If you’re familiar with this blog, the title of today’s post may have made you do a double-take. After all, the third part of our 3-part approach to developing communication skills is Practice! (Intention and Alignment are steps 1 and 2.)
So what’s all this “don’t waste your time practicing” stuff?
When you practice, do it with purpose and intention. When my daughter Nora was younger, she played the violin, and she was supposed to practice every day. Sometimes, she would practice simply to get through the day’s assignment, not in order to improve her mastery of some element of the instrument.
I could tell when this was happening because as she played, she would make the same mistakes over and over again. Instead of slowing down and really working at that one passage, she would fly through it, mess up, recover, and go on.
This isn’t productive practicing. It’s checking the box of practicing. And it’s a waste of time.
If you’re practicing a speech and you find yourself tripping over the same phrase or transition, stop. Maybe the phrase is something that seemed good on paper but is odd to say out loud. Find a different way to say it that’s more natural for you, then try that section of your presentation again. Do just that little chunk until it feels easy.
If you’re going through a presentation and you keep forgetting the next point you want to make, stop. Construct a robust transition that builds a bridge between the part you remember easily and the part you need to get to. Practice the end of the first part, the transition, and the beginning of the next point several times, until it’s consolidated in your mind.
The point of practicing is to make all the mistakes and find a way to fix them now, instead of when you’re actually giving the speech. Make that practice time valuable; don’t just check the box.
