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Yes, You Have to Rehearse Your Zoom Presentations
My clients always try to weasel out of rehearsal. They fret that they will become stale if they rehearse, or over-practiced and stiff. The likelihood of that outcome is vanishingly small, by the way. I think that over 14 years of working with hundreds of clients I may have seen one who truly became stale from over-rehearsal. And that was because he was a control freak who didn’t know how to change up his rehearsal modes.
These days, the rise of virtual presenting actually makes rehearsal more important than ever. Here’s a tip for executives who attempt to shirk rehearsing because it’s uncomfortable on Zoom: don’t. You need more rehearsal, not less, if you are going to deliver a competent virtual presentation.
Why? Presenting on video mostly means zero feedback. You get no sense from the audience how you’re coming across, either good or bad. If you are not used to shouting into the void, this experience can be very disconcerting. Even if you haven’t thought much about how important an audience’s reactions are to you, you will miss them acutely when you first get started giving a speech on Zoom.
The sensation of putting lots of human energy out there and getting none back is worse than a bad first date — much worse, because that’s only one person. The entire audience is there, lurking, on the video conference…
