When is the Best Time to Rehearse?

It’s hard to squeeze in time for rehearsing with everything else you have to do.

And when you can finally wedge out an hour here or there, it only makes you feel more defeated  (or even panicky) because, let’s face it, an hour isn’t always enough to achieve a confident, natural sounding and well-remembered talk.

Don’t worry! You’re not alone.

One of the biggest challenges people face when picking the best time to rehearse is finding the balance between preparing their content, designing their slides, perhaps even running it past the boss or other interested parties and saying it out loud in the way that you want it to land for your audience.

It’s hard to stay motivated to remember your content and deliver it dynamically without meandering and with meaning when you’re literally squeezing in a half hour here and there to rehearse but never really “all-in”.

Speaking from experience, rehearsal takes planning, commitment, and an understanding of the purpose of rehearsal. And TIME of course.

So how – and when – can you find enough time for rehearsing? Should you do it last thing when you’ve finished designing? Or as you go along?

Here are some things to consider.

Best time to rehearse: Does after the design stage and just before the performance have an edge?

Get the design right, get the content right and then you can spend the time getting the delivery right.

It sounds logical, doesn’t it?  After all, how can you rehearse when the talk isn’t complete?

Scheduling rehearsing after the presentation is ready or just before you stand up to speak has 3 big benefits:

• You have a got a good chance that this rehearsal will commit the talk to memory and it will be fresh in your mind as you step up to the platform
• You are rehearsing with all the tools and aids you need ie slides, props and notes or prompts so it is as near performance conditions as you can get it. Sometimes we call this rehearsal Dress Rehearsal ( for some types of talks, you would also rehearse in the clothes you want to wear on the day itself eg When we are coaching our TEDx speakers at TEDxNorthwich, we build in a dress rehearsal in the days before the event itself so speakers know what it feels like to deliver in a big theatre with lights and stage and cameras.  They then know what they need to bring to the event in terms of energy, presence and meaning.
• When you trust in the content and the sequence and structure of your talk, then you can concentrate on delivering the meaning of your talk in this rehearsal: the emphasis, the pause, the eye contact, the pace. In my experience, adding this element into your talk transforms a good or even a mediocre talk into a great talk.

I would argue that this final rehearsal is essential to polishing and shining your message and building your confidence for the actual delivery in front of a live audience.

There are strong reasons then, why this type of rehearsal is essential.  Why then does it get missed out more times than not?

Here are the three reasons I am given by clients and speakers

1. There’s not enough time

Time has a habit of running away with you.  The slides take longer than you think.  You keep changing your mind about what content you want to include.  Perhaps you are waiting on information from other people or maybe you are researching your topic to death and then look up to find that the three weeks you had to prepare have shrunk to three days. And there are no gaps in your diary to practice.

The reality is, that however much (or little) time you have, it is human nature to squander it. We have three months, we leave it to the last week.  If we have a week, we leave it to the last day.  We have a day, we leave it to the eleventh hour.

There’s not enough time is an excuse, not a reason, most of the time if we are honest with ourselves.

To manage your time better, you can plan out a schedule of actions to take, milestones to reach and outcomes to achieve.

Where this relates to rehearsal, take your performance date and then work backwards.  Put the date, time and place of your dress rehearsal in the diary even before you start to design and craft your talk.   That way you won’t have run out of time and you will have a complete talk to practice.

2. I don’t like rehearsing!

This is an interesting one.   Generally, I have found in thirty years of supporting others in speaking, that this boils down to people thinking erroneously that rehearsal will make them sound too practised and polished and professional rather than fresh and stimulating and ‘in the moment’.

And I get it.

We all want our delivery to be dynamic, engaging and sound as natural as possible.  Won’t rehearsing squish all the energy and life out of it?  It’s a false logic of course.  You don’t go to a play and expect a wonderful performance if the actors haven’t learned their lines and yet each time those actors deliver in the moment as if it were the first time ( except the one amateur performance I saw where they knew the lines but I would have been hard pressed to see the difference between the actor and piece of wood )

Practice, done right, adds to the performance.   If you are going with the moment and under-prepared, then your mind is busy ducking and diving, reacting and responding.   A little of this is useful, but when it takes up all your thinking and attention, then you have nothing else left to give to the audience.

What gets lost is the meaning.  When that is missing then the impact is significantly diminished.

Best time to rehearse: As you go along? 

Leaving the rehearsal to the last minute can mean that it just gets missed out and then you find yourself standing up and delivering without that necessary practice.  In fact, for some people, when they stand up to speak it might be the very first time they have heard the words come out of their mouths.

To rehearse as you go along requires you to fully understand what the purpose of the rehearsal is and to plan it in.

Otherwise, we all know how easy it is to procrastinate.

So what’s the purpose of rehearsal?

There are three:

When we looked at the benefits of rehearsing after the talk was prepared and before the delivery, we were examining the Dress Rehearsal.   A pulling together of the whole thing as it were.

Practising as you go along has several different purposes, depending on where you are in the process.

Right at the beginning

For example, if you sound out your talk at the start of the preparation process even before you have a structure or even definite content, (I call this the SOUND and SENSE practice), then you are doing it in part to make sure that it makes sense but also to make sure that you are using spoken English rather than written English.  In other words, when we write down our presentation it is easy to use the language of the written word.   This often results in longer sentences, more formal type of language and complex sentence structure.   When we sound it out, our language becomes spoken language.  This means shorter sentences, simple sentence construction and day-to-day language the audience will recognise and respond to.

After you have a rough and ready sequence

Rehearsing here is what I call the Stumble Through.  It is an uncomfortable practice but a necessary one if you want to build on your structure and content and if you want to tweak and experiment with your delivery style.

Most people hate the stumbling, hesitating element of this talk but it is vital to test your thoughts as to content and structure.  It is another check that what you are saying is relevant to the audience and pitched at the right level.

Practice to test, trial and tweak.

If you are writing your talk or even creating slides, then stop every now and again and test it out.  How are you going to deliver this?  Trial it out on others (even if you don’t deliver the whole presentation).  Tweak it so that it sounds like you, that it is understandable and that it relates.

And keep doing this.

Your aim is that it flows, that it engages your audience and that it is memorable.

Rehearsal isn’t a one-time activity

If the overall purpose of rehearsing is to keep changing your talk until it is the best it can be for that audience, then rehearsal isn’t a one-time activity, it is a process.

As with all processes, it works better if you make a plan at the beginning.

Build backwards for your delivery date and diary in Dress rehearsal and then practices, your stumble through and your Sound and Sense.  That way, you know that you will commit to the time necessary.

Sure, an hour here or there is great. But when it comes time to deliver a talk that is inspiring and memorable ( and makes a difference) you need more than a snatched 15 minutes here and there.

When you’re juggling slide design, content research and writing your talk, you have to be incredibly strict with your rehearsal and practice schedule. Set time-related deadlines and stick to them.

If you’re unsure how to start preparing, I created a FREE guide.  Drop me an email and I’ll send it to you

It has everything you need to plan your rehearsals and create dynamic talks.

And if you’d like help preparing for a talk, let’s chat – get in touch.