How to Handle Mistakes
I blew it. It was the worst performance in recent memory. I’d like a do-over.
Have you ever said these words or anything similar, about one of your performances? In my case it was a business presentation. Perhaps it was an internal presentation before your boss and peers. Maybe a critical sales presentation before a prospective customer or existing client. What do you do when you know you blew it? Do you beat yourself up constantly? As if this would help.
Recently, I blew it. I failed to give my best presentation. From my standpoint it was awful. From the audience’s point of view, it was good. You see, I possess enough professional skills that even my worst is better than most. A good friend of mine, Lisa Jo Landsberg said, “Your 50% is better than everyone else’s 200%. You’ve got a lot of junk in your trunk.” (How many of you know that real life is better than fiction. And you can’t make up what some people say?) Now for those of you who are not familiar with this colloquialism or catch phrase, a lot of ‘junk in my trunk’ is a good thing. What she meant was I have a lot of talent. My ‘off’ day is better than most people’s ‘on’ day in front of an audience.
“People do not learn from experience. They learn from reflecting on their experience. The failure to debrief is the main reason why people fail to reach their full potential in performance.” – Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan
Step 1: Debrief your performance.
Let’s debrief the situation. The first debriefing framework comes from Blaire Singer – Author of Sales Dogs. This is step one, when you blow it on the stage (or any other life experience.)
1) What happened (Facts only, no opinions)? I gave a lousy performance on stage.
2) Why? There were these mitigating factors:
- I was tired. I was traveling internationally. I was suffering from jet lag and had very little sleep. By the time I got on stage, it was 2:00 am according to my body clock.
- The audience was tired. Again, by the time I got on stage, the audience had been at the venue for almost an entire day, with very few breaks.
- I was speaking to another culture – Non-North American. The audience did not relate to some of the idioms and humor.
- I was over confident. The day before in Montreal, I got a standing ovation. I assumed that this standing ovation would follow me on the airplane.
- I did not rehearse and practice as much as I normally do. I have given this presentation over 100 times before.
- It was a free speech. My preparation showed that I thought it was a free speech. I am the world champion of public speaking. Many people are seeing me for the first time. I don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.
3) What worked?
- Analyzing my speech on stage.
- I did get a do-over. I made two additional presentations to the same crowd that were superior.
4) What did not work? Being on automatic pilot mode. My speech was more of a performance than a conversation. It was not genuine.
5) What did you learn? Not to taking any audience for granted. Prepare for every presentation as if I were being paid a million dollars because poor performances are worthless.
6) What can you do to correct or improve?
- Prepare!
- Provide original content.
- Practice and rehearse as if it were the world championship of public speaking.
- Stop beating yourself up.
“If you are not failing you are not trying.” – Alan Weiss, PhD.
Step 2: How to handle your mistakes in the future.
So how do you handle mistakes? Authors Matthew McKay, Ph. D. and Patrick Fanning, in their best-selling book Self-Esteem (third edition) make the following suggestions:
1) Realize that everyone makes mistakes. Mistakes are the inescapable by-product of learning or trying anything new.
2) Realize that even you make mistakes.
- Make a list of your 10 biggest mistakes.
- For each mistake, before you acted, ask, “What were you thinking?” Were you hoping for happier consequences? Did you have any idea that this would turn out painful? What were your needs that pushed you into this decision?
- Knowing what you know now and given the same thought process and needs, would you act differently?
3) Forgive yourself. You need to forgive yourself for three reasons.
- You did the best you could at that time.
- You’ve already paid for your mistake. You’ve endured the consequences and felt the pain. There is no need to pay this price over again. Pay for your mistakes only once. I’m going to repeat this again. Pay for your mistakes only once. Guilt is paying for your mistakes more than once.
- Mistakes are unavoidable. They are part of the learning process, in fact, everything you have learned in your life was the result of countless mistakes. How many falls did it take you to learn how to walk? Did you give up? Get the point?
- Bonus Reason: Associate mistakes with learning. Make mistakes faster so you learn quicker.
“Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin in…serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered [cluttered] with your old nonsense.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Have You Seen My New Book?
Posted by etate in Energize, Educate, Entertain on August 27th, 2009
It’s official! Our brand-new book has been published… and I’m so excited to tell you about it!
