203 How Frequently Should You Practice Your Presentations?

The Japan Business Mastery Podcast By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

The usual frequency for most people for giving formal presentations is once in a blue moon. In other words, we don’t do so many in a year. This presents a problem, because as we know, repetition is key to learning and improvement.

Instead of hanging around waiting for someone to invite you to speak, you need to get out there and beat the bushes for opportunities to present.

What can you speak about? There will be a natural alignment between your own areas of experience, expertise and knowledge and popular demand, which will determine the types of subjects you will be able to speak upon. If these areas are such that there is a common interest in this subject, you will find there will be groups who will be interested in having you speak. The trick is to let them know you exist as a speaker.

How will speech organisers know you exist as a speaker? Investigate what sorts of groups exist in your area who regularly feature speakers. Make a matrix between the subject areas they cover and your own range of interests and capabilities. If there is a match, then contact them and ask if they are looking for future speakers. The person tasked with finding speakers will be very happy to hear from you, because they usually have a difficult job finding good speakers.

A simple way to demonstrate your ability is to do speeches on relevant subjects, video them and put them up on YouTube and your website.

Once you get a chance to do a formal presentation, to a live audience, make sure you get it on video. You can point the event organizers to the videos, to give them an idea of your ability. After the speech you post the video to a link to your website so that people can see you in action.

With all of this content floating around you start to become a known face and people will start contacting you. We get into a virtuous cycle here where success breeds success. This is really great for personal and company brands and that is what we want.