hey team,
Game 6 of the 2013 NBA Finals. The Heat are down 3–2 in the series, down three points in the game, and there are under ten seconds left.
LeBron pulls up from three. Misses. The ball clangs off the rim, there’s a scramble, and Chris Bosh grabs it, then kicks it out to Ray Allen. Allen catches it while backpedalling into the corner, totally off balance, jumps, shoots, drills it. Tie game. The Heat win in overtime, then win Game 7.
It’s one of the most famous shots in NBA history. People still talk about it like it was a miracle. Everyone, that is, except the guy who hit it.
Years later. Listening to a podcast where Ray Allen gets asked about The Shot. He says he practiced that exact shot 30 or 40 times every day. For him, it's just muscle memory.
That's also what rehearsal should give you before a speech.
Now, I get it. You’re not going to rehearse your talk 30 times a day for two weeks. But for a talk that really matters...well, you should probably rehearse it a lot more than you do. What we want is for you to walk on stage already knowing it’s good, and already knowing that you know the speech. If you’ve got both of those, speaking becomes one of the most fun things in the world.
The problem is, almost nobody’s been taught how to rehearse. As such, most of us fall back on the mirror. The stupid mirror.
The mirror
Somewhere back in Public Speaking 101, someone probably told you to practice in front of a mirror.
Well-intentioned but...this is not the right idea.
It looks nothing like a real venue. You spend the whole time staring at yourself, which at best is like looking at one person, and at worst insinuates the talk is about you.
And! Most people mumble when they're rehearsing to a mirror. You’re in a hotel bathroom, feeling a little silly, talking under your breath so nobody in the next room hears you. What are you actually practicing? Mumbling. You traveled all this way to practice mumbling. That’s the muscle memory you’re building. Not the energy we want on stage.
Three unlikely rehearsal tips
So what should you do instead? Here are three things that sound a little weird, but just might work.
1. Rehearse with music on. Two things will happen. The music will make it way less awkward. You're no longer alone in a room talking to yourself. And particularly if you have your power mix on, you'll rehearse with energy. That energy sticks.
2. Yell it the night before. The night before the speech, in your hotel room, yell it. Like, actually yell. Big, primal, I just got to the top of the mountain, yell.
(I suggest doing so from the bathroom, since it’s a little more soundproof)
Once you’ve yelled your speech in the bathroom of an Embassy Suites, it’s really hard to show up small the next day.
3. Rehearse the stuff you don’t think you need to rehearse. Quick football story. After a neck injury, the Colts cut Peyton Manning, and nobody knew if he could still play (including Peyton). To make sure he was still capable of performing, he got a bunch of guys together and played out an entire football game. Right down to waiting out halftime.
Halftime. Nobody rehearses halftime. He did.
Do the same with your talk. Rehearse walking in. If you’re playing a video, practice standing there in silence for the full three minutes.
When I spoke at Craft + Commerce, I knew I’d be on a raised stage looking down at my notes, so I rehearsed in my hotel room with my laptop on the floor. Must have looked ridiculous in my hotel room, but once I was on the real stage, looking down at my notes felt normal.
The whole point is to cut down on anything you’d have to figure out in the moment. As little as possible should be weird.
You’re not memorizing
Which brings me to the most common misconception about rehearsal -
Rehearsing isn’t memorizing.
Memorizing is what you did for the school play, or in sixth grade when Miss Fulginiti wanted to test if you could remember The Jabberwocky word for word.
A speech doesn’t work like that. There's nobody grading you with a red pen. The audience doesn’t know what you're supposed to say.
What you’re really doing is saying the words again and again until they’re familiar. That’s muscle memory. Same thing Ray Allen had in that corner. He wasn’t trying to remember how to shoot. His body already knew.
So that’s the goal. Not a perfect recitation, just walking on stage and finding the talk right there when you reach for it.
Honestly, you’re only getting this email because I bothered to rehearse.
Years ago I had one shot at my audition to work at Duarte (the presentation firm I was dying to work for). So before the real thing, I gathered a bunch of friends in Portland and ran through the whole workshop with them. It was my own version of Peyton’s fake football game. It worked. When I got to the real audition, nothing phased me. Pretty much everything I do now traces back to that.
That’s the thing about rehearsal. Nobody in the audience is going to see you yelling in the bathroom or rehearsing with your laptop on the floor. They’ll just see someone who seems like they belong up there.
Next speech, try one out-loud run through at full volume, nowhere near a mirror.
Speak well my friends,