Member Article

No matter how silly you feel talking to an empty room...

With Simon Raybould at Curved Vision Theatre

Regular readers of this column will know that we do voice & presentation skills training for the business in this region: *really* regular readers will know about our public courses too. Both of these are group-based for a very good reason: it’s almost impossible to take yourself seriously when you’re rehearsing your delivery and you’re on your own. Talking to yourself isn’t a good thing (usually). Sometimes, of course, you’ve got no choice but to practice on your own: in my case I do it when I don’t think my presentation is (yet) ready for an audience.

When you run through things on your own, it’s frighteningly easy to subconsciously skip over the hard parts without realising and it’s almost impossible to sort out the timings. Today’s tip is terribly, terribly simple.

Practice out loud.

That way you’ll find the combinations of sounds which you could have trouble with when you “go live” and you’ll also have a much better chance of getting the timing right. Remember that people think (and this means you!) about 10 times faster than they can listen and even that is a number of times faster than they can speak. What takes a moment in your head can take several minutes ‘in real life’.

… and don’t think you can compensate for this because you know about it. You can’t.

Well, you can, but only with a lot of experience!

As always, you can contact me on sme@curved-vision.co.uk: we’ve got a public training day coming up in a couple of weeks too!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .