I have a slightly strange piece of advice for people preparing to speak on stage.
Practise like Jim Carrey.
I don’t mean learn to impersonate Ace Ventura.
Please don’t.
I mean practise with more expression, more movement, more vocal variation and more physical commitment than feels entirely comfortable.
Go bigger than you think you need to.
Push your range.
Because one of the things I’ve learned from years of speaking on stages and coaching other people to do the same is this:
Under pressure, we contract.
Your gestures get smaller.
Your voice gets flatter.
Your face becomes less expressive.
Your movement becomes more conservative.
Your personality gets turned down.
So if you practise at the absolute minimum, then contract under pressure, there isn’t much left.
Or, as I’ve said slightly less elegantly in workshops:
If you practise to Kiwi and then shrink, you’re going to be boring as batshit.
That’s why I practise like Jim Carrey.
Why Jim Carrey?
Think about the range Jim Carrey has as a performer.
At one end, he’s completely ridiculous.
His face moves in ways I’m not convinced a human face is supposed to move.
His body becomes part of the performance.
His voice changes constantly.
Everything is exaggerated.
But then watch him in one of his more restrained performances.
He can go in completely the opposite direction.
Quiet.
Still.
Subtle.
The contrast is striking.
That’s what interests me.
Range.
I don’t want speakers walking onto corporate stages impersonating Jim Carrey.
I want them to develop enough range that they have choices.
Can you go bigger?
Can you become quieter?
Can you speed up?
Can you slow down?
Can you use your face?
Can you use silence?
Can you deliberately change your voice?
Can you physically embody what you’re saying?
Because if you’ve never explored those edges in practice, you’re unlikely to magically discover them when 500 people are staring at you.
Most people don’t actually practise speaking
One of the first questions I’ll ask somebody I’m coaching is:
“How do you currently practise?”
They’ll often tell me:
“I read through it.”
“Out loud?”
“No.”
Why would they?
Sitting alone in your office reading a presentation aloud feels weird.
Standing in your lounge room gesturing enthusiastically at nobody feels even weirder.
But here’s my question:
What exactly are you practising?
You’re preparing for an activity that requires you to stand up, use your voice, use your face, use your body, operate slides, hold a remote, look at an audience and manage the physical effects of pressure.
And you’re rehearsing it by sitting silently and reading.
That’s not the same activity.
You cannot practise speaking silently.
At some point, the words have to leave your mouth.
Practise “as if”
There’s a principle I use constantly when preparing myself and other speakers:
Practise as if.
As if the audience is there.
As if the stage is underneath you.
As if the slides are on the screen.
As if this is the real thing.
I regularly ask speakers:
“Have you got your own clicker?”
“No.”
“Then what are you practising with?”
It sounds like a tiny thing.
It isn’t.
If you’re going to have a remote in your hand on the day, practise with a remote in your hand.
If you’re going to use slides, run the slides.
If you’re going to stand, stand.
If you know the dimensions of the stage, map out roughly that amount of space.
If you’re going to move during a particular story, move.
If you’re going to pause, actually pause.
Don’t think:
And then I’ll probably pause here.
Stand there and experience the bloody silence.
Practise the physical reality of the performance as closely as you reasonably can.
The closer practice gets to performance, the fewer surprises your brain has to deal with when it matters.
The five mistakes that make great practice almost impossible
Over the years I’ve noticed five mistakes speakers make repeatedly.
- They procrastinate.
- They don’t write a script.
- They don’t time their talk.
- They build shitty slide decks.
- And they don’t practise their delivery.
I’ve often taught these as five separate mistakes.
But they’re really a chain reaction.
Procrastination starts it.
You put the presentation off.
Now there’s no time to properly develop the thinking.
So you don’t write the talk.
Because you haven’t written it, you don’t really know how long it is.
So you don’t properly time it.
Now the slides become your safety net.
More words go onto them because you need something to remind you what you’re supposed to say.
Then, because you’re still changing everything the night before, there’s no meaningful time left to rehearse.
And we wonder why speaking feels stressful.
