Asking One Question for Eleven Years

Think back to your last high-stakes presentation. You decide what high-stakes means, because it’s relative to whatever you had riding on it.

The question: What did the five minutes leading up to it feel like?

I’ve been asking this in every workshop since 2015. The answers come back so consistent I could write them on the board before anybody speaks. Heart racing. Butterflies (more like bats). Sweaty palms. Cotton mouth. Tunnel vision. Slurred or rushed speech.

These are usually senior leaders, spanning industries, company sizes and tenure.

Still… Same list.

Your Primitive Body Has One Program

When your brain registers a threat, it runs one sequence and it doesn’t ask you first. Your heart rate climbs to move oxygen faster. Blood leaves the hands to favor the larger muscles, which is why your fingers go cold and your grip goes strange. Your liver dumps stored glucose into the blood, because the body is funding a sprint. Attention narrows onto the thing in front of you and drops everything at the edges.

The sequence exists because your ancestors encountered things that could eat them, and the ones who made it out of there got to reproduce.

It runs identically for a high-stakes presentation.

Your body can’t tell a predator from a pitch. It reads stakes, and it answers the only way it knows how. That’s not a flaw you developed. It’s standard equipment, and it isn’t up for negotiation.

Which leaves you with one thing to work on, and we’ll get there.

Three in Four Call it Fear

I ask for the feeling too, not just the symptom. If I had to put a number on eleven years of answers, roughly three in four give me some version of fear. Terror. Anxiety. That gut-punch sensation we’ve coined “impostor syndrome.”

The other quarter describes the identical list using completely different words. Energized. Opportunistic. Ready.

Same racing heart. Same cold hands. Two different names for it.

Which tells you what the sensation is worth as evidence about your ability. Nothing. The people calling it fuel are feeling what the people calling it terror are feeling. The anxiety was never the variable.

The Advice Fails and You Take the Blame

So we tell each other to calm down. Breathe deeper. Stand like a superhero. Picture them in their underwear. Just be confident. Fake it till you make it.

All of that, while sometimes effectively neutralizing the symptom, is addressed to a root that takes no instructions from language.

I want to be fair to that advice, because it isn’t malicious and it isn’t stupid. It’s the sensible conclusion if you believe the shaking is about you. The problem with the advice? It’s useless in the moment.

The wasted minutes right before you present is the smallest part of what it costs. The real damage is what it teaches people to conclude when it doesn’t work: that everybody else has this handled and they don’t.

The advice fails, and the presenter takes the blame.

You’ve Been Practicing Recognition

A gymnast spends an overwhelming majority of her hours in the gym and a tiny fraction of them competing. Nobody calls that excessive. We call it the sport.

Then there’s the leader walking into a funding decision having rehearsed the length of an Uber ride.

Same stakes. Opposite preparation.

Most of what corporate culture calls rehearsal is actually just reading the deck through the night before. You walk in prepared to recognize the material. Recognition does nothing for your ability to produce it when your palms are sweaty.

Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke ran that comparison as an experiment. Five minutes after studying, the students who reread the material beat the students who practiced recalling it, 81 percent to 75. A week later the order reversed: 56 percent for the ones who practiced retrieving it, 42 for the ones who reread.

Rereading wins the night before. But it loses when it matters.

Silent review builds familiarity. Speaking it builds retrieval, and retrieval is what the adrenaline comes for.

So here’s the ratio I recommend for presenters: One hour of rehearsal for every five minutes of content. A thirty-minute presentation earns six hours of practice.

One rep means one full pass, out loud, standing, start to finish, without notes. There’s a whole process for this, and it’s yours to put to work.

None of it removes the adrenaline. It reduces what the adrenaline has to compete with.

When the material stops taking all of your attention, you have some left over for the people in front of you. Remember, you can present to people, or you can be present with them. When the stakes are high, what will you choose?

What Would You Have to Stop Thinking About?

Adrenaline may claim those last five minutes before showtime, but you get a vote on everything that happens before them.

What shortcuts are you taking in your rehearsal process (if you have one)?

What are you still going to be thinking about while you’re saying your first sentence out loud?

And if you’d call the feeling energizing instead of terrifying, what’s your secret?

It Can Be Simpler. It Will Never Be Easy.

That’s the promise I made with Mary Baird on The Simplifiers this week.

Her whole show is about simplifying, so we went at the clearest way to remove complexity from a presentation: Don’t assume you’re starting with slides. Take the deck out and what’s left is you, the idea, and the audience. Nothing left to hide behind. Much simpler to follow.

Nothing about a high-stakes presentation is easy. It never will be. But we’ve made it far more complicated than it should be.

“But I’ve Been Doing This for Twenty Years.”

You have. And you’ll still feel the five minutes. That part doesn’t retire.

Everything above is about what happens while you’re alone with the material. The piece I can’t hand you in an email is the exercise you have to conduct yourself. You have to get reps.

So tell me something. How many hours did your last high-stakes presentation actually get, measured against the minutes it ran? Hit reply and give me the number. I read every one of these myself.

🔥 Hi, I’m Eric, and every week, I share insights, observations and tools so you can ditch decks and light a fire in your high-stakes presentations. If you like what you see here, follow me on LinkedIn.