When I first started learning the piano, at the late age of thirty-eight,
my passionate piano teacher drove into my head that when I
hit the wrong note, I should keep playing through to the end. She
emphasized that if I stopped every time I made a mistake, I would
never make it to the last note. I would suggest the same with a speech,
once it is ready to practice in its entirety. You need to get it ingrained
in your head that you will not be perfect. You will make mistakes, and
that is a fact. When you stop at the point of the mistake, you will hurt
the flow and also probably influence how you react in the middle of a
real presentation if you make a mistake; you may be creating a habit of
stopping where you are and starting over, which will not be good for
you or the audience.
As you go back to certain sections and repeat them over and over,
you are fine-tuning portions of the presentation but limiting your ability
to look at the speech holistically. There is more to a speech than
just content. Flow and rhythm are built throughout, and stopping
each time you make a mistake makes them harder to recognize. In
some of my earlier speech practice habits, I started over again whenever
I made a mistake. This made the beginning of the speech flawless
because I had said it so many times. There have been times, because of
the added pressure of the actual performance, where I lost my place in
the body of the speech that had been practiced less. I surprised myself
with the mistakes I had never made before in practice. I am convinced
it was because I did not take my piano teacher’s advice. I have made
considerably fewer mistakes since I have learned to practice all the way
through.
Thomas B. Dowd III’s books Displacement Day: When My Job was Looking for a Job (2014 Paris Book Festival Honorable Mention), The Transformation of a Doubting Thomas: Growing from a Cynic to a Professional in the Corporate World (Honorable Mention at the 2012 New England Book Festival), From Fear to Success: A Practical Public-speaking Guide (2013 Axiom Business Book Awards Gold Medal Winner and 2013 Paris Book Festival Honorable Mention). Audiobook version of “From Fear to Success” is also available! See “Products” for details on www.transformationtom.com. Book and eBook purchase options are also available on Amazon- Please click the link to be re-directed: Amazon.com
MP3 Downloads of “From Fear to Success: A Practical Public-speaking Guide” are available at Apple iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, Emusic, Nokia, Xbox Music, Spotify, Omnifone, Google Music Store, Rdio, Muve Music, Bloom.fm, Slacker Radio, MediaNet, 7digital, 24-7, Rumblefish, and Shazam “From Fear to Success” MP3 on CD Baby
