A few years back, we worked with the CEO of a company on a speech assignment that promised to be both fun and challenging. The CEO had built the company from nothing to dominant in his industry. He had achieved a great deal, and was now ready to tell his story to the world. He had spoken to his employees, and a few industry groups, before, but had never ventured outside of this narrow sphere of influence.
Now he wanted to go big. He got in touch with a speaker bureau, and asked it to book him. The bureau counseled him to go small – to begin with a modest venue and a small audience. Just to get the hang of it.
He rejected that advice. He persuaded the speaker bureau to get him a large audience – 6,000 people – and a high fee for his first time out. So the bureau called us in to help write the speech. The stakes were high and the speaker inexperienced. A coach seemed like a good idea.
We wrote the speech, and it was a compelling one – if I do say so – because the CEO was an immigrant who started with nothing and built the company up through hard work and business savvy – a classic ‘rags to riches’ story. This was a person who changed the world in a significant way and had as a result a good message for people to hear.
Once everyone was happy with the speech, we proposed that the speaker rehearse. The CEO resisted, saying, “I’m very comfortable under pressure, because of my extensive martial arts training. I’ll be fine.”
We pressed hard, but the speaker ultimately did not rehearse beyond talking through the script in a 10-minute session in his palatial apartment overlooking Central Park in New York.
I called my good friends at the speaker bureau to warn them that our speaker hadn’t rehearsed and I was worried. They thanked me for the warning, and we all held our collective breaths.
The big day and the debut came, and with it disaster.
The stage was quite wide, and the conference organizers had put a couch in the middle of the wide expanse to break it up. At one end of the stage – stage right – was the podium, and at the other end, a potted plant. The speaker began at the podium, but soon left it to roam the stage.
A couple of minutes in, he jumped up on the couch and executed what everyone figured out later must have been a half-remembered Kung Fu move. It was dramatic; and the audience was riveted. Then he jumped down, uttered a few lines from the speech, and jumped up on the couch again, performing another semi-martial-arts maneuver, and a few more lines from the speech.
He kept up this astounding mixture of speaking and martial arts ballet until he had managed to get through – incoherently – about half the speech. Then he (mercifully) stopped and asked for questions.
There were none. 6,000 people in the audience were stunned into silence.
The speech was a Grade-A disaster. The CEO has never spoken in front of a large audience again to date. The speaker bureau didn’t talk to me for 3 years, even though the CEO had the decency to call both me and the speaker bureau up and apologize, taking the blame on himself. The organizer of the event has a ‘bootleg’ tape of the speech which is played at late night ‘after event’ parties to riotous laughter. They coined the phrase ‘jumping the couch’ from this incident to describe a speaker who melts down during a speech.
You must rehearse. You don’t want to jump the couch. Adrenaline plays funny tricks on the mind, and you need to establish the muscle memory of a full, physical rehearsal in order to give your body something remembered to do when the adrenaline kicks in. A mental run-through is not enough. You must rehearse.
If find yourself arguing with me, or yourself, giving reasons why you don’t need to rehearse, that’s a red public speaking flag. Professionals rehearse. Amateurs jump the couch. So rehearse. Please.
(Some of the details have been changed to protect the CEO in question. For a longer discussion of how and what to rehearse, see my article here.)
Thanks for the real life story, Nick!
Practice – Practice – Practice!
Practice makes perfect. NO, It doesn’t exist.
Perfect Practice makes perfect. NO, that doesn’t exist, either.
The Road to Perfection never ends! YES!
Great example! Thanks,
G
Thanks, Fred and Gray, for the comments. You’re right; you won’t achieve perfection, but you’ll get a long toward it, with rehearsal.
Very funny story, Nick. I can see it in my mind now. Although, I’d love to see the video too ;-)
I’m lucky to have provided communication training to US armed services who understand something of the nature of adrenalin. We say “Prepare, yet remain adaptable.”
Best to you,
Mark
“Under duress we do not rise to our expectations—we fall to the level of our training.”—Bruce Lee
This sounds OK at first reading, but is actually nonsense. Simply because this CEO melted down does NOT equate to the necessity of rehearsal for an experienced speaker. Prep, sure. But at the other end of the scale, doing what Malcolm Gladwell reportedly does? I could do that, but it’d make my performance 1% better at the cost of many times the time investment.
As I said, nonsense.
Van, I hear that excuse regularly from busy executives and it doesn’t wash. Most people won’t melt down, but the body does signal when it is doing something for the first time. The question is how does (even) an experienced speaker want to show up? As someone who is in control, or someone who is making it up as he/she goes along? The pro wants to both know what he/she is doing, and look like it. That 1% improvement you cite is woefully low and sadly misguided. Try rehearsing; you’ll see.
Again, I’m sorry, but nonsense. You’re (again) painting a straw man here: if I don’t rehearse, then I’m “making it up as I go along”? Hardly. In speech competitions, in fact, there’s usually an Impromptu category, and the people who are skilled at it can appear to the random spectator as if they’d practiced their speech for HOURS.
Nick, you may just have a vested interest, as a coach, in pushing this rehearsal meme. While there are certainly a lot of people who need to, or who would benefit from a lot of rehearsal, that’s simply not true of many experienced speakers. You also (incorrectly) somehow assume that I’ve never tried rehearsing my talks.
Again, don’t confuse preparation with rehearsal. Preparation is vital, but suggesting things like giving the talk repeatedly in front of a mirror is advice for either tyros or chronically nervous people.
Good luck, Van.
Let me take it one step further: it’s far more common for most executives to have to speak publicly WITHOUT having the chance to rehearse, or even sometimes prepare formally. Whether it’s on earnings calls, to the press, or just to a company meeting, being able to stand up and speak in an impromptu manner is quite often the measure of a well-regarded executive.
Rather than pushing this absurd must-rehearse-to-the-gills meme, you should instead be emphasizing the development and honing of those sorts of impromptu speaking skills — confidence, articulateness, structure — because these come into play much more often than the chance to speak to hundreds or thousands of people with a rehearsed speech.
And thanks for the good luck wishes.
Van, I have blogged quite a bit on impromptu speaking, and that is something I often train people in. Of course that’s an important skill for executives and many other sorts of people.
I’m also an enthusiastic advocate of Improv training for people who want to become more proficient on their feet.
And I also work often with executives who, apparently unlike you, have important speeches for which they do have a chance both to prepare remarks and to rehearse. And they find that extraordinarily useful.