Rehearse.  Rehearse.  Rehearse.  Then rehearse some more.

I beat this into all of my client.  There is nothing that will help your presentation more than rehearsal.  The benefits are endless.  But hey, it wouldn’t be a blog post on The Presentation School if I didn’t give you a few in a neat little bulleted list:

  • If you’re nervous, you can go into autopilot.  You won’t have to overthink your content anymore.
  • You’ll sound more natural.  Steve Jobs rehearsed for 72 hours for each of his presentations so he could sound off the cuff.
  • It’ll help you memorize your content so you can focus on important things like eye contact with your audience.
  • You’ll catch content that doesn’t make sense so you can fix it.
  • You’ll get over your ums, ehs, literallys and of course, ands.  No more filler words, just your content (though some ums are natural)
  • You’ll be ready for technical difficulties. If you’ve lost your slides, no worries, you know your content, you’ll just go with the content that doesn’t need a visual.
  • You’ll do better.  Period.  End of story.  Who doesn’t want that?

Happy rehearsing!