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The Speaker’s EDGE: Secrets and Strategies
for Connecting with Any Audience
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This was a collaborative project by World Champions Darren LaCroix, Mark Brown, Craig Valentine, and myself, along with Hall of Fame Speaker Patricia Fripp… and it contains more than 73 years of on-stage experience! That’s HUGE! http://www.edtate.com/speakers-edge-book.html
I think you’ll get some great ideas & techniques when you read the Speaker’s EDGE book. Here’s a VERY short list of topics:
7.5 Suggestions for Getting Out of Your Head- Six Keys to Connecting Your Keynote to Your Audience
- Unveiling the Magic for Being a More Effective Speaker
- How Our Audience Members Learn
- Engage Your Audience
- Don’t Speak Too Quickly in Front of Your Audience
- Build Emotional Connection through Eye Contact
- Getting Over the Jitters Before You Speak
- Seven Timely Tips for Pre-Presentation Preparation
- How to Lose an Audience in Ten Ways
- Speak into the Listening That People Are Hearing
- Appreciative Listener 40 Empathic Listener
- Comprehensive Listener 41 Discerning Listener
- Evaluative Listener
- Eight Keys to an Effective Q & A Session
- Set Expectations
- Choose the Best Punch Word
- Perfect Your Pause
…and MUCH more!
Click on this link to get all the details… http://www.edtate.com/speakers-edge-book.html
We really worked hard to create this quality public speaking resource for you. Check it out — you’ll love it!
Have a great day!
Ed Tate, CSP
Certified Speaking Professional
World Champion of Public Speaking
Guerrilla Marketing Certified Coach
P.S. Forgot to tell you! If you order Speaker’s EDGE today, you’ll get the e-book as a bonus! Complimentary… no charge… zero… zip… zilch… nada… http://www.edtate.com/speakers-edge-book.html
Toastmasters 2009 International Convention
I’ve just returned back to the office after an eventful week at the Toastmasters 2009 International Convention. Like so many others at the convention, I had the opportunity to meet up with old friends and to make many new ones. Darren LaCroix, Craig Valentine, and myself arrived a few days early to host “Get Paid to Speak” Champ Camps and The World Champions’ EDGE Summit. It was a blast!
Darren LaCroix and I put together a few video journals of our trip and I am excited to share them with you.
Video Journal – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKlBta0v7PA
Contestant Advice – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52yqGsRWO2A
Pre-conference Activities – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BcE1yYEPsk
The convention peaked on Saturday morning with the World Championship of Public Speaking Competition. Ten contestants came together after months, even years, of preparation to compete for the title of 2009 World Champion of Public Speaking. Congratulations to Mark Hunter of Australia for taking the title this year. Great job to all who competed!
I would love to hear if you attended the convention and what you thought of it. What was the highlight for you? What did you take away from the experience? If you didn’t attend, start planning now for 2010, I’d love to see you there!
Presentation Skills
Posted by etate in Energize, Educate, Entertain on August 11th, 2009
What an honor! I was recently featured in an article on RoundTheTable.org, the official publication of the Million Dollar Round Table…
PRESENTATION SKILLS ~
Ed Tate, a trainer specializing in professional development, shared his strategies for making business presentations memorable.
1. Stories are sticky
“What we remember most are the stories we hear,” he said. Tate encouraged attendees to use stories about their services helping people — as opposed to statistics — whenever possible in their presentations. Stories are relatable and memorable — they “stick” with you.
2. Open your presentations creatively
“In my opinion,” Tate said, “there is nothing worse than opening with ‘Hi, my name is Ed Tate, and I’d like to tell you five strategies to make your presentations memorable.’ That’s a boring opening.”
Instead, Tate recommended opening up with a story to be more creative and more interesting. After the story, he said, frame the message by explaining what you will talk about in one sentence or less. Then, Tate said, it’s time to jump into the content.
3. Four secrets of storytelling
Tate took attendees through an exercise to explain that any story has to have four parts:
1. The head — it makes you think.
2. The heart — it makes you connect.
3. The stomach — humor causes a belly laugh.
4. Heavy hitting — the message of the story.
He conceded that humor is optional. “Sometimes presentations lend themselves to humor,” he said.
Tate emphasized the importance of the heart — the connection. “The heart (or connection) is just as important as content,” he said. “Here is what most people do: They run to their computers, they create their content and spend very little time figuring out how their content is going to relate to their audience.”
4. Focus on your outcome
He advised having a call to action in every presentation. “Before you even go into a presentation,” Tate said, “focus on your KFD first.”
K — What do you want people to know?
F — What do you want people to feel?
D — What do you want people to do?
Tate recommended practicing your presentation in front of others, and named Toastmasters as a good organization to join to improve your confidence and presentation skills. “Speaking is an active skill,” he said.
How Public Speaking Can Help You Dramatically Increase Your Business
Posted by etate in Energize, Educate, Entertain, Success on June 24th, 2009
I have been on the road for 8 weeks straight and I have been a bad blogger, aka, no new posts. Here is an article from guest blogger Donna Gutner. Enjoy.
