Is rehearsal important?  Can you get by without it in an over-scheduled world?  It’s odd that I should even have to pose these questions, but a surprising number of the people we've worked with over the years have tried to wiggle out of rehearsing even important speeches.

Speakers want to deliver charismatic, assured, memorable performances.  Some of them say they want to 'wing it', because thinking too hard about it or preparing too much will make them stale or boring.

Don't believe it, and don't credit that urge in yourself if it comes up.  It's just avoidance.  It's the fear talking.  And more importantly, it's wrong. 

Here are three reasons why you must rehearse in order to deliver a great performance. 

1.  A presentation is both a mental and a physical activity.   So for a presentation to look good and sound good, both your brain and your body have to know the speech.  You can ‘walk through’ a speech in your mind, but the only way for your body to learn the speech is by doing it.  In order to achieve the apparently effortless, natural-looking performance a great stage actor delivers, he or she rehearses for four weeks, give or take, doing the same thing over and over and over again until it has become part of not only the intellectual memory, but also the sense memory.  You should rehearse, at an absolute minimum, three times.

2.  Transitions are the key to an effortless-looking performance.  It’s in the transitions that the differences between a mediocre and a good speech show up most obviously.  The average business speaker creates a speech by pulling together a collection of Power Point slides, some borrowed, some new.  The speaker then shuffles the slides into some kind of order and thinks he’s ready to go.  What we get, then, is the following:  “What this slide shows is….What this next slide is talking about is…”  This kind of clumsy hopping from slide to slide is the mark of a half-digested, under-rehearsed speech.  In rehearsal, you’ll find the ways to make the transitions smooth and logical.

3.  Rehearsal gives you the strength to go the distance.   I’ve seen many an under-prepared speaker suddenly realize, half-way through the speech, that she’s still got 30 minutes to go.  There’s a moment when the speaker signals to the audience that it’s all taking longer than she thought, and everyone in the room picks up on the signal.  The result is that the audience begins to think of the speech, even if the content is good, as an endurance contest.  If you rehearse, you get a sense of beginning, middle, and end, and you learn how to pace yourself. 

Audiences will forgive the occasional verbal slip, but if you look like you don't know what you're doing, they'll write you off as a loser every time.  Rehearse.  Please.  For all of us.