The most common reason people suck at public speaking

I hate articles that hide the answer at the end, so here it is: the reason most people suck at public speaking is they don’t practice enough.

Why? The old adage says “Practice makes perfect”, after all!

Of course, there’s always someone to throw a rock at ancient wisdom, and so the slightly newer adage "Practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect" came into vogue.

It's true that the more perfect your practice, the more perfect your execution will become, and yet I think the “perfect practice makes perfect" meme is more damaging than useful because (in my experience) it scares people away from practicing at all.

Practice and execution are a recursive function, a feedback loop. The output becomes the input, which feeds the the output, which again becomes the input. If your intent is in the right place, normally it'll be a positive feedback loop, with each recursion producing an improvement.

Any practice, perfect or not, is better than no practice. The implication that it’s even possible to create perfect practice without first indulging in quite a lot of imperfect practice seems entirely misguided to me.

This is true of everything, though of course in my world I think about it most in the context of public speaking and the creation of commercial influence. Very few people who present to groups in professional settings practice enough. We don’t allow the positive feedback process to loop enough times to generate the kind of improvements we’d like to see.

If you want to get better at public speaking, you should first commit to getting better at private speaking. (I recommend the car. I love talking to my dashboard as though it’s an auditorium of potential clients).