Failure or Mistake?
I have failed many times in my life and the ones that stand out are the public failures. When you put yourself out there to do paid public speaking or presentations the pressure is on.
I could tell you about the time that after a presentation one of the pieces of feedback was ‘she should never be allowed to present’. Ouch, that stung!
Or how about the time I was flown in at the last minute to Adelaide to fill in for somebody who had to pull out. The person debriefing me was very hard to pin down and also very casual about the topic. The event turned out to be a bit of a non-event. I ended up with only 2 audience members and the back of the room was filled with execs from the organisation. As I started my presentation, I realised I had misunderstood what was required of me and things went downhill from there. One of the most embarrassing moments of my career. And it turned out the 2 male audience members had only attended because of my name and who they thought I might be! Yikes, it took a long time to get over that one (if I ever will) 😊
Or how about the time, I was presenting and a guy at the back of the room started heckling me and disagreeing with everything I said?
And here’s another one. The time I was doing a lunchtime presentation to members of a professional organisation. I had 45 minutes to present and somehow after about 10 minutes the organiser was making what I thought were winding up signals and I panicked and rushed through the presentation. Turned out she was just making encouraging faces!
How awkward that was with a roomful of people looking at me and the organiser saying you have another 30 minutes!! By that time though I was used to unexpected events! So, after a few sinking moments, I invited the audience to ask me questions instead. I think that the audience participation made it a more interesting event rather than me standing there speaking at them. Not everybody saw it that way and feedback was mixed. But one of the attendees was a board member and he introduced me into his organisation and I got a great new client from it, so it can’t have been all bad.
Why am I telling you all this? It just came to me to talk about this, and it might help somebody else. I don’t want all my writing to be about success or how to get success. That’s not realistic. We all have successes and failures, it’s part of being human. And while I have had successes in public speaking, it’s hard to remember them.
But I have learnt from my mistakes, and I prefer to see them as mistakes. Nobody starts off wanting to fail. And I may not make those same mistakes again but there will be others and that’s ok. It’s all about perspective. When you are not trying to be perfect or present as perfect, it takes a lot of pressure off. Not everybody is going to like you or get you and that’s ok too.
If you want to learn how to reframe your stories about failure, give me a call or send me an email and let’s chat.
