Carving Out Time To Practise
More often than not, a big struggle for my clients is trying to find time to practise the skills they learn in our sessions.
Whether it’s students with a jam-packed course load, parents with full-time jobs, or professionals trying to improve their skill sets, most of us are already over-scheduled. Often, simply trying to find a small bit of free time to unwind feels like moving mountains, never mind adding extra tasks to your to do list.
Over the years that I’ve been coaching, I’ve come up with ways that you can practise while you’re doing your existing tasks, i.e. while you’re doing regular life. If you’ve ever felt compelled to work with me, but worried that you wouldn’t be able to put in the time to make it worthwhile, I want to assure you that you can do it. And that it will be incredibly impactful.
First of all, if you haven’t yet downloaded your FREE public speaking guide HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT: The 4 Key Elements to Move Past Fear and Speak Up in Any Situation, go do that! The information below will help you figure out how to do that work in your existing schedule. Go here: www.ubuskills.com - sign up, and you’ll receive the free guide right into your mailbox!
Focusing on the four key elements of presentation: standing, breathing, speaking and reading, let’s go through each of them with practical ways to integrate them into your life so you’re not losing sleep (literally) trying to practise!
Standing. As I’ve written in the aforementioned free guide (or if we’ve worked together in a workshop or one on one), use the principles of Alexander Technique (AT) to carry your body through space. Using AT will allow you to physically stay grounded and balanced, give you a physical presence of authority, and has the added benefit of decreasing physical stress. Here are some ways you can practise standing and Alexander Technique:
Be mindful as you walk to incorporate the small adjustments of the principles of Alexander as you move. Have to run to the bathroom? Use AT to get you there. (Join us on Instagram every tuesday for #tubuesdaywalks where you discover benefits from walking.)
As you brush your teeth in the morning and the evening (or in between if you’re a keen tooth brusher), start with your feet and move up (as per the guide) as you’re brushing to remind yourself of the movements and small adjustments of standing.
Breathing. Breath work, specifically controlled breathing, is a fundamentally necessary piece to presentation of any kind. Deep breathing incrementally opens up your rib cage (by relaxing your intercostal muscles), which gives you greater breath capacity, which means you can have more control over your speaking voice. Controlled breathing gives your brain the signal that you are not in fight-flight-freeze mode, and in turns reduces cortisol and adrenaline in your blood stream, allowing you to stay calm and focused, reducing brain fuzz. Sound too easy to be true? It’s not. It’s truly that simple. The first thing to do is get my controlled breathing gif - find it here: http://bit.ly/ubuskills-breathgif. Save it to your bookmarks or your homescreen on your phone so that you can access it easily. As you practise, think about deepening your breath as you follow along. Here are some places where you can pull up the gif and practise 2 minutes of breathing:
Buses, subways, taxis - any time you’re not in the driver’s seat, take 2 minutes and pull that gif up on your phone. Nobody will know - they’ll just think you’re playing Candy Crush! (I do this ALL of the time.)
Waiting Rooms. Waiting for the doctor? Dentist? A job interview? Therapist? Your husband? This is the perfect time to practise controlled and deep breathing with the gif.
Speaking. My guide details how to use your Optimum Pitch (OP). This is an ever evolving understanding of how your body makes sound, and changes with you as you both grow older as well as deepen your physical understanding of yourself. The important thing to remember is that you will rarely use your optimum pitch at all times, but you do want to know how to access it when you need it, and think of it as your base point. This is why keeping in good practise is necessary. Speaking and reading often go hand in hand, so in this section, I’ll note places where you are only speaking, and not necessarily reading.
Work presentations. Practise finding your OP ahead of your presentation and see how using it affects your performance of the information you’re delivering. People naturally perk up and respond to a resonant voice and hear it as authoritative.
Phone calls. Have a difficult phone call to make with a family member, or even with your local internet provider? Use your OP to express your complaint/difficulty and see how that affects the response of the person on the other end of the line.
Conversations in loud places. Ever go out for dinner with a friend, or to a concert in a bar, and it’s so loud you can barely hear yourself speak? Use your OP! It gives the least amount of harm on your voice, naturally gives you volume, and will ensure you’re not clearing your throat for the entire next day from vocal strain.
Reading. I’m going to devote an entire blog post (soon!) about the power of marking up your text (called text mapping in the free guide) and reading effectively to a group of people. But for our purposes today, we are referring specifically to reading out loud and practising both marking up your text as well as reading 3-7 words ahead of what you’re speaking. (For more information, check out the, wait for it… free guide!).
Are you a parent? Use your reading skills for bedtime stories. Honest go goodness, I practise this every night conspicuously as I’m reading to my daughter. I read 3-7 words ahead of what I’m saying, and often look up from the page to read the rest of a sentence to her. This creates connection between us through eye contact, and also means I’m keeping my reading skills honed.
Read aloud every day for five minutes. Whether you read a newspaper, a book, Twitter, a program manual, a recipe, an online quiz about which Harry Potter character you are - read it out loud. Practise reading 3-7 words ahead, and look away from the book/paper/computer every once in a while.
For reading of something on paper, use the text mapping techniques to mark it up, and practise reading it aloud. For example - your boss gives you a report to look over. Insert some practise time into the mix - mark up the text, and read a page or 2 aloud. (Pro tip: it will also help you retain the information better!)
The overarching piece here is to keep these things in mind as you go about your life. You will start to incorporate your practise regularly, and it will keep your tools nice and sharp for when you need them.
Please note that for any presentation, you’ll use all four of the elements at once, and often, once you’ve been practising a while and are familiar with the work, you can start to practise 2 or more of them at once. Standing/Reading, Walking/Breathing, Reading/Speaking. See how many elements you can combine when you’re being mindful of practise - it’s only going to benefit your skill set and your ability to speak whenever, and wherever you need.
Have any ideas of other areas where you can implement practise into your daily life? Let me know in the comments! I always love to help my clients out with new opportunities to stay sharp without having to make more time.
As always, please write to me with any questions - I love to help!
