Practice
Welcome to 5 Minute Speech Coach, an audio course to help anyone get better at public speaking through consistent practice.
Before we go any further, let’s take 3 deep breaths together. Try to breath from your stomach as much as you can.
Ready? Okay. [3 deep breathes]
This episode is about the 3rd part of GAPE: practice. Gape is (goals, anchor, practice, evaluation) and p, practice.
5 Minute Speech Coach is an audio course to help anyone get better at public speaking through consistent practice. I highly recommend checking out the show notes for today, because the resources on Practice will be way more how we set up consistent habits, and know what to work on when.
Here’s a story about Practice.
everyone and their mother can tell you that an important part of building a new skill is PRACTICE, but that doesn’t mean we ever freaking do it. The second piece is that more time practicing isn’t always helpful -- in fact, it can actually be the opposite, ingraining bad practice in your emotional reactions, approach to work, and even in your speaking patterns.
Now we come to the exercise for today’s lesson -- thinking about your practice. One of the most important concepts in the GAPE system is learning how to access your anchor: not memorize it, but to come back to it and find it whenever you need it, even if your mind or body are not at ease. So for the next few minutes I want to take some time to breathe, get centered, and practice answering questions or responding to something based on your anchor. You might need to pause here for a minute and think about different questions or moments that might come up in your conversation that you want to prepare for, and that’s fine. You might even want to come up with questions you have to answer in other parts of your life where your anchor might be relevant (like I did for my second job interview). Some potential scenarios are listed in the show notes if it helps. But work on breathing, pausing, and responding to that scenario with your anchor in mind.
[Practice track]
Great work today. Thanks for taking the time to focus on building this skill ,and check out today’s show notes’: there are lots of resources on building a habit out of practice, ways to make sure you stay consistent in your GAPE practice, and some notes on how to approach reflection. Talk to you soon for our fourth and final step in GAPE -- evaluation.
