How many times did you see a presenter going off-track, perhaps by just rambling on some insignificant details that only him can find interesting? How many times did you see a presenter being surprised by a slide? How many times were you? I know it happened to me a couple of times, and it only happened when I did not rehearse.

Rehearsing is that thing we can all do to make our story come out smoothly. It is the one thing all professional actors do. It is the one thing all musicians do. When it comes to a live delivery, rehearsing is the one thing no one should go around because of two main reasons: first, there is nothing easier than rehearsing, and second, there is no replacement for it.

Yet, rehearsing must have a bad reputation among speakers, because very few actually do it. Perhaps one reason for it is that rehearsing is often being taken for learning by heart. Musicians and actors rehearse, but the good ones do not learn by heart. They rather exercise their knowledge.

Rehearsing is less a preparation for the unexpected, as it is an exercise of discovery. Eisenhower once said:

The plan is useless; it’s the planning that’s important.
Dwight Eisenhower

To rehearse is to exercise your plan. On the one hand, while doing it you will discover glitches in your plan. On the other hand, you will learn more about your plan.

When preparing a talk, one particular area that benefits from rehearsing is transition. Transition is the space in your talk. It is the space between the parts of your talk. It is the space between your slides. It is the space between your sentences.

Transition can make or brake your story. Think of the story as a ride. When transition is smooth, you will enjoy the ride and will perceive it as effortless. When transition is abrupt and evident, you get distracted and you will perceive the ride as bumpy.

One way to know whether or not a speaker prepared for the talk is to analyze the transition. For example, after the introduction a transition needs to be made towards the main content of the talk. When the talk is less prepared this transition is typically abrupt, perhaps nothing else than a very short pause, while well prepared speakers make it less obvious perhaps through the use of a short story or even just a change in tone. A similar thing happens with the transition towards the conclusion.

Another example is the transition between slides. Slides should not be the talk, they should merely support it. But, when the talk is not mastered, speakers tend to rely too much on the slides: because the speaker does not know exactly what comes next, slides are first shown and only afterwards are they introduced and accompanied with words. Such a talk is perceived to make sense for each individual slide, but the overall structure is perceived as unclear because the transition does not glue the pieces together. On the other hand, a speaker that knows well the talk, knows at any moment what comes next and how to introduce the next part. When this happens, the point on the next slide can always be introduced before the slide appears, and because of that, slides are perceived to reinforce the speakers speech.

Transition is natural to be rough in the early stage of the preparation. But, going over and over through your talk you can do away the rough edges by experimenting different ways of moving from one part to the other of your talk. Here are some questions you can think of while rehearsing:

• How should I start?
• How should I make the transition from introduction towards the main part? How should I make it for the conclusion part?
• How should I end the talk to make it fit with comes afterwards?
• Is the order of the parts logical?
• Where should the pauses be?
• Are the slides useful as they are, or should they be changed to fit the story?

There are not many excuses for getting in front of an audience without having rehearsed. Perhaps lack of time is one good excuse, because rehearsing does takes time. Reportedly, Steve Jobs is preparing for weeks for his famous keynotes, and because of that his keynotes are now awaited events. And I imagine he is not the least busy man.

If you ask yourself how long should you spend on it, here are some rule of thumbs:

• The larger the audience, the more you should rehearse (Mircea Lungu points out one reason for it).
• The longer the talk, the more you should rehearse.
• The less you already talked in front of similar audiences, the more you should rehearse.
• The less you already talked about the subject, the more you should rehearse.
• The more important the talk, the more you should rehearse.

But time is not the only excuse. Another one is that the environment is not suitable for rehearsals. That is a bad excuse. Of course, it is best when rehearsals happen in a similar environment as the actual talk, but that does not mean you cannot rehearse otherwise. If a formal rehearsal is out of the question, you can ask your colleagues to listen to you during their break. If that does not work, you can ask your spouse to listen to you while playing video games. If your spouse is not available, you can take the cat to listen to you while it is sleeping. If the cat cannot stand it, talk in front of the mirror. If you do not have a mirror, just do it without one. And if you have too many people around that give you odd looks when you talk to yourself, just do it in your mind.

There is no replacement for rehearsal, and if you look carefully you will see that there is no real excuse for getting in front of an audience and not have done it.