-Ed Tate
There’s an often-quoted statistic that the fear of public speaking is right up there with the fear of death as the two events people most fear in their lives. However, as a business owner, I can guarantee you that public speaking is a phenomenal way to grow your business, so if it’s an activity that scares you, you need to take the bull by the horns and start working past that fear. As an introvert, public speaking isn’t something that comes naturally to me, although, I’m told I’m good at it. It’s been quite a learning process, and I’ve had as many failures as successes. My best learning experiences have come through the process of finding the courage to just do it and learn along the way.
If you’re a self-employed service professional, you work in a time-based economy. You have only so many hours in the day to work directly with your clients. Speaking to groups gives you the opportunity to reach out and touch, and impact, others who might otherwise never cross your path and for you to get them into your marketing funnel so that they can begin to get to know, like and respect you. Once they’re in your marketing funnel, if you provide a solution that solves a problem that they have, they’ll ultimately hire you.
Here are ten steps I recommend to get you into action to use public speaking to fill your professional practice:
1. Pick 3 topics on which you can present a 20 minute – 60 minute speech. These should be topics on which you love to speak and will readily showcase your expertise to your audience. The topics also need to be ones that speak to your target market’s pain and provides a solution for a problem that they’re having.
2. For each presentation, write a 2 – 3 sentence description of that provides a brief overview of your content. To add some meat to the description, create a benefits statement for each presentation and what they’ll learn or get out of your talk. Remember, your audience will always be asking the same question, “WIIFM”, or “What’s In It For Me?”, so make your description so compelling that they think, “Hey, I’ve got to hear that!”
3. Have a professional photo made, and create a 3-6 sentence introductory bio of yourself. Many bios sound the same and are pretty boring so, on my website, I decided to tell something of a story about myself to make my bio a bit different, http://www.onlinebizcoachingcompany.com/aboutdonna.htm. Let your personality shine in your bio.
4. With your topics, bio, and photo in hand, you can now put together in MS Word a simple speaker one-sheet that tells a prospective association program chair everything s/he would need to know about you. If you have a list of audiences to whom you’ve spoken previously, you will want to list some of those under the heading “Satisfied Clients”, and spread 2 – 3 testimonials from other speaking gigs throughout the sheet. In order to get ideas for layouts of the one sheet, visit the National Speakers Association, http://www.nsaspeaker.org, and view the speaker one sheets of other speakers to jumpstart your creativity.
5. Create a speaking link on your website and have the presentations you’ve outlined available on your site, as well as your speaker one sheet, and a separate link with your photo and bio. Many association program chairs will want to “check you out” online, even though you’re offering to speak to them free of charge, so give them the opportunity to read all about your speaking topics on your website.
6. Now you need to find audiences filled with your target market. To start locally, approach the program chairs of professional associations to which you already belong and see if you can get on their speaking schedule. Your local library or Chamber of Commerce may have a current list of professional associations in your area which you can also approach. Other sources for finding speaking gigs include the American Society of Association Executives, http://www.asaenet.org. On the website, click Directories on the left hand links column, and then Associations, and then select Gateway to Associations. Once you’re in the Gateway, you can look up associations by keyword or by location. A second place to locate associations is Gale’s Encyclopedia of Associations. This multi-volume encyclopedia is present in the reference section of all major libraries.
7. You (or your Virtual Assistant) will then need to call these associations and get the name and contact info of the program chair. Some program chairs will want to talk to you right away regarding your speaking topics, so be prepared to have that conversation on the fly. Being able to send them to your website to read more about the topics is also helpful. Others will want you to send information, so you’ll need to draft an introductory letter that you can snail mail or email along with your speaker one-sheet.
8. Once you’ve got a speaking engagement, ask the program chair some questions about the audience so that you can better tailor the speech to fit their needs. I learn best through hearing stories, so as I’m asking questions about the audience, I’m going through my own list of illustrative stories I’ve told to see which ones might best match my audience’s needs. Remember that your audience wants a full experience of you as well as the information that you’re providing, so be sure and inject a lot of your personality and wit and humor into your speech.
9. Before your speech, determine how you want to get audience members into your marketing funnel. Do you want them to sign up for a complimentary consultation on the spot? If so, bring your calendar or a sign-up sheet. Do you want to get them on your mailing list? Give away something at the end of your presentation that is compelling enough for them to part with a business card or to write down their contact info to enter the drawing. If your goal is to get them on your email newsletter list, be sure and get their email address. If you use direct mail, you’ll want to get their physical mailing address.
10. The day of your presentation, just relax and have fun! This may be the hardest of any of the steps outlined here, but being authentic and being yourself will get you in the good graces of most of your audience, despite what you might say (or forget to say!). Think of your presentation as the beginning of a great relationship that you’re establishing, and leave your audience feeling good about themselves and about you.
Try and book 2-3 speaking engagements per month, and soon you’ll become the “go-to” expert in your industry!
Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps baby boomers create profitable online retirement businesses by demystifying the steps needed to successfully market a baby boomer business online. Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get results? Discover how to increase your visibility and get found online by claiming your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, at ==> http://www.OnlineBizU.com
The Common Denominator of Success
Posted by etate in Leadership, Success on May 29th, 2009
I read a lot. As a Keynote Speaker and a Key Note Taker, I have to. It’s my job and my passion. My new favorite book is Albert E. N. Gray’s The New Common Denominator of Success. Here are my Key Notes:
- The common denominator of success – the secret of successful people – he or she has formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do.
- Successful people don’t like doing these activities any more than unsuccessful people. They just do it.
- Success is achieved by the minority and, therefore, unnatural and not to be achieved by following our natural likes and dislikes, nor guided by our natural preferences and prejudices. Your natural likes and dislikes got you where you are today.
- Successful people have a purpose strong enough to form the habit of doing the things they don’t like to do in order to accomplish the purpose they want to accomplish.
- Habits form futures. If we don’t deliberately form success habits then, unconsciously, you will form non-success habits.
Mindset Shift™ 2
I would like to thank everyone who posted a comment to my first blog. I’ve received many phone calls and emails in the past few days, as well. This experience is definitely emotionally uplifting and mentally liberating due to your support. I am amazed at how many people have had a similar “bad teacher” experience and have worked or are working to overcome it. As a result of my Mindset Shift™ I have discovered that if you unblock one area of your life, it frees up other areas. What’s your experience with this? Have you found it to be true as well?
Keep those Mindset Shift™ stories coming! A client of mine shared this one with me recently.
His teenage daughter worked at a cookie store at the mall. While her co-worker was on a break,
a senior citizen had come into the shop. This woman was taking her time making her selection and as a result a long line stated to form.
The young sales lady as well as the other customers were becoming frustrated and impatient with the delay and some of the customers walked off in a huff. Finally the elderly woman completed her order. She said, “I want to thank you for your patience. I wanted to be sure that I picked my son’s favorite cookies. He leaves tomorrow for Iraq.”
What was the mindset of the teenager and the other customers now? Embarrassment? Shame? Compassion? Empathy? How long did it take to make a Mindset Shift™ from frustration and impatience to shame and compassion? Seconds!
Keep your Mindset Shift™ stories coming and thank you for your support.
Mindset Shift™
Posted by etate in Energize, Educate, Entertain, Leadership, Success on April 30th, 2009
Today, I finally did it. I caved in to the pressure. I became a blogger. You have to understand one thing about me. I don’t like to write. I’m not into anything that feels labor-intensive. But the real reason I don’t like to write is a deep-seated fear about my writing ability. My third grade teacher, in front of the entire class, told me that I was a lousy writer. Every kid in the school knew about my writing inability by recess. Isn’t it amazing what sticks to us, depending upon the source of the criticism? Thank goodness for friends. Two friends helped me with a Mindset Shift™. That is, they shifted my thinking from immobilized to empowerment.
The first friend, Carrie Perrien Smith (http://www.soarhigher.com), told me to separate my ideas/content from my grammar. This was an eureka moment for me.
“You can hire an editor to correct your grammar. But only you can come up with your content.”
“It just haunts me that you don’t have more in print because of something a teacher told you years ago. You are way smarter than that teacher will ever be and doing really important things. I don’t think teachers really have any idea that things they say innocently or by accident can shape a person’s personal truth. Even if you were a crummy writer (which I know you aren’t), editors make their money turning great content (which you have in your head) into digestible books for your target audience. Your time is now!”
Thank goodness for friends.
My other good friend, Darren LaCroix (http://www.humor411.com), convinced me in two sentences and a question.
“A blog is nothing more than an email sharing what you’ve learned. You do this for a living. Can you write a two paragraph email about what you’ve learned?”
Darren pointed out that I’m a copious note taker. It’s true. Whatever meeting I attend, I take lots of notes. I want to make sure that I get the key ideas… the Key Notes. I’m also a keynote speaker. So the name of my blog is “Key Notes.” Yes, it is a double entendre.
Thank goodness for friends.
Presto! There it was a Mindset Shift™. It took years to develop this phobia about writing and I’ve created an amazing story about how I do not like to write. But my friends dissolved that excuse in seconds — like Alka-Seltzer in water.
Have you ever experienced a Mindset Shift™ in a matter of seconds? That is, you felt one way and in a matter of minutes or seconds, your mindset shifted? So what’s your story? What cherished beliefs (excuses) are you holding on to that’s keeping you from growing? What area(s) of your life needs a Mindset Shift™? Maybe you need a people-shift. Write me your two paragraphs (or less).
P.S. I welcome your comments if you catch any grammatical errors. But you must give your Mindset Shift™ ideas first and the corrections second. It’s my blog. My rules.
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