Hearing a truly gifted public speaker can be transformative. Bill Gates often gushed about the effect that Steve Jobs would have on any audience. To him, Jobs was capable of moving the most jaded, hard-nosed audience member. Fans go back to these speeches over and over to mine them for more meaning. A Wikipedia article called Stevenote is dedicated to analyzing his speaking technique.
When people hope to learn to command an audience the way such superstar public speakers do, they often study them closely to find out if they can identify their secret. When they do, it doesn't take them long to find one magic ingredient: every great public speaker tends to put in unbelievable levels of practice.
The greats tend to have a natural interest in delivering a wonderful message, and this may make it easy for them to tolerate high levels of practice without boredom. The importance of practice, however, seems clear. According to John Sculley, one-time Apple CEO, Jobs would take every word, every inflection, and every emotion that he planned to bring to a speech and practice it nonstop much like a maestro preparing for a performance.
As with playing an instrument on stage, getting a performance into your muscle memory is what makes the execution effortless. When delivering the actual words becomes effortless, you are able to focus on refinements. You're able to think about tone, about how to time your pauses for maximum effect, and about dressing your words in the right emotions at the right moments. Practice is the secret that makes it possible for anyone from fighter pilots to star sales executives to guarantee superlative performance in unpredictable, high-stress environments.
But practice isn't about blind repetition. If you're committed to great practice, you need to know how to do it for great results. What follows are six ideas to guide the way you rehearse.
1. Aim for 10 times as much practice
It was a mantra that Larry Page at Google worked with that you needed to aim for a tenfold improvement in everything you did. As far as Page was concerned, any product that Google put out needed to be at least 10 times as great as anything by the closest competitor.
If you've always practiced your speeches five times in order to feel ready, the tenfold mantra would tell you that it would be a better idea to practice fifty times. This kind of practice wouldn't necessarily come out of your personal time after work. Instead, you could put in the extra practice on your commute, in the shower, or anywhere else. You could also practice smart, by dedicating most of your extra practice to the difficult parts of your presentation, alone.
2. Leave out the middle
Audiences don't usually remember entire speeches. Rather, many remember only how speeches begin, and how they end. The intro sets up an audience's appetite and makes them enthusiastic about taking your ideas seriously; the conclusion helps make sure that they retain these ideas once they leave. For this reason, it can make sense to focus your effort on these two parts of your speech. While there is no reason to get careless with everything in the middle, a reasonable amount of practice is usually adequate. Unless the organizers require you to take not a second longer than your allotment of minutes, allowing yourself to go in with only a reasonable amount of practice for the middle of your presentation can help you be more spontaneous with it.
3. To speak well under stress, practice well under stress
You may practice a hundred times in the privacy of your bedroom or car, but the practice doesn't really count. When it's showtime, you'll find that the stress of delivering that same speech in front of people changes everything. For this reason, only some of your practice needs to be done in private. Once you get the hang of your speech, you need to take it out in front of anyone you can get to listen to you. Practicing before other people can help you get used to your body's responses to the social anxiety involved.
4. Separate your stress training from actual speech training
Having to speak before an audience can be a stressful experience all by itself, even without having to throw in the pressure of having to make your points in an effective way. For this reason, it can help to make your first few practice sessions all about delivering messages you are already familiar with. When it's material that you know well already, you should be able to see how exactly having an audience member there makes you feel. You could then directly address the anxiety.
5. Ask people to comment on your performance
Anyone you can find to listen to your practice speeches needs to do more than just be a presence that helps you get over your stage fright. They also need to tell you what exactly they don't like. Of course, they are likely to be uncomfortable with sharing frank criticism for fear of how you'll take it. For this reason, it's important to do everything you can to put them at their ease. You could, for example, put on a show of taking anything they may say and putting it into practice right away as they watch. This could be a confidence-building exercise for your practice audience. However, it's important to keep in mind that you don't want to badger them for honest feedback. You simply want to take anything that comes freely.
6. Watch yourself speak
When you don't have an audience to practice with, it can help to do it in front of a camera, and to then sit through the whole thing as you play it back. Recording yourself can help in two ways. To begin, a camera can feel like you're speaking to an actual person. Even more importantly, though, sitting through the playback can help you observe yourself as an audience member. If you catch yourself wearing an uncomfortable expression, fidgeting, or doing anything else that doesn't announce confidence, command, and comfort, you'll want to make changes.
When you put in far more effective practice than anyone you know, you should only expect to be far more effective up on stage than anyone you know. It doesn't matter how many public speeches you have under your belt. No performer in any field does well without practice, and it's important to accept that your case is likely to be no exception.