A Professional Motivational Speaker’s Top Tips – How To Rehearse A Speech
As a consultant professional motivational speaker, I get pleasure from motivational quotations. Warren Buffett (the enormously influential financial investor) once declared: “Practice makes permanent, not perfect”. And Buffet is absolutely right. Here are a few concrete (and yet potent) strategies that will put a stop to you wasting a huge amount of your precious time whenever you rehearse a speech (or any other sort of corporate speech).
A Professional Motivational Speaker’s Five Best Pieces of advice
Tip 1: Commence rehearsing in plenty of time. If you leave it too late to get started, you’re in the worst of both worlds. You’ll have lost the spontaneity of the extemporaneous orator without developing the fluid delivery of a professional motivational speaker. And, as you stretch back into the depths of your memory to bring your presentation to mind, you’ll falter over your lines. Therefore commence rehearsing ASAP. Don’t forget, working on a presentation always takes much longer than you assume. So begin straight away, today if you can.
Tip 2: (This next piece of advice was spelled out to me by another smart professional motivational speaker.) Take note of how long it takes to speak your first page of content, out loud. FYI, I’m not suggesting you present your subject matter as if actually facing your colleagues, just speak it and time yourself. This straightforward exercise will give you a good impression of approximately how many pages of information you’ll need to rehearse to fill the time you’ve been allotted. For instance, if you find that you need four minutes and you’ve been allocated 40 minutes to speak then, obviously, you’re only going to have time to get through roughly ten pages of subject matter.
Bear this in mind and you won’t make the common error of rehearsing thirty pages of material only to discover that you only have adequate time to present a handful of the pages of subject matter you spent hours polishing. This is both a big waste of time and makes you look like an amateur. What’s more, in their frustration, some corporate speakers who’ve made this mistake try to squeeze all their information into the time allotted by speaking really fast. This obviously compounds the problem.
Tip 3: Don’t learn your content as if it were a script. That’s because converting your content into a script and then making it seem conversational takes a lot of time. (This is even true for a professional motivational speaker with prior script writing experience.) Here’s the solution? Experience has taught me that a corporate speaker is most likely to get lost as he/she transitions between different chunks of material. And so, I recommend you learn the order of your subject matter blocks, but not the line-by-line wording within each one.
Tip 4: Videotape yourself. Most folks getting ready for a speech won’t follow this idea, which is a gigantic error of judgment. Sure, it needs a tiny bit of planning. That said, it greatly decreases your overall prep time and improves the final product – your speech. In particular, listen for verbal tics and watch out for distracting, repetitive gestures like toying with a marker pen.
Tip 5: Remember to perform a technical rehearsal. (According to a professional motivational speaker, this step never fails to differentiate the professionals.) Don’t just presuppose that you’ll be able to operate the audio-visual aspects of your presentation. Something that seems really straightforward, like using a hand-held microphone, can appear to be an exercise in digital dexterity when you’re in front of a crowd of people.
Follow these quick tips and then, on the day of your presentation, you’ll be able to focus on the essential thing, presenting your information to the group. Your audience will simply presume that you’re a professional motivational speaker. I wish you well.
