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A Professional Motivational Speaker’s Top Tips: How To Rehearse A Speech
By Guest Author | September 26, 2009
Topics: Public Speaking |
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As an experienced professional motivational speaker, I’m a huge fan of motivational quotes. Here’s one (that is sometimes attributed to Warren Buffett): “Practice makes permanent, not perfect.” And Buffet is 100% right. Here are a handful of rock solid (and yet robust) ideas that will prevent you wasting a lot of your valuable time whenever you prepare a speech (or any other kind of corporate presentation).
A Professional Motivational Speaker’s Five Best Strategies
Tip 1: Make a start on your rehearsing in plenty of time. If you leave it too late to start, you’re in the worst situation of all. You’ll have lost the naturalness of the extemporaneous speaker without developing the smoothness of the professional motivational speaker. And, as you reach back into the depths of your memory to recall your material, you’ll hesitate over your words. Which means that you should start practicing ASAP. Remember, working on a speech always takes much longer than you would suppose. So begin straight away, today if you can.
Tip 2: (This next strategy was explained to me by another clever professional motivational speaker.) Start the clock and see how long it takes to read your first page of content, out loud. To be clear, I’m not advocating you present your content as if actually before real people, simply speak it and time yourself. This easily understood exercise affords you a clear impression of about how many pages of subject matter you’ll need to fill the time you’ve been allotted. For example, if you find that you need four minutes and you’re speaking for 40 minutes then, clearly, you’re only going to have time to get through approximately ten pages of subject matter.
Take this into account and you won’t make the common gaffe of practicing twenty five pages of information only to discover (often on the day) that you only have adequate time to deliver a handful of the pages of information you spent hours polishing. This is both a massive waste of effort and makes you look like an amateur. What’s more, when faced with this quandary, some speakers try to squeeze all their information into the time slot by speaking mega-rapidly. Clearly, this compounds the problem.
Tip 3: Don’t learn your content as if it were a script. Working off a script in this fashion and making it sound fluent takes a ton of work. (And that’s for an utterly professional motivational speaker who knows how to write a script in the first place.) Here’s the solution? Experience has taught me that a corporate speaker is most likely to get lost as he/she transitions between different chunks of material. For that reason, I advise you to memorize the order of your content blocks, but not the line-by-line wording within each one.
Tip 4: Videotape yourself. Have you ever watched yourself on video? Most folks cringe every time they watch themselves in this fashion. And so, if you’re like most individuals, I wouldn’t expect to enjoy it. That said, it’s crucial for your success. Listen for verbal tics (eh, em and repeated phrases: “like I said,” etc). Also pay attention to repetitive gestures such as hand-washing
Tip 5: Don’t forget to do a technical rehearsal. (According to the professionals in motivational speaking, this step invariably differentiates the professionals.) It’s wrong to presuppose that you’ll be able to operate the audio-visual aspects of your speech. Something that seems really straightforward, like using a hand-held microphone, can appear to be brain surgery when being watched by an audience.
Pay attention to these tactics and then, when you step out in front of your audience, you’ll be free to concentrate on the essential thing, presenting your information to the group. People will simply take for granted that you’re a professional motivational speaker. I wish you well.
This has been a Guest Author Submission.
To Your Success,
SherryD
http://www.wbobr.com
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