rehearsal actually triples the average person’s ability to remember. So, in other words — no big surprise — what works best is practice.

Whether preparing for opening or closings, oral arguments, mock trial summaries, or CLE presentations, practice is what gets you from the stage of just having good content to the stage of also having effective and comfortable delivery of that content. That lesson isn’t novel, of course, but busy litigators will often implicitly or explicitly counter that they don’t have time to rehearse. I would argue instead that they don’t have time to not rehearse. In my experience working with myself and many busy lawyers, one hour spent in either on-your-feet or focused mental practice is generally more useful than two hours spent reviewing your notes or slides. In this post, I will share ten of my favorite practice tips for getting comfortable with your content once the outline or slide deck is done, or mostly done.

1. Talk to Yourself

Giving a presentation isn’t the same as composing a brief or a blog post. It is oral and it is an interaction between you and an immediate audience. For that reason, your preparation can suffer if too much of your work is done on paper. Talking to yourself as you prepare and as you practice can help to keep you grounded in oral style, which means shorter and simpler sentences combined with a greater need for signposting and repetition. A full on-your-feet practice session can also be beneficial even if you’re by yourself.

2. Reduce (then Eliminate) Your Notes

As you complete your content development phase, you might find yourself with a script or an overly detailed outline. In that case, you will need to pare it down. To do that, try taking your script or notes and highlighting just one or two words per point or per sentence. If you run through it enough, then those words will be sufficient to cue the right content. Then try producing an outline or page of notes that just include the highlighted words. If the notes by themselves make sense to no one but you, then you’ve done it right. Then, once you’ve pared down your notes and practiced a few times, it is a much shorter step to getting rid of the notes all together.

3. Memorize Your Outline

It is certainly possible to memorize a long presentation word for word. Actors do it, after all. But for most speakers, we don’t have the time, and the result would likely be a more flat-sounding recitation than the actors would be able to turn in. Better than memorizing word for word is memorizing structure. Knowing what content comes next is more important than knowing the exact phrase you had in mind when you wrote your notes. Having a good structure is the first step, because we know that your audience will process your content more effectively when it’s delivered in chunks. So instead of viewing your content as a linear list of points, one right after the other (warning, PowerPoint encourages exactly that), it is better to commit to a true multilevel outline grouped around a small handful of key points.

4. Pull in a Sounding Board

It can sometimes be a challenge to give our full effort to a practice session when we are by ourselves. So it is a good idea to drag in whoever we can: co-counsel, clients, consultants, secretaries…anyone who is handy. That scrutiny pushes us to be “on” during the practice. It also creates the possibility for good feedback. But even without that, an audience is a good in and of itself because it creates a practice scenario that is more realistic.

5. Use a Room that Comes Close to Your Actual Venue

Another factor in being realistic is the location of our practice. Research proves that our physical location serves as an important cue for our feelings, so it helps to practice in a place that resembles your presentation location as closely as possible. What’s best, of course, is to use the actual room you’ll present in. But when you can’t get that, the next best thing is to replicate the physical conditions that will apply to you as a speaker. For example, if you will need to stay behind a lectern, then you should practice that way. If, on the other hand, you will have space to wander as you talk, then practice that way.

6. Use Audio Recording

If you’re doing a practice run, it is easy to simply record it. Chances are your phone has that ability. Once you’re done, the recording will be a useful practice aid. The goal isn’t necessarily to critique the recording, but if it was a decent run-through, you can listen to it a few more times in order to pump that content into your memory. In my experience, when trying to build familiarity for an oral presentation, hearing the content is much better than reading the content from a page — it seems to engage the same part of the brain you’ll be using as you present. The recording will also allow a kind of passive practice: Listening to the audio lets you imagine yourself delivering it, and you can listen while you drive to work or before you fall asleep at night.

7. Use Video Recording

One step further is to vide0-record your practice. It is easier than ever to do, and again, your phone probably has that capability. Viewing the practice afterward is the best way to put yourself in the shoes of the audience, not only hearing the content but also seeing how you look and move as you present it. Viewing it allows you to notice some things you wouldn’t otherwise notice, and encourages some unconscious correction as well. The average person doesn’t really enjoy seeing themselves on video, but if you commit to not being too hard on yourself, then it can be a very useful step.

8. Try It at Higher Speed

When you are listening to your own performance via an audio recording, or running through the presentation verbally, and your goal is mainly to get your content into your short-term memory, try bumping it up to a higher speed. My own theory is that this can promote better recall because it focuses your attention to a higher degree and increases your own processing speed. The moment every speaker dreads is the feeling of not knowing what comes next. But if you get used to hearing or delivering the content at a higher speed, then the “What do I say next?” tends to pop into your head more quickly. With this technique, you will naturally need to be disciplined and remember to slow down to a normal conversational rate when it comes time for the actual performance.

9. Work on Nailing the Beginning and the End

The two most important parts of your speech are the introduction and the conclusion. The primacy and recency effects tell us that this is when you will have the greatest impact on what the audience remembers from the presentation — with recency (the conclusion) being the more immediate effect, and primacy (the introduction) being the more long-lasting effect. Your introduction also serves the purpose of contributing mightily to your own self-perception of how you’re doing, and a good one can give you an important shot of confidence early in the presentation when you need it most. So if you don’t have time to go through everything, at least run through the beginning and end.

10. Tighten Your Transitions

If you have more time, then I’d also encourage you to run through at least a few additional parts of the speech. One great candidate for added attention will be the transitions, since those are the points where a speaker is most likely to experience a memory gap. A good transition is not just a way to keep things orderly, and not just a substitute for “My next point is…” Instead, the transition ought to be a kind of a bridge: a way to show a meaningful relationship between the previous idea and the next one. You’re likely to know the content itself without as much practice, but if transitions are a sticking point, then it makes sense to give those extra attention, along with any other spot where you tend to get lost or to feel a gap.

Practicing, of course, takes more time than not practicing. That is why some will avoid it or minimize it. But they do that at a clear cost to their own comfort as well as the quality of the audience’s experience. Want it to be great? Practice it.

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Other Posts on Speech Preparation:

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Image credit: 123rf.com, used under license

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