Practice Through to the End

Ever make a mistake practicing for a big presentation?

When I first started learning the piano, at the late age of thirty-eight, my passionate piano teacher drove into my head that when I hit the wrong note, I should keep playing through to the end. She emphasized that if I stopped every time I made a mistake, I would never make it to the last note. I would suggest the same with a speech, once it is ready to practice in its entirety. You need to get it ingrained in your head that you will not be perfect. You will make mistakes, and that is a fact. When you stop at the point of the mistake, you will hurt the flow and also probably influence how you react in the middle of a real presentation if you make a mistake; you may be creating a habit of stopping where you are and starting over, which will not be good for you or the audience.

As you go back to certain sections and repeat them over and over, you are fine-tuning portions of the presentation but limiting your ability to look at the speech holistically. There is more to a speech than just content. Flow and rhythm are built throughout, and stopping each time you make a mistake makes them harder to recognize. In some of my earlier speech practice habits, I started over again whenever I made a mistake. This made the beginning of the speech flawless because I had said it so many times. There have been times, because of the added pressure of the actual performance, where I lost my place in the body of the speech that had been practiced less. I surprised myself with the mistakes I had never made before in practice. I am convinced it was because I did not take my piano teacher’s advice. I have made considerably fewer mistakes since I have learned to practice all the way through.