You will improve your delivery through a recorded practice and review loop.
Most people hate watching themselves on video. The voice sounds wrong, the face looks odd, and every small habit seems enormous. That discomfort is why so few speakers record their rehearsals, and why the ones who do tend to improve faster than the ones who do not. A recording shows you what the audience sees, which is the one view you never get while speaking.
This exercise turns that discomfort into a routine: record five minutes of your talk, review it three ways, choose two changes and record again, all in about thirty minutes. You need your phone, something to prop it on, and the outline and slides you built in modules 2 and 4.
Choose a five-minute section of your talk that includes your opening or your most important point. Set up your phone a few metres away, at roughly the height of a seated audience, so it captures you from head to knees. If you can, use a meeting room or a space similar to where you will present.
Stand as you will on the day. If you will use slides, have them on a laptop or screen beside you, and click through them as you speak. Do not sit, do not read from notes held close to your face, and do not stop to restart if you stumble. Just keep going, as you would in front of real people.
Arjun recorded the opening five minutes of his clinic managers' talk in an empty meeting room after work, with his phone on a chair stacked on a box.
Watch the recording three separate times, each with a different focus, and keep a page with three columns headed voice, body and audience for your notes.
First pass: listen for voice. You can look away from the screen, or just listen. Note your pace, whether you paused around key points, how your volume held up, whether statements ended down or up, and roughly how many filler words you used. Lesson 5.1, Pace, pauses and volume, and lesson 5.2, Fewer ums without sounding scripted, are the checklists here.
Second pass: sound off, watch the body. Note where you looked, how you stood, what your hands did and whether you paced or fidgeted. Lesson 5.3, Eye contact, stance and gestures, covers what to look for.
Third pass: watch as an audience member. Sound on, full attention, as if you were a manager seeing this talk for the first time. Do not analyse. Just notice whether you followed the point, whether your attention drifted, and where. Note the moments where you would have glanced at your phone.
Arjun's notes. Voice: rushed the first minute, no pause before the Monday sentence, eleven fillers, mostly "so" and "um" at slide changes. Body: looked at the laptop screen for most of the first two minutes, swayed side to side, hands clasped. Audience: the point was clear, but he lost interest during the second minute, which was a long description of how reminders are sent today.
You will probably find more than two things to fix. Resist the urge to fix them all. Trying to change six habits at once usually means none of them changes, and your delivery gets stiffer as you monitor everything.
Look across your three columns and pick the two changes that would make the biggest difference to the audience. Usually one is about voice and one about body, but not always. The audience column is a good guide: whatever made your own attention drift is probably the most important fix.
Arjun picked two. First, slow the opening and pause before and after the Monday sentence. Second, look at the room instead of the laptop, one person per sentence. The swaying and the fillers could wait. He also noted that the long description of current reminders needed cutting, but that was a content change, so he made it in his outline and left it out of this exercise.
Record the same five minutes again in the same setup, with your attention on the two changes and nothing else. Then put the two recordings side by side and compare the first minute of each, followed by the moment where your most important point lands.
Note how each change looked the second time. Did it work? Did it feel strange from the inside but look normal from the outside? Did it cause any new problem? Many people find that a change which felt exaggerated while speaking looks perfectly natural on the recording.
Arjun's second recording took about twenty seconds longer, because of the slower opening and the pauses. His eye contact was better but still drifted to the laptop at each slide change, so he decided to move the laptop to one side for the real talk.
You are finished when you have two recordings of the same five minutes, your three-column review notes from the first, and a short written note on the two changes you made and how each looked the second time. Hold on to both recordings, because comparing them with a later rehearsal, a few weeks on, is one of the clearest ways to see your own progress.
Set up your phone in the room you have, pick your five minutes, and press record before you can talk yourself out of it.
Record, review and re-record five minutes of your talk, and write down the two changes you made and how they looked the second time.
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