Rehearsals have a habit of turning into editing sessions. The speaker reaches a slide, stops and says, “I don’t like the way we’re saying that. Can we look at it?” Twenty minutes later everyone is rewriting one sentence, and nobody has seen the talk from start to finish.

So when I rehearse with a speaker, we use the leg tap. If something doesn’t feel right while they are speaking, they tap their leg and keep going. Someone notes the slide number. At the end, we go back to every slide that got a tap, and they tell us what they did and didn’t like.

It means you get a genuine end-to-end run. You find out how long the talk really takes, and you feel the flow the audience will feel. The changes still get made. They just wait until the end.

If you are rehearsing on your own, record yourself. Knowing the camera is running stops you pausing to tinker, for exactly the same reason.