TJ, we love to rehearse our PowerPoint presentations. It's a great idea. we endorse it completely. Absolutely. Next time, there is no time now, we didn't finish the PowerPoint deck 1am. And now it's a 8am presentation.
It's now 755. That's something I hear constantly. Guess what? You're lying to yourself. If you tell yourself, there's no time to rehearse your PowerPoint presentation, you're just lying to yourself. There's always time for anything that's important.
But here's the real problem. Human beings left to their own devices are going to procrastinate. They're going to want to avoid doing what's unpleasant. It's much easier to sit at your desk, or sit in a hotel room in front of a laptop type. Rearrange bullet points take email from colleagues adding bullet points. rearrange the font size, change the color move the logo, it feels productive.
Feels like you're working our boy burning the midnight oil. My boss is going to be impressed. And yet it's often a waste of time. If you haven't rehearsed your PowerPoint presentation, you're going in unprepared. How many of you would dictate an entire PowerPoint presentation? Tell someone, okay, send it out as is email it to all of our clients, customers prospects, the media, don't spellcheck it, edit it or review it.
You probably think I'll teach you That's crazy. I'd never do that. If I did. I'd be fired. There'd be so many errors. Well, why would there be errors in it?
There's errors because it's your first draft. You're winging it. You haven't taken it through a review process. Well guess what? Your PowerPoint presentations. Part people are will experience is you speaking.
So if you haven't spoken in advance, then you're delivering your rough draft to the audience. Well, rough drafts by definition are rough. They're usually garbage. They're bad. The second, third, fourth draft, usually they're much, much better. So that's the real problem people have is they tell themselves they're working hard by adding, adding, changing, reviewing, edit, change, review, add, and they simply squeeze out time on the calendar to rehearse.
If you want to be an effective presenter, at some point, you're going to have to have some discipline. Now, I would urge you to do what some famous American political presidents who are great communicators do. Ronald Reagan had a rule with his speech writing team really important speech, like the State of the Union. It's gotta be finished. We can advance because he rehearsed every day for a week and even did videotape rehearsals for a full day before a major speech. Maybe you don't try to finish a week in advance, but you could decide at least 24 hours, preferably 48 hours in advance, so that you now have time to actually rehearse, refine, get comfortable with it, and get to the point where you can deliver it effectively.
If you decide you're going to do it, it will happen. If you tell yourself that rehearsal is somehow a luxury, but you're going to keep getting input from people change this font size, change this purple to a darker purple. I've seen people practically changing their PowerPoint as they're walking up to the stage. You'll never ever, ever have any time to rehearse if you just give yourself the out. have infinite number of revisions and you don't give yourself a deadline. So my advice, give yourself a deadline where unless attorney says you've got to change that particular slider, we all go to prison.
You're not going to change the slides anymore. You're going to focus your energies on practicing getting better, more comfortable delivering an interesting engaging way. And you're going to be practicing on video.