As many of you know, I go to the park to exercise in the pre-dawn hours. I’ve been doing this for years, it’s one of my favorite activities each day.

Last week I suddenly, out of nowhere, started limping on the way to the park. The problem was my ankle. You see, the day before I had been practicing jumping.

Yes, I had to gently practice something any 12-year-old kid would consider insignificant, but my aging body protested against even that. The ankle limp was basically my body saying, “Wait, jumping, are you serious?! I thought we were done with that!” (BTW, no worries, a day of stretching and my ankle was fine.)

You might ask what this has to do with anything.

With almost all of my clients, we work on 4 things. Practice is one of them, especially when the client is preparing for a presentation.

The whole point of practice is to find out where things break down, and then to shore them up. With a limp, the weak point might be that some stretching is needed, or maybe you need to build up a particular muscle. With a presentation, the weak point might be a particular sentence on slide 7, or a poorly-defined central idea on slide 14.

Push the limits, find out where it breaks, and then shore it up. As I tell my clients over and over, “Screw up with me, rock it in real life.”