Practice leads to confidence.
You’ve worked hard, and feel ready. You’ve spent hours studying the vocabulary, read the textbook, and answered all of the questions in the book. You have confidence.
You have honed our presentation, know your speech, and practiced your posture and gestures. You have confidence.
Why, in both of these examples, do people then fail? Why do they bomb the test or screw up their keynote address?
It turns out that confidence isn’t enough. We stop too soon. We tend to stop when our internal meters indicate that our confidence level is high. We need to push on.
The technical term is overlearning. The concept, introduced by Ebbinghaus in the 1800s, is that we need to go beyond confidence. We need to go to competence.
WiseGeek used the analogy of a musician:
A violinist doesn’t stop learning a piece he or she will perform once it’s initially mastered. The violinist instead keeps practicing that piece so that it is automatic and there is little possibility of forgetting it when performing in front of a large crowd.
Overlearning is common practice among actors, dancers, politicians, sellers and preachers. Evangelist Billy Graham used to preach to tree stumps before he became famous. Practice until you can do it automatically.
You want to be so practiced that it feels natural.
How do you know if you’re competent? Try it out. Do dress rehearsals. Teach a friend. Make up little tests. Prove you can do it.