Presentation Skills Tip #7: Why Scripting Turns Your Brain To Mush
Presentation Skills Tip #7: Why Scripting Turns Your Brain To Mush
Here is Presentation Skills Tip #7 in the strategic presentation skills series:
Have you ever gotten ready to do a big presentation and you script it all out? What happens that makes that NOT work?
When you script something out your brain literally “reads” it in your mind before you say it. So if you hit a wrong word your brain “freezes” on you and it can take a long while to get back on track.
For your audience scripting can make you seem flat because your voice may become more stagnate or you can seem unauthentic because you seem too “practiced.”
So what should you do instead?
I recommend that instead of scripting you do bullet points. Make sure any stories of analogies you will use you have the “key points” in bullet point so you can incorporate them all. Then allow your brain to freely tell the story and points as you need to in that moment with that audience.
This keeps you authentically involved with your current audience and your current material. It also keeps you from getting “brain fades” where your brain freezes because you switched words around or the order of what you say.
Now having said all that, I still recommend that you practice your first 10 minutes of your speech so you develop your own rhythm and flow. That will allow you to focus on the audience rather than on what you are going to say next.
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