Under what circumstances do you practise or rehearse something you’ve got to ‘deliver’ at work? Perhaps part of your job involves pitching to win business and you prep for that or maybe there are times that you want to make a key point in a meeting, so you run through what you’re going to say and make sure it hits the right note?

I’ve been reflecting on why something I did today went as well as it did and it’s because I put the leg work in beforehand to get polished.

I was taking a group of senior bods in a large organisation through the proposed content of a couple of workshops aimed at mid-level managers. It’s been a long process to get to this point and the purpose of this ‘walkthrough’ via a virtual platform (slide deck on screen in front of each of them in their offices and me on the other end of the phone, sitting at my PC) was to share the concepts and mechanics of the sessions before the pilots later on in the week.

I’d done this virtual walkthrough twice before for two other sets of workshops and the first time I found myself floundering a little and just not as polished as I was second and third time. I put the success of the second and third times down to knowing exactly what it would feel like to be delivering my pitch in a virtual environment (I am used to F2F encounters for this sort of thing) and also preparing a script for myself to work from (something I wouldn’t do if F2F – I would be much more free-flowing, natural and engaging the people present in the room by responding to their body language).

In a nutshell, I took some time after the first experience to run through what was good and what could be improved and made a mental note to do things differently next time. So many times we have it within our power to be successful if only we take the time to reflect on what happened, as objectively as possible.

There’s also a key point here about the way we practise or rehearse something. For instance, when preparing for an interview, what’s far more powerful than running through the main ideas inside your head, is to have someone take the role of interviewer and ask you specific questions. You then answer as though you’re in the interview and get to hear feel the words in your mouth and hear them with your own ears. This is a very different experience to rehearsing inside your head and when I do it with clients they often feel embarrassed and laugh, saying they’re making a hash of it. They quickly get over that and we get into some useful preparation and ultimately, turn out a series of polished responses.

What’s the take-out? There’s no substitute for practising in a way that’s as close to the real thing as possible.

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