Why Entrepreneurs Need Rehearsal

As an entrepreneur, confidence is huge when you are presenting or pitching. And if you think about your pitch as a performance, you’ll realize that you need rehearsal. The more you practice your pitch, the more naturally it flows out of you.

You don’t necessarily need to memorize it word for word (although that helps), but the more time you spend talking about it, the more comfortable you become. 

And that comfortability leads to confidence.

And that confidence leads to leaving a great impression on your audience.

I think one of the reasons entrepreneurs lack confidence or get nervous when pitching is because you don’t have the performance skills needed to deliver all of your hard work and passion. You might put a lot of pressure on yourself and think:

“I should be able to do this! It can’t be that hard! Why do my pitches not feel good?”

Well, I think it’s because many entrepreneurs don’t really understand all the details that go into a performance. That’s why I am “pulling back the curtain” to allow the business world into the artistic rehearsal process. A big goal of mine is to connect the actor world with the entrepreneurial world, because I feel strongly that they have so much in common.

The rehearsal is the preparation. The pitch is the performance. 

When you dedicate time to rehearsal, and explore all the ways you can use your voice, body, and emotions to express your ideas, that’s when you can really let your product and yourself shine.  

As an actor, when I am in rehearsal for a play in the theatre, I spend weeks focusing on storytelling. I learn my lines, maybe learn a new accent, and collaborate with the other actors and director to explore all the different ways to tell the story. 

We focus on body language and movement, and how to honestly connect to our emotions to tell the story. At the end, so many tiny and important decisions are made during the rehearsal process that the audience is not aware of. We focus on every detail during the rehearsal process so that the audience is hearing and seeing the clearest and most honest story that the writer intended.

Does this gesture convey the right message? Does sitting down on this line help to make a strong point? Can I be heard clearly by everyone in the theatre?

As we get close to opening night, the director might say, “Everything we have worked on for the last several weeks in rehearsal… forget about it! Trust that it lives inside of you.”  Now, that is so much easier said than done, and I know this because those words have been said to me so many times!

But it's true. When you rehearse your pitch and all the possibilities of delivering it, you start to know it inside and out.

And that makes you extremely comfortable expressing your ideas.

And that makes you feel completely confident.

And that’s when you can truly let it live, let it breathe, and let it shine.

For more tips for Entrepreneurs: https://coaching-for-success.com/chrisroe