Great Presentations Make for Great Career Success

I had someone come to me and ask for help in developing her presentation skills recently.

She asked for my one best bit of advice when it comes to doing dynamite presentations.  I told her, “Practice out loud.”

Tweet 120 in my career advice book Success Tweets says, “Practice presentations.  You can control your nerves by practicing out loud.  The more you practice, the less afraid you’ll be.”  I think that practicing your presentations – out loud – is the most important presentation success tip.   Here’s 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.”

Practicing your presentations out loud is common sense.  Don’t come up with bogus reasons for not practicing your presentations out loud.  There aren’t any.  The career success advice here is simple.  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.

The career success coach point here is simple common sense.  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.

That’s my career advice on becoming a dynamic presenter.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to share your thoughts with – and your presentation horror stories and triumphs – in a comment.  As always, thanks for reading my daily musings on life and career success.  I really appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, please download a free copy of my popular career advice book Success Tweets and its companion piece Success Tweets Explained.  The first gives you 140 bits of career success advice tweet style — in 140 characters or less.  The second is a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

PPS: I opened a membership site on September 1.  It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations.  To celebrate the grand opening, I’m giving away a new career advice book I’ve written called I Want YOU…To Succeed in Your Corporate Climb.  You can find out about the membership site and get the career advice in I Want YOU… for free by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.

 

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