[Editor’s note: This post originally appeared in 2016.]
All of your great work to become a great communicator comes to naught if you don’t invest seriously in preparation.
So many people underestimate how much preparation a great speech takes. But not you. You invest seriously in preparation to reap real rewards. Whether you’re presenting at the company holiday party or TED, you pay attention to the physical setting and your needs. You spend some time deliberately thinking about the environment you’ll be in, what you’ll need to feel comfortable. And then you get it. Before you speak you check your microphone or earbuds, you make sure you can see the teleprompter and slide display, you see if the stage lights are going to be in your eyes.
You get paranoid and plan for things to go wrong. Haven’t you ever seen a projector fail? Or a remote not work? Or a demo crash? We all have. Expect it and have a plan B.
You rehearse and rehearse again. You time yourself by giving the speech in the car as you drive to work. You record yourself to see how you sound and refine the choppy parts. You use mnemonic devices to help you remember your key points.
Getting ready for your QBR? Before you go in, you find out if you can take notes with you, find out how many people will be in the room, find out where you are on the agenda.
Even for your staff meeting or an important one-on-one meeting, you have clarity about your communications objectives. You identify your goal, your key messages – even if they’re just scribbled in a notebook.
An unprepared communicator who wings it may stick the landing one in a hundred times. If you’re comfortable with those odds, good for you. But a prepared communicator delivers consistently, and gets consistently better at delivery every time she speaks. Be that prepared communicator!
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