You know how I bang on on a regular basis about how important mirror neurons are, and how important it is that when you are presenting, you display the emotions you want your audience to feel? Here’s a little story related to that:

When I was a teenager, I was really into bicycle road racing. It was my life, actually. You know how I mentioned once that I dropped out of high school and went to college instead because high school was an inefficient use of time? Training for road racing was what I was freeing up time for.

Anyway, at one point when I was probably about 17, I headed out for a training ride. Very close to home, an older driver, turning left into a grocery store’s parking lot, clipped my bike. I went flying over the handlebars and my bike got crushed and folded under the car’s wheels.

I landed in the middle of the road. Fortunately, my helmet took the brunt of the impact.

(BTW, almost exactly a year later, and just a couple blocks away, my brother got hit; his life was saved by his helmet too. That makes two of us, and I have been a big supporter of helmet laws for bicycles and motorcycles ever since. My mother would probably have zero children today if it were not for those pieces of plastic and foam.)

Realizing that I was in the middle of the road, and panicking at the knowledge that I might get hit by other cars, I got up on my hands and knees and crawled to the side of the street, muttering “oh sh*t, oh sh*t,” over and over as I went. I looked back at the car that had hit me, and saw, and heard, my bike getting crushed, folded, and dragged underneath the car as it pulled out of the street and into the parking lot.

I collapsed curbside as people started to gather around me. I realized that they were as panicked as I was, but I needed them to stay calm so they could think straight, so I quickly became calm and collected. In fact, I became freakishly calm, and I started giving instructions and telling people what to do (“call an ambulance, I will need to go to the hospital,” “go get my mom, here’s the address,” “find a blanket and put it on me,” stuff like that). At one point during the instruction-giving, I thought it had started raining, because I felt liquid pooling in my eye sockets. Turns out it wasn’t raining, it was blood flowing from the rest of my face.

My point is that this is why you practice your presentations a gazillion times. Not so cars won’t hit you, so that your calmness will calm others.

Others are going to be whatever you are. If you get up there and you are nervous, they will be nervous too. If you are cool and collected, they will be cool and collected too. Whatever you want them to be, that’s what you need to be.

And so you practice a lot, so you know your material and calm down.

Clients often worry that a lot of practice will make them seem wooden and rehearsed. And in my experience, it does. Practice rounds 7-12 will often feel, and in fact will be, quite wooden. You have to push through that, because in practice rounds 13-18 your relaxed spirit shows back up, except this time, you know your presentation by heart.

Don’t forget, whatever you want your audience to be, that is what you need to be.