The most common question I receive when helping anyone with improving their presentation skills is:

“How should I practice for my next talk?”

Or, I get the cousin of this question:

“How many times should I practice my presentation?”

I’m going to address both of these items in this post by starting with the latter as the framework for how you should do it.

On that note, you should practice using what I like to call the Plus 10 Rule. I’ve explained this in earlier posts but I’ll highlight it here again. The Plus 10 Rule implies that you should practice a presentation the number of minutes of your talk plus ten. For instance, if you are going to give a 20 minute talk on a subject you would take 20 and add 10. Therefore, you should practice that presentation 30 times.

Please keep in mind that this recommendation is assuming you are building something from scratch. I’m not an expert on giraffes but if I was asked to give an informative...