Practice the tricky part

0:03Speaker 1:Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning, This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is to practice the tricky parts. Whenever you are getting ready for a meeting or a speech, or an interview or any sort of performance, think about when you are most likely to stumble, and focus on that. Your practicing will be a lot more effective and efficient than if you keep running stuff that feels easier. Many years ago, when I was studying the piano more seriously, one of my teachers asked how I was practicing. I mentioned playing through my next performance or competition piece, and when I came to a rough part, I'd go back over that a few times. He paused and asked me, why do you even start at the beginning? Why not start with the rough part. It's a good question. The goal of practicing anything is to get better at it. If certain parts of anything are harder for you than others, then you need to spend more time on those. If you just go through everything in sequence, you will get better at all of it, which is great. But the parts that are rough might not get enough attention to bring

1:32Speaker 1:them up to the good parts. And if you have limited practice time. This will mean you are spending a lot of time on things that really don't need as much polishing. I certainly keep this in mind with my speeches. I speak to lots of different groups, but different groups want me to speak for different lengths of time and to cover different material. If I have let's say twelve main chunks of material I talk about, someone who wants a twenty minute speech might get three to five points, and someone who wants an hour long speech would get more.

2:06Speaker 1:Depending on the group, I might need to change one of those chunks, perhaps to focus on a certain problem more, or to give different examples, so that material will be less familiar to me than the other stuff I'm talking about. So rather than run through a forty five minute speech four times, I might run through the actual speech twice, but repeat the five to ten minutes of updated material eight times. That takes less time overall and means I'm more fluid on the stuff that would have been choppy in the run through condition. Now, I know that not everyone does a ton of public speaking, but you probably do something that is public facing repeatedly. Maybe you need to give tough employee feedback from time to time. I'm guessing you can praise people easily. That is not particularly hard.

3:05Speaker 1:You do not need to practice your praise multiple times, but it would probably help to think through how you will say more challenging matters and to actually hear yourself say those words multiple times so you can deliver them in a confident, but encouraging and helpful way. Or maybe you make sales calls. There are certain parts of your product or service that sell themselves, but there are often tough questions about something that maybe isn't your favorite part of the product either. Those are the answers you need to practice repeatedly to make sure you are telling a story that you believe in and that makes sense to you and so it sounds authentic. You want to make sure you know how those words sound so you don't flinch or anything ridiculous like that when you are saying them for real practice The tricky part. We all have limited time. Most of us don't practice our various skills merely as often as we should. Practice is something that is important but not urgent, easy to chuck when life gets busy. If we are going to carve out time to practice, we want to use that time as efficiently

4:24Speaker 1:as possible. I will admit that it is a lot more fun to practice the parts that are easy. The reason I was playing through my piano pieces is that it's a lot more fun to sort of get in the flow than to bang out a bad measure over and over again. But I also think it is fun to be really good at something and to perform well. Practicing the tricky part is what gets you there. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making them of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.

5:23Speaker 1:Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.