🎤Public Speaking: Practicing Your Talk
How to dry-run your talk with intention
In this month’s post, I’ll continue sharing a behind-the-scenes look into my preparation process for my first public-facing conference talk at this year’s Women in Product Conference!
In this mini-series, I’ll cover the following topics—as a minimum:
Practicing your talk—this is today’s post!
Preparing for live audience Q&A
Day-of routine
In today’s post, I’ll focus on sharing my routine for nailing down speaking to a virtual audience.
Let’s get started.
Record yourself: audio only edition
When you’re getting started with practicing, I recommend recording yourself speaking, then playing back the audio recording for self-critique.
During this time, refer to the table below on things to listen for.
Record yourself: audio + video edition
After you have revised your content and have done a few cycles of recording your speech, then iterating on your self-critique, I recommend doing the same thing—albeit with recording both audio and video.
During this time, refer to the table below on things to look out for.
Practice, practice, practice!
I recommend running through your talk end-to-end as many times as you can, from where you will be delivering it on day-of.
If you need to memorize it, you will most likely need to run through your talk more times. If there are specific sections or sentences that evade your memory, I suggest running through these specifically, in addition to end-to-end practicing.
You may also want to record your talk, and play it back so you can familiarize yourself with the content if you’re unable to actually dry-run it (for example: during commutes to work).
Whether or not you must memorize your talk, I highly recommend knowing your transitional phrases by heart, especially if you need to switch from one slide to the next.
Don’t worry about not knowing your talk by heart word-for-word. Instead, focus on knowing the flow and structure of your talk like the back of your hand.
Thanks for reading this month’s post!
Here are some external resources to check out:
Toastmasters International’s standard form, for tracking filler words and sounds.
If you have developed your own strategies and tactics for practicing to give public talks, please share them in the comments below.