The Perfect Reply: How to React When Speeches Go Wrong

Everybody makes mistakes. Great speakers, awful speakers, everyone in between. But there's a difference in how they react to their own mistakes. Most of us, we make a mistake and we grimace. We. We do something like that. Sweat appears on our forehead. If we're standing up in front of a bunch of people, colleagues, professionals, we're a little nervous anyway. We. We forget what we're going to say. We think, oh, my God, everybody's looking at me, staring at me, laughing at me. If we're in a media interview or our eyes shoot up, oh, God, I forgot what the stat was. I forgot what the facts were. We panic. So it's not that people even notice the mistake we make. It's our reaction to our mistakes. That's where people get in the pit of their stomach, this feeling of, uh, oh, TJ's not doing too well. He's on a high wire. He's going to fall. He's going to tumble away. That's what you want to avoid. So the key is not to say, I'm going to be perfect. I'm going to rehearse 10,000 times and memorize it. No, the key is to cut yourself a little slack and realize you're going to make mistakes. But don't beat yourself up. Don't grimace, don't go. Don't look up. Don't look like you're upset with yourself. Great speakers don't make fewer mistakes than anyone else. They simply cover it more. And they realize that the way people hear words is not the same way that they read them. When you read words and you see a misspelling, it jumps out at you. If you see bad grammar, it jumps out at you. But let me tell you a little secret. Most people, when they speak, I don't care how smart they are, how well educated they are. If you took a transcript of words coming out of their mouth, you'd be appalled. Most of us speak with stops and starts. Bad grammar. We stumble over things, and yet it still sounds okay. There's a big difference between how the ear processes words versus the eyes. So if you don't get something just right, if you stumble a little, it's okay, don't worry about it.