By the time you walk onto the stage, your brain is trying to remember content, read slides, manage time, operate technology, control nerves and appear confident simultaneously.
That’s an enormous cognitive load.
Then somebody tells you:
“Just relax and be yourself.”
Brilliant.
Preparation creates freedom
This is the part people sometimes misunderstand about scripting and rehearsal.
They think preparation makes a speaker robotic.
Done badly, absolutely.
But great preparation should do the opposite.
It should create freedom.
I want to know my content so well that I don’t need half my brain desperately trying to remember what comes next.
Because then I can pay attention to the audience.
I can see them.
I can respond to them.
I can let a laugh run longer than expected.
I can pause.
I can change pace.
I can enjoy myself.
Preparation creates presence.
And presence gives you power.
Practise the performance, not just the words
Once the content is solid, this is where the real fun starts.
Now I can work on delivery.
Where does my voice change?
Which word gets emphasis?
Where do I pause?
What is my face doing?
What are my hands doing?
Where do I move?
Where do I become completely still?
Where does the audience need energy?
Where do they need space?
Where can I use a story, metaphor, contrast or rhetorical question?
How can I use the Charismatic Leadership Tactics I’ve spent years studying and teaching?
I sometimes describe vocal emphasis as vocal italics.
If this sentence were written down, which word would I italicise?
Now say it that way.
This is where rehearsing like Jim Carrey becomes useful.
Push it.
Try too much.
Make the gesture ridiculously big.
Overdo the facial expression.
Take the vocal variation further than you normally would.
Find the edges.
Then pull it back.
You cannot develop range while constantly staying inside what already feels comfortable.
Comfortable for you isn’t necessarily interesting for them
I demonstrate this in workshops.
We’ll have someone deliver the same piece of content at three different performance levels.
Level one feels safe.
Level two pushes them.
Level three feels big.
Then I’ll ask the speaker:
“Which one felt most comfortable?”
Almost always, level one.
Then I’ll ask the people watching:
“Which one was most interesting?”
Very often:
“Number three.”
There’s the problem.
Your comfort and your audience’s experience are not the same measurement.
What feels enormous inside your body can look completely appropriate from 15 metres away.
What feels beautifully understated to you can look like almost nothing to an audience.
That’s especially true on a large stage.
The room absorbs energy.
Distance absorbs expression.
Pressure makes you contract.
So sometimes the feeling of:
“Bloody hell, this is a lot.”
is exactly where useful development begins.
You should feel uncomfortable sometimes
I don’t believe the goal of practice is to make every moment comfortable.
If everything you’re doing feels completely comfortable, there’s a reasonable chance you’re simply repeating behaviours you’ve already mastered.
Skill development happens near the edge.
Try the bigger gesture.
Hold the silence longer.
Tell the story with more emotion.
Drop your voice.
Use your face.
Move deliberately.
Stand completely still.
Record yourself.
Watch it back.
Cringe if you need to.
Then do it again.
Because you’re building choices.
And eventually behaviours that initially felt ridiculous start feeling available.
That’s what practice is for.
Not simply proving that you can already do what you already know how to do.
Don’t perform like Jim Carrey
This is the distinction.
I’m not suggesting you perform like Jim Carrey.
I’m suggesting you practise like Jim Carrey.
Explore the extremes.
Develop range.
Make yourself uncomfortable while the stakes are low.
Then, when you step onto the real stage, you have choices.
Maybe the moment needs energy.
You’ve got it.
Maybe it needs stillness.
You’ve practised that too.
Maybe the audience needs warmth.
Maybe conviction.
Maybe humour.
Maybe vulnerability.
Maybe silence.
The wider your range, the more intentionally you can respond.
And that’s ultimately what great performance is about.
Not being bigger for the sake of being bigger.
Being able to give the moment what it needs.
So next time you’re preparing a presentation, don’t just read it.
Stand up.
Get your clicker.
Put the slides on.
Use your voice.
Use your hands.
Use your face.
Move.
Pause.
Practise the whole bloody thing.
Practise as if.
And every now and then:
Practise like Jim Carrey.
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