Practice the tricky part

 Pay more attention to places where you're more likely to make mistakes

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
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

(00:23):
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

(00:45):
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

(01:08):
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

(01:28):
that are rough might not get enough attention to bring
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

(01:49):
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.
Depending on the group, I might need to change one
of those chunks, perhaps to focus on a certain problem more,

(02:12):
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

(02:34):
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

(02:59):
guessing you can praise people easily. That is not particularly hard.
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

(03:21):
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

(03:41):
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

(04:02):
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

(04:24):
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.

(04:48):
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

(05:09):
Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you
can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts
from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or

(05:32):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.