Speaker 1: Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning,
Speaker 1: This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
Speaker 1: tip is to practice the tricky parts. Whenever you are
Speaker 1: getting ready for a meeting or a speech, or an
Speaker 1: interview or any sort of performance, think about when you
Speaker 1: are most likely to stumble, and focus on that. Your
Speaker 1: practicing will be a lot more effective and efficient than
Speaker 1: if you keep running stuff that feels easier. Many years ago,
Speaker 1: when I was studying the piano more seriously, one of
Speaker 1: my teachers asked how I was practicing. I mentioned playing
Speaker 1: through my next performance or competition piece, and when I
Speaker 1: came to a rough part, I'd go back over that
Speaker 1: a few times. He paused and asked me, why do
Speaker 1: you even start at the beginning? Why not start with
Speaker 1: the rough part. It's a good question. The goal of
Speaker 1: practicing anything is to get better at it. If certain
Speaker 1: parts of anything are harder for you than others, then
Speaker 1: you need to spend more time on those. If you
Speaker 1: just go through everything in sequence, you will get better
Speaker 1: at all of it, which is great. But the parts
Speaker 1: that are rough might not get enough attention to bring
Speaker 1: them up to the good parts. And if you have
Speaker 1: limited practice time. This will mean you are spending a
Speaker 1: lot of time on things that really don't need as
Speaker 1: much polishing. I certainly keep this in mind with my speeches.
Speaker 1: I speak to lots of different groups, but different groups
Speaker 1: want me to speak for different lengths of time and
Speaker 1: to cover different material. If I have let's say twelve
Speaker 1: main chunks of material I talk about, someone who wants
Speaker 1: a twenty minute speech might get three to five points,
Speaker 1: and someone who wants an hour long speech would get more.
Speaker 1: Depending on the group, I might need to change one
Speaker 1: of those chunks, perhaps to focus on a certain problem more,
Speaker 1: or to give different examples, so that material will be
Speaker 1: less familiar to me than the other stuff I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: So rather than run through a forty five minute speech
Speaker 1: four times, I might run through the actual speech twice,
Speaker 1: but repeat the five to ten minutes of updated material
Speaker 1: eight times. That takes less time overall and means I'm
Speaker 1: more fluid on the stuff that would have been choppy
Speaker 1: in the run through condition. Now, I know that not
Speaker 1: everyone does a ton of public speaking, but you probably
Speaker 1: do something that is public facing repeatedly. Maybe you need
Speaker 1: to give tough employee feedback from time to time. I'm
Speaker 1: guessing you can praise people easily. That is not particularly hard.
Speaker 1: You do not need to practice your praise multiple times,
Speaker 1: but it would probably help to think through how you
Speaker 1: will say more challenging matters and to actually hear yourself
Speaker 1: say those words multiple times so you can deliver them
Speaker 1: in a confident, but encouraging and helpful way. Or maybe
Speaker 1: you make sales calls. There are certain parts of your
Speaker 1: product or service that sell themselves, but there are often
Speaker 1: tough questions about something that maybe isn't your favorite part
Speaker 1: of the product either. Those are the answers you need
Speaker 1: to practice repeatedly to make sure you are telling a
Speaker 1: story that you believe in and that makes sense to
Speaker 1: you and so it sounds authentic. You want to make
Speaker 1: sure you know how those words sound so you don't
Speaker 1: flinch or anything ridiculous like that when you are saying
Speaker 1: them for real practice The tricky part. We all have
Speaker 1: limited time. Most of us don't practice our various skills
Speaker 1: merely as often as we should. Practice is something that
Speaker 1: is important but not urgent, easy to chuck when life
Speaker 1: gets busy. If we are going to carve out time
Speaker 1: to practice, we want to use that time as efficiently
Speaker 1: as possible. I will admit that it is a lot
Speaker 1: more fun to practice the parts that are easy. The
Speaker 1: reason I was playing through my piano pieces is that
Speaker 1: it's a lot more fun to sort of get in
Speaker 1: the flow than to bang out a bad measure over
Speaker 1: and over again. But I also think it is fun
Speaker 1: to be really good at something and to perform well.
Speaker 1: Practicing the tricky part is what gets you there. In
Speaker 1: the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's
Speaker 1: to making them of our time. Thanks for listening to
Speaker 1: Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you
Speaker 1: can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Speaker 1: Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts
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Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your favorite shows.