How many times should you practise your presentation when the stakes are high?

Everyone knows you should practise before you present. But when the stakes are high — when your job, your firm’s future, or a major contract is on the line — how many times is actually enough?

Let me tell you about thirty-five.

The Pitch That Changed My Thinking

I was engaged by a large law firm invited to pitch for a major banking contract. The kind of work that, if won, would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to the firm. The managing partner brought me in to coach the team — not just on presentation technique, but on a fundamental mindset shift: from thinking like lawyers to thinking like communicators.

Lawyers are trained to be precise and thorough. That serves them brilliantly in their work. But in a pitch environment, it can work against them. Precision becomes excessive detail. Thoroughness becomes length. The instinct to cover every angle produces presentations that overwhelm rather than persuade.

What the bank needed to see wasn’t just competence — they could read that in the firm’s credentials. They needed to see a team they could trust, a group they’d want to work with, people who understood what the client actually cared about.

The Number That Surprised Them

When I told the team they should aim for thirty-five full run-throughs before the pitch, the room went quiet. A few expressions suggested they thought I’d lost the plot.

But here’s the logic. The first five to ten rehearsals are about getting the content out of your head and into the room. You’re still remembering what comes next, checking your structure, filling gaps. You’re not really presenting yet — you’re recalling.

The next ten to fifteen are where you start to find the real shape of the material. The words become more natural. The transitions smooth out. You discover which parts land and which parts drag.

It’s the final ten to fifteen where something shifts. You stop thinking about the content and start connecting with the audience. You can read the room, adjust your pace, respond to questions without losing your thread. You’re no longer reciting — you’re communicating.

Thirty-five sounds extreme. But for a presentation of this magnitude, it’s what genuine preparation looks like.

What Rehearsal Is Actually Doing

There’s a useful distinction between practising a presentation and rehearsing it. Practice is running through the material to get it right. Rehearsal is running through it enough times that you can’t get it wrong — and then using that security to be genuinely present with your audience.

The goal of rehearsal isn’t to become robotic. It’s the opposite. It’s to reach a level of familiarity with the content that you don’t need to consciously manage it anymore. That frees up enormous mental bandwidth to do the things that actually win rooms: read the energy, connect with individuals, respond to what’s happening in front of you rather than what’s happening in your script.

The Law Firm’s Result

The team rehearsed. Not thirty-five times, as it turned out — but significantly more than they’d ever done before. They won the contract.

Afterwards, several members of the team told me it was the most prepared they’d ever felt walking into a pitch. And interestingly, it was also the most natural they’d ever felt in the room.

That’s the paradox of rehearsal. The more thoroughly prepared you are, the less prepared you look — because you stop managing your material and start talking to people.

Your Magic Number

The right number of rehearsals depends on the stakes, the length of the presentation, and how far outside your comfort zone the material sits. For a routine internal update, five solid run-throughs might be plenty. For a career-defining pitch, the law firm’s experience suggests you should aim higher than you think necessary.

Here’s the test: if you can deliver the full presentation without notes, handle an interruption gracefully, and still know exactly where you are when you return — you’re ready. If you can’t do all three of those things yet, you haven’t rehearsed enough.

The time you invest in preparation is the time you take back in confidence when it matters most.