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For many years, students would often place audio recording devices near the podium so they could record and review my lectures. Since there were often dozens of these devices all recording the same thing, I started offering to record myself and then post the recording so that all students could benefit. I still do this to this day using the Voice Memo app on my phone.

In previous posts, I have written about the importance of practice in mastering public speaking and how external feedback from trusted colleagues or coaches can be invaluable in refining your presentations. But engaging in self-feedback by listening to audio recordings such as I routinely capture, can also be an effective method for improving your presentation skills.

When you deliver a presentation, your attention is divided among many competing demands. You are focused on recalling your content, monitoring the audience’s reactions, managing your anxiety and trying to maintain your pacing. With so much happening simultaneously, it becomes virtually impossible to objectively assess your own performance in real time. You might have a general sense that things went well or poorly, but the details remain fuzzy.

A recording helps you do this. It allows you to step outside yourself and absorb your presentation from the audience’s perspective. You can now hear what they heard. Did you speak clearly or did you mumble certain technical terms? Were your transitions between topics smooth or jarring? Did your energy carry through, or did it fade at critical moments? These questions become answerable when you have the ability to review your performance with the critical distance that only a recording provides.

Moreover, recordings don’t lie. While colleagues providing feedback may soften their criticisms to spare your feelings or may miss certain details because they were focused on your content, a recording captures everything exactly as it happened. This unfiltered view, while sometimes uncomfortable, gives you the raw material you need for genuine improvement.

Overcoming the Discomfort

The elephant in the room is that most people hate listening to themselves. You may cringe at the sound of your own voice or feel embarrassed by mistakes you made. This discomfort is completely normal. The version of your voice that you hear when you speak is different from what others hear because of bone conduction – the way sound travels through the bones of your skull as you talk. When you hear your voice on a recording, you are finally hearing what your audience hears. That can feel startling at first.

But here’s the reality. What feels strange to you is perfectly normal to your audience. They don’t know what your ‘internal’ voice sounds like. They only know the voice they hear. The key is to push through the initial discomfort and adopt a mindset of curiosity rather than judgment.

The Strategic Approach to Self-Review

Simply pressing play and listening to yourself present is unlikely to yield meaningful insights. You need a systematic approach. Here are some suggestions on how to make the process productive.

Global Assessment

On your first pass through the recording, listen to it all the way through without stopping. Resist the urge to critique every detail. Instead, focus on the big picture. How does the presentation flow overall? Does the narrative arc make sense? Are there moments where the presentation drags or where you lost momentum? Make brief notes about overall impressions but don’t get bogged down in specifics yet.

This global view helps you understand the audience’s experience of your talk as a complete entity rather than a collection of discrete moments. You might discover that sections you thought were problematic actually worked well in context, or conversely, that smooth individual segments created confusion when placed in sequence.

Content and Structure

Now listen to the recording again, this time focusing specifically on content and organization. Are you telling a coherent story? Is your opening effective at hooking the audience and establishing why they should care about your topic? Does each section build logically on the previous one? Are your transitions clear?

Pay attention to how you explain complex concepts. Do you provide adequate context before diving into technical details? Are you defining specialized terms or assuming too much prior knowledge? Conversely, are you over-explaining things that your audience likely already understands?

Also note your pacing of information delivery. Are you cramming too much into certain sections, forcing the audience to work too hard to keep up? Are there opportunities to add strategic pauses that would allow key points to land?

Verbal Clarity and Explanation

On this pass, focus specifically on how clearly you are communicating your ideas through language alone. Talks should always be primarily about what you say. With audio recording, you are listening to exactly what your audience hears without the benefit of your slides, gestures or visual cues to fill in the gaps. This can be remarkably revealing. Passages that seemed clear during preparation may turn out to rely heavily on what the audience can see rather than what they can hear.

Ask yourself whether your verbal explanations are self-sufficient. When you reference a figure or a data set, do you describe it thoroughly enough for someone to understand it without seeing it? When you refer to ‘this result’ or ‘as shown here’, do you also articulate what the result actually is? These kinds of verbal shortcuts are easy to miss in the moment but become immediately apparent when you can only listen.

Also pay attention to the precision of your language. Are you using the right words for what you mean, or are you hedging excessively or using vague terms? Clarity of thought and clarity of language are closely linked, and the audio recording will expose any gap between the two.

Vocal Delivery

This time, you might even close your eyes and just listen. How does your voice sound? Are you speaking clearly and at a volume that is easy to hear? Is your pace appropriate – not so fast that information blurs together but not so slow that attention wanders?

Listen for vocal variety. Does your tone and energy level change to match the content, rising with excitement when discussing surprising findings and becoming more measured during complex explanations? Or does your voice remain in one monotonous register throughout?

Pay attention to filler words and verbal tics. We all have them. ‘Umms’, ‘ahhs’, ‘you knows’, ‘likes’ and ‘basicallys’ that creep into speech. Identifying your particular patterns is the first step toward reducing them.

Don’t forget to assess your strategic use of silence. Pauses are powerful tools for emphasis and for giving the audience time to absorb information. Verbal tics often reflect too fast a pace or not enough pauses to breathe.

Making the Feedback Actionable

Listening to yourself present and noting areas for improvement is valuable. But the real benefit comes from turning observations into action. After reviewing your recording, create a specific plan for improvement.

Start by categorizing your observations. Which issues are most critical to address? A confusing narrative structure or unclear explanation of core concepts should take priority over minor verbal tics. Focus on the changes that will have the greatest impact on how effectively you communicate your message.

For each issue, identify a concrete strategy for improvement. If you discovered that your transitions between sections were unclear, you might draft explicit transition statements and practice them. If your verbal explanations of data were too vague, you might script out how you will describe each key result in words, without relying on what the audience can see. If your pacing was too fast, you might mark spots in your notes to deliberately pause.

Be realistic about how many things you can work on simultaneously. Trying to fix everything at once typically leads to fixing nothing. Choose two or three priorities for your next presentation. As those improve and become more automatic, you can shift attention to other areas.

Beyond Solo Review

While self-review of recordings is powerful, it becomes even more valuable when combined with external feedback. Listen to the recording with a trusted colleague, mentor or coach. They may notice things you miss or interpret elements differently. Having a structured conversation about what you both hear can yield insights that neither of you would reach alone.

You might also consider sharing your recording with the colleague in advance and asking them to listen to it independently before discussing it together. This approach ensures that their feedback isn’t colored by your own self-critique and that you get their authentic first impressions.

The Bigger Picture

Learning to productively review recordings of your presentations does more than improve individual talks. It develops your metacognitive skills – your ability to step back and assess your own performance critically. This capacity for self-reflection and self-correction is invaluable not just for presentations but for professional development generally.

Regularly reviewing your presentations can also help to desensitize you to the discomfort of public speaking. When you can listen to yourself present without excessive cringing, when you can identify areas for improvement without spiraling into self-criticism, this form of self-evaluation will serve you well throughout your career.

Have you ever recorded one of your talks? What insights have you gained? What challenges have you faced? Please share your thoughts in the comments, like or repost. And if you think I can help you develop your presentation skills through coaching, please reach out here or at my LinkedIn site.