I was talking yesterday about how important it is to work hard in your preparation, not just the presentation itself. A sports coach I heard of recently summed that all up with the phrase “Train hard – play easy“. :)
I like that.
My old piano teacher was a concert pianist and I once asked him what he thought about during recitals – did he concentrate just on the interpretation, or was he still thinking a little about the technicalities? I can still remember his answer: “Neither – I count the audience”. He didn’t mean it literally, of course, just that as a performer he should be so well prepared he couldn’t get it wrong, technically… if needed, he could count the audience.
So how does one prepare?
It’s not about doing it over and over, fortunately.
Go over the presentation and find what works – then forget about working on those bits because they don’t need to be worked on! Obviously.
The bits you need to look at (and look at hard) are those bits that don’t work. Far, far too often we find clients who come to use saying things like “I’ve been over it a dozen times and I still get it right!”; our response is, basically, that there’s no wonder it doesn’t work if that’s all you’ve done… you need to find the bits that are more difficult and go over those hundreds of times, not dozens.
Fortunately you don’t need to do it all over a hundred times!
