Career Success: Tweet #120

By now it should be pretty clear that I think that practicing your presentations – out loud – is the most important presentation success tip.  I’ve mentioned practice in the last five success tweets.

Here’s a recap of why I think it is really important to practice your presentations out loud.

Practicing your presentations out loud…

• Calms your nerves.  When you practice several times, the presentation is familiar and comfortable to you.  This makes you less nervous.
• Helps you edit your talk for impact.  There is nothing like saying it out loud to show you the rough spots in your presentation.  Once you identify these rough spots, you can correct them before you’re in front of an audience.
• Helps you get better.  The more times you repeat a talk out loud, the better it gets.  It’s almost impossible to be over-prepared.  Practice does indeed make perfect.

These three reasons should convince you that it’s important to practice your talk out loud.  Yet, I am always amazed that so many people don’t take the time to practice.  They have some great excuses…

• It takes too much time.
• I know what I’m going to say, I don’t need to practice.
• I feel foolish talking to myself.
• I won’t get any better.
• I’ve done this talk a million times, I don’t need to practice.

And I say, “WRONG!!!”

Practice is the main ingredient of any successful presentation, not funny slides and animation – practice.

Thomas Edison is famous for saying, “Many people miss opportunity because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.”  I am semi-famous for saying, “Most people know the right thing to do in most situations, their common sense tells them.  They don’t use their common sense for a bunch of bogus reasons.”

So don’t come up with bogus reasons for not practicing your presentations out loud.  If you want to become a dynamic communicator, and create the life and career success you want and deserve, you have to practice your talks – out loud.  That’s some of the most important career advice I can give you.

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  If you want to be able to deliver dynamic presentations, you have to follow the career advice in Tweet 120 in Success Tweets.  “Practice presentations.  You can control your nerves by practicing out loud.  The more you practice, the less afraid you’ll be.”  Besides controlling your nerves, you’ll get better each time you practice.  Trust me on this one, time spent practicing a presentation is time well spent.