Point Taken Winter Newsletter 2009: Issue 22

Afraid your audience will be left in the cold at your next presentation? Turn up the heat with a Point Taken coaching session.

Whether you have an important presentation coming up or just want to get more comfortable with addressing an audience, Point Taken can help!

Practice Makes Permanent

Repetition makes a behavior permanent – that’s how all our habits, good and bad, get started. Practice alone won’t make you perfect – but practice with focused feedback and coaching will.

What’s the point of practicing?

Many studies show that by verbally practicing, presenters can work out any challenges that arise and will ultimately feel more confident about the material they are presenting. Rehearsing the material until they feel at ease helps remove any doubts they may have.

How to make your practice pay off

One of the reasons we don’t practice more is that we don’t have enough time. So how can you make your practice time – however brief – pay off? A few tips:

  • Recreate the actual presenting environment. It creates a sensory memory that allows you to recall your practice later during your presentation.
    • Practice in the actual room – or one like it
    • Dress for the actual event
    • Stand up to get better voice projection
  • Enlist others as practice audience members – and ask for their feedback.
  • Get a coach – someone who can watch and help you focus. This is akin to having a personal trainer while you work out; you’ll get more done in less time than if you are on your own.
  • Stop and rewind if you need to. Like field drills, you can do one part over and over until you master it.
  • Make notes for the next time. Reviewing your notes is like studying for the big test – it raises your awareness.
  • Time yourself. Make sure you can finish in the time allotted.
  • Don’t be afraid to try something new – if it doesn’t work, you can always change it back.

In order to make a presentation really stand out, practice can make all the difference. By working with Point Taken and conducting our ‘practice runs’, it will sharpen all of your skills and allow you to polish your presentation. Point Taken is able to combine a strong focus on delivery skills while fine tuning your content. Our coaches will work with you until you are ready to wow the audience with your presentation. We can help with any type of presentation in any venue, including national meetings, product launches, team meetings and new business pitches.

Quotes

“Practice without improvement is meaningless.”
– Chuck Knox

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Got any points you want taken?

Send us an email at askatrainer@PointTaken.net
and you may see your comments in the next newsletter.

Her Point Exactly:

A message from the president

This is prime time for New Year’s resolutions – and I’ll bet no one’s resolution is to make more mistakes. In fact, we are probably resolving to make less mistakes, yet without taking some risks and making some mistakes we are not likely to find the best performance within ourselves. What matters is when and how we make those mistakes. In front of a client – BAD; in front of the mirror – GOOD, we learned something about what not to do. We want to make our mistakes where we can learn from them relatively painlessly so that in the high-risk/high-return situations, we are polished, professional and perfect.

This newsletter focuses on practice sessions so we can take risks, try new things, get coaching – and get better. Practice can’t be separated from performance; they are linked together, so that one really requires the other. And I encourage you to expand your new year’s resolutions to include some unexpected ones, like making more mistakes. At the very least, it allows you a great excuse when you misstep; you can say you were just keeping your resolutions!

~Beth Rogers

Point Taken
Fun Facts

Winston Churchill, thought to be one of the best orators of his time, memorized every speech backwards and forwards ahead of time to hide his stutter.
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