An Extra Hour

With the exception of my friends in Arizona and Hawaii, most of us in the US received the annual fall gift of an extra hour today.  While this hour was given while we were sleeping, it always feels to me as if the day is longer, affording me endless possibilities of things to do.  I feel energized by the opportunity to finish long-avoided tasks, catch up on work projects, or spend time with family and dog.  This hour – 60 minutes – seems so much longer than what it is in actuality.  As I get older, I look forward to “falling” back more than almost any other day on the calendar.  And, to be fair, I resent giving that hour back in the spring.

As with many things, this makes me think of the difference an hour can make to my teams and to my clients.  What if we had an extra hour to get ready for a critical short-list presentation?  What would we do with it?  As you might imagine, I have several suggestions of both what to do, and what not to do with your extra hour.

First, though, in the absence of any cosmic gift of fabricated time, how do we gain an extra hour of preparation and/or rehearsal time?  By planning the presentation development like we would a project, we can capture time by minimizing waste.  In other words, by developing clear milestones for preparation and by holding team members accountable to preparation deliverables, any team can significantly decrease the amount of time it takes to create a good presentation.  And, by establishing realistic milestones right up to the time the team leaves for the interview, we can capture that extra hour between the final rehearsal and the time we leave.

Before writing about what we can do with that time – there are so many possibilities – I should establish what teams and individual speakers should not do.  Teams that practice right up to the time they leave for the interview create nervous speakers and risk being “flat” in the actual performance.  Team members who fiddle with their visuals and PPT slides up until “go live,” create anxiety for themselves and others and buy themselves enormous risk of failure of both content and technology in the actual interview.  And, please, don’t spend your hour rewriting your notes.  Not only will you waste time, but you’ll actually decrease the value of any notes because your eye will no longer recognize the shapes and patterns of words on the page.  Finally, don’t go to your office and return emails or solve problems of your day. The hour before the team leaves for the interview is a time to prepare, to relax, and to get ready.

The hour before the team leaves for the interview can be a gift and can be the most important period of time of all.  Successful teams finish their team rehearsal at least an hour before the team leaves.  These teams keep speakers together to have a snack, rehearse Q and A, and work logistics. This enables each team member to leave for the interview rested, relaxed, and confident. 

In some cases, I put teams through a “blocking” rehearsal.  Blocking, a term borrowed from the theater, means to put speakers through the movement of the interview without practicing the actual content.  This helps speakers know who is on their left and who is on their right, where they move in the space, and where to find visuals.  Blocking creates confidence in movement and interaction.  And, most importantly, it reduces uncertainty and burns off energy to help team members relax into the process of speaking.

In the final hour before departure, I sometimes recommend to particularly nervous speakers that they take a walk around the building, speaking their content out loud to themselves or another team member.  In this way, the speaker reinforces the “body memory” necessary to link content to delivery and s/he continues to manage nervous energy.  Some of my most memorable presentations involved long walks with principal speakers who went on to give the best presentation in the interview room before the real selection committee.

For particularly nervous speakers, helping them breathe can be a huge help. It sounds strange –and sometimes it is – but reminding a speaker to take deep breaths can be enormously helpful.  Getting away from the bustle of energy to sit in a quiet room and calmly breathe in and out can be the best strategy for managing frayed nerves. Let the marketing professionals pack the team up for the interview.

On this day of extra time, I wish each team an extra hour to get ready for each interview.  While the rest of the year only affords us 24 hours in each day, by proper planning and time management, teams can capture an hour to get speakers really ready to present their best and most relaxed selves before selectors.