Why You Shouldn’t Rehearse Your Speech In Front of a Mirror

Photo by Min An from Pexels

I’ve often had clients and others tell me that they’ll rehearse in front of a mirror in order to practice a speech or some important part of a speech. It seems like a good idea in principal, doesn’t it? You can try out various expressions, gestures, and stances and see what works. You can test your own comfort level with the material in safety, seeing how much you remember and noting what you’re missing or getting wrong.

And yet, the practice has always struck me as wrong-headed, designed to increase self-consciousness when you want to be reducing it, if anything. And of course, you’re seeing yourself backward (and in two dimensions) in a mirror, so the view you get of yourself is in fact a distortion.

But I’ve never had a convincing argument ready to present to these people when they bring up the idea, and so I’ve just encouraged them to do their best and moved on to other topics.

Then a recent study on a related topic caught my eye and got me thinking about the issue again. The study was a small, simple one that found that if you tell people to stop looking in the mirror for a two-week period, their self-esteem will increase. More than that, the incidence of depression, social anxiety, and body dissatisfaction decreases as well.