Ok, so you have your Pecha Kucha slides completed – you have designed and created a presentation that is beautiful, compelling, and effective using my helpful tips.  Now you are all set, just show up and give the presentation, and you are good to go!

That certainly would be one way to approach your Pecha Kucha presentation.  If that’s what you do, you are most certainly going to have a spectacularly awful time talking in front of the Pecha Kucha audience!  It is incredibly challenging to stay on point for each of your 20 second slides.

Going up in front of the audience without practicing this flow will show – that’s the cold, hard truth.  You will miss your cues, get flustered, get behind, and experience what I call “The Pecha Kucha Quicksand” – the more you struggle to catch up (and get out of the quicksand), the more you get buried. [pullquote]The Pecha Kucha Quicksand – the more you struggle to catch up (and get out of the quicksand), the more you get buried.[/pullquote] With practice, you will realize that the best, and really the only, thing that you can do if you forget a point or slip while you are in the middle of a slide is to take a breath, slow down, and start at the beginning of the next slide.  If you don’t do this, you will get behind in the presentation and stay behind (“on that last slide that we saw before this, I wanted to say that this was important…”)

It’s okay to make a mistake or miss a point – the audience won’t know.  You want to minimize this, and the best way to do this is by practicing.  A lot.

I spent the better part of two days practicing the presentation that I delivered.  The first day I just spent getting down exactly what I wanted to say on each slide.  When you only have 20 seconds, you quickly realize that each word is very important.  Depending on how long the word is, it could be as much as ten percent of your time!  Without practicing, you don’t really get that concept.  With practice, you begin to see it.  I feel like this is the most important part of the practice, as it really helps you hone your points.

After I worked through the exact words I wanted to speak on each slide, I hit a wall.  I was afraid.  I didn’t think that I could remember the points, and I wanted to just read my notes while the slides played.  I stopped practicing.  I did some soul-searching.  I decided I wanted to go for it, and that I was going to do the presentation without notes.  I knew that this could result in disaster!  I could get up and totally forget what I was talking about.  But I also knew, in my heart of hearts, that Pecha Kucha is as much about the performance as it is about the presentation – and the only way to really do it is to do it from the heart and drop the notes.  I am glad that I made that decision.

I started the next phase of practice by just attempting to get the sequence of the slides down, so I knew what was coming, and where I was in the presentation.  After spending a few hours working on that, and feeling confident that I had it down, I began to go through the presentation from beginning to end.  This was also new for me, I don’t generally feel comfortable speaking my presentations out loud beforehand.  I am glad that I became more comfortable with this approach by actually doing it, and will definitely practice out loud in the future.  I practiced so much I was starting to go hoarse!  I was grateful for some green tea and honey to settle things down.

So how did it go?  I ended up missing two sentences that I wanted to share with the audience, and that’s okay with me.  The beautiful thing is, nobody knew about the missed sentences.  When they happened, I just slowed down, took a breath, and waited for my cue for the next point, avoiding the Pecha Kucha Quicksand.  I nailed the other 38 or so sentences, and felt an incredible sense of accomplishment.  There is no way I could have done it without the practice.

image via flickr/kaibara87

How do you practice for your presentations?  Share tips in the comments section!  I’d love to hear what you do to prep.