Presentations in Action - Jerry Weissman [44]
When Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.F58.4
Three weeks of public furor later, Senator Lott resigned his majority post.
Clearly, the World War II slogan “Loose lips sink ships” also applies to politics and business. Politicians lose elections, and businesspeople lose jobs and sink deals as a result of verbal gaffes.
Jeffrey Zaslow wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal called “Keeping Your Foot Away from Your Mouth,” in which he looked at some famous gaffes by famous people and analyzed the reasons such slips happen:
There are gaffes that result from clueless thinking or unfortunate phrasing, and then there are gaffes—such as those with racial or sexual overtones—that can be rooted in our personal belief systems.
His article went on to note that that the viral influence of the Internet and YouTube have worsened the negative impact of gaffes. “Even if we don’t mean it, it can be hard to recover. We’ve become a culture that is unforgiving when it comes to poor word choice.”F58.5
Granted, but we can look at verbal errors another way. In business, the high stakes involved in presentations and the resultant pressure are universal givens. Therefore, whenever a presenter makes a mistake, every person in every audience has been there, done that, and so they respond empathically instead of critically. Audiences are forgiving of imperfections that fall into the “clueless thinking or unfortunate phrasing” category—but not for “racial or sexual overtones.”
This is not to say that you should intentionally make mistakes to create empathy (although some presenters do this to manipulate their audiences’ emotions), but that you should be forgiving of yourself. Many presenters, in striving for unattainable perfection, memorize their presentations. However, memorization (unless you are performing William Shakespeare) is actually counterproductive. If you miss one word, you lose track completely.
Instead, use Verbalization—the efficient way to practice that you’ve read about several times in this book. The reason for the repetition here is that Verbalization is one of the most powerful tools available to presenters—yet one of the most underutilized.
But even Verbalization does not guarantee perfection. When, not if, but when you slip in a presentation—or in any situation in life—remember the words of eighteenth-century British poet Alexander Pope: “To err is human, to forgive divine.”
59. The Free Throw: A Presentation Lesson from Basketball
“It takes me a couple of minutes to settle down” is one of the most common utterances presenters make, and they make it in reference to the jolt of adrenaline that every presenter—novice or veteran—experiences at the start of every presentation. The jolt produces the Fight or Flight reaction to stress, which, in turn, causes the presenter’s eyes to dart around the room—regardless of the size of the room or the size of the audience—in search of escape routes; the darting then makes that person appear furtive to the audience. If you’ll pardon the play on words, in the blink of an eye, the audience gets an immediate negative impression of the presenter, and there is never a second chance to make a first impression.
Even if the veteran ultimately settles down, the die is cast. Both veteran and novice would do well to defuse the jolt and start strong. The veteran will not have to wait the few minutes, and the novice can get started on the right foot.
A lesson in how to control this pivotal first moment comes from how basketball players shoot free throws. Think about their process. Even though these well-trained athletes have practiced this shot countless times, they go through the same brief ritual each time. They step to the foul line, look at the basket, bounce the ball a few times, take a deep breath or two, look at the basket again, and then shoot. Whether or not they make the first shot, they go through