Professional actors will do it as a matter of course. Musicians and athletes too. Why won’t the business world?

Rehearsing, in real time and out loud, not just in your head, is the hardest thing to find time for, in my experience. The big event, the vital pitch, the career-enhancing conference speech .. planned, designed, crafted, powerpointed to a ‘T’ .. but rehearsed? Seldom.

It’s the biggest casualty in the haven’t-really-got-time list of things that sit on so many desks. We know it’s a good idea, or at the very least we’ve been told it is, but we never quite find the time to do the rehearsing part. ‘Oh I’ve been on my feet before and survived; I’ll survive this time too’ or ‘Actually I’m much better when I’m winging it’. Ever heard those? Ever said them?

It’s tempting to speculate as to why speakers seldom rehearse. An actor, say, will spend six weeks with a professional team before even thinking of putting himself out in front of a paying audience. The actor knows that the show will be better in every respect if nothing is ‘left to chance’. The business speaker, by and large, is not actively seeking the opportunity to speak and therefore puts off doing anything about it until he’s in the moment and has to take the fatalistic view. Put simply, we don’t rehearse because, for the most part, we don’t want to be doing it. If we don’t want to do it why put ourselves through the pain of doing it more than once? So runs the flawed logic.

The dangers of not rehearsing need reinforcing – if we don’t run the full speech at least once how do we know how long it is going to take to deliver? How do we know that we haven’t written something that we can read well enough but find difficulty in saying (it might be a word, ‘statistics’ is my favourite example, or a tongue-twisting phrase or proper name)? How do know what pace to take it at? How do we know what key points to bring out, and in what ways, to reinforce our main message? How do we know, in short, that the speech or presentation is going to work?

If we don’t know that before we’re ‘live’ in front of an audience we are adding immeasurably to the pressures on ourselves. Small wonder then that the experience turns toxic and nervousness takes over.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to rehearse, though, is this. It flatters your audience (who will always spot the polished speech ahead of the wing-and-a-prayer delivery) that you bothered to take the time to make the shared event the best that you could. The confidence you will gain from not having to find everything out ‘live’ will translate itself directly into your delivery, your body language and your attitude; your audience will not fail to reward the extra time you took. Just listen out for it in the applause.