Something quirky happens when you listen to yourself talk. Not many of us do that to ourselves very often, but indulge for a second and join this metacognitive journey. Do one of the following:

Take out your phone and record yourself explaining something you explain all the time to people. Perhaps it’s a recruitment pitch, or an explanation of your job, or how you prefer your coffee (if you have very detailed coffee orders).
Find something you’ve written recently for someone else (an email, for example) and read it out loud. Record that on your phone.

Since this is a blog article and you’re probably skimming it quickly, here’s what you’ll probably see when you watch the recording:

My voice is so awkward
Why do my eyes move around so much
I don’t think what I said is exactly right

That. That realization that what you intend to communicate is slightly off-kilter when it enters the world is a powerful and humbling realization.

I grew up playing music, on the piano and double bass. Learning two instruments taught me the painful reality that beauty and harmony did not spring from the mind through the fingers. It was an arduous and boring slog of taking the smallest section of music and playing it ten times, then ten times at half the speed, then ten times with my eyes closed…I can list hundreds of permutations to transform an intention into the closest approximation of what it should be in reality. Even then, when I was on stage or in front of the teacher, I still muddled through what I had practiced. Nerves, perhaps.

If you ever tried to learn an instrument and make music, this ability to self-review is familiar. What’s powerful about this skill is that it’s transferable to countless contexts, especially in the workplace. Being able to be outside of your own head to hear/reread what you are actively producing is a skill that can only get more sensitive.

Honing that skill is something you can do on your own. Here’s a quick guide on one way to go about it.

Memorize and record yourself

In order to get out of your own head to improve your delivery, you have to move the presentation out of the active processing part of your brain. This means you need to memorize what you want to say. Do yourself a favor here and find something you need to really memorize, such as a business explanation, a pitch, or an upcoming presentation that you need to do.

Here’s a set of techniques to memorize something, in case you forgot those skills from primary school:

Write out what you want to say. Do this word by word or as an outline, talking point by talking point.
Distill your words and talking points into sections. If you love a good narrative structure, make it a three-act structure.
Close your eyes and recite out loud the sections you just organized. Repeat until you can recite the structure in order without your notes.
Present the final section by repeating it five times without notes, then take a break, then come back to it and do it five more times. If you need your notes to refresh yourself, guess a few times before checking what you have written down before. Rinse and repeat until you can do the whole final section without notes.
- Protip: Starting with the last portion of your talking points means it will be the most solid when you are ready to present. Ending strong matters more than having a killer middle.
Wait a day.
Recite what you practiced yesterday five times without notes. If you need notes even once, repeat step 4 and 5. Good memorization takes time.
Repeat steps 4-6 for the first section of your presentation. It’s not recommended to do this concurrently with memorizing another chunk of content or else you’ll have to check that you aren’t mixing up talking points.
Repeat steps 4-6 for the remaining section, the middle of your presentation.
Now practice transitions. Starting midway through your first section, attempt to smoothly continue from your first chunk of content into your second section. Practice until the transition is just as solid as an individual section.
- Protip: Optimize your transition practice by starting with the last sentence of the first section and stopping after the first sentence of your second section. While the extra practice of repeating whole sections is nice, focusing on the transition is the real goal.
Repeat step 9 for the middle section to the ending section.
Do the whole pitch without notes. If you find that you are faltering on a particular segment, be disciplined and repeat just that struggle area. Running through your whole talk and repeatedly stumbling in the same place is not effective practice.
Record yourself doing the whole pitch.

2. Watch the recording

Get over the cognitive dissonance of watching yourself. That’s your biggest barrier to self-improvement. Even a new presenter can find areas to improve their own delivery. The key to making this more palatable is to ignore everything else except for one specific thing and jot down your observations on that one thing. Here is a checklist for watching a recording of yourself doing some task:

Look at your feet: are they planted, are you rocking back and forth, do you have one foot up, do you twist or shift your weight?
Look at your arms and hands: do they emphasize what you are saying, do they grab your body, do you rub them unconsciously, are they in your pockets?
Look at your eyes: do they look at the camera, do they wander the room, do they move in concert with what you are saying, do you close them?
Listen to your punctuation: does the pitch of your voice go up when asking a question or ending a sentence?
Listen to your “downbeat” talking points. These are the key points you want to communicate because they are important: do you set them up appropriately or do you skim over them?
Listen to your silence: when do you stop talking? Do you stop to breathe, do you stop when something is important, or do you stop because you’ve forgotten what to say?

If you are truly the rigorous type, you’ve watched this recording six times. It will be less awkward on the sixth watch than the first watch. The overarching theme of identifying something as “good” or “bad” is that bad things are distracting or take away from what you’re communicating, the good things emphasize what you are communicating.

3. Set one goal for one behavior

Just like how you practice one component during the memorization phase, changing and improving your delivery and enhancing your self-awareness should be done incrementally. This means that if you notice that your feet do weird things when you are talking, focus on only changing how your feet behave when you practice and present.

If you’ve done your homework in memorizing the content, you’ll have a bit of headspace to focus on your feet. This is an achievement unto itself- internalizing the content has now given you the power to self-regulate a small behavior. When you practice, you can actively pay attention to where you feet go or halting what they unconsciously do.

If you’ve practiced enough, when you deliver that critical presentation you will be able to respond in real-time on your performance. Your ability to self-monitor is freed up, either by changing a particular behavior (like your foot placement) or the content of your presentation on the fly (you know the transition to the second section is coming up but you need to repeat a talking point in the first section based on how the audience reacted). These backchannel observations become more and more articulate with practice; you’ll be able to judge and decide whether your feet should point to one side, lift one foot to hover in midair, or to move to the side of the room to intimidate a colleague off their phone.

Imagine the cheering crowd on your incredible presentation: they love your intentional practice.

Everything you just said is a lot of work

Bingo. You can do it alone and it is a lot of work and a lot of reward. However, you don’t have to do it alone and it’ll be easier with a coach or a mentor. If asking someone in your office is too mortifying to watch you practice a presentation five times, perhaps Learn to Scale can work with you on your ability to self-reflect. Or, if you work with a team that needs a bit of a boost and you just don’t have the time to give, a third-party like Learn to Scale can be just what you need. Give us a buzz and chat with us about what you’d like to accomplish.