TJ Walker uses Rick Perry's debate freeze and Ted Cruz's repetition to show how speakers recover from memory lapses. His advice: don't promise a specific number of points, pause deliberately, and keep your audience script separate from your notes.
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What do you do if you just can't remember what you want to say? That is the worst nightmare for so many speakers. This idea of being on stage and all of a sudden your mind blanks out. You don't know what to say. Well, one person who knows about that better than anyone is Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who, who famously ran for president twice and in a debate in his first campaign, had a memory freeze unlike has ever been seen on the national stage before. He said, essentially, as president, I will eliminate government waste. I will eliminate the Department of Energy and the Department of Environmental Protection and the. Oops. He couldn't name the third one, and he became a laughingstock after that. Now, today, he's back in the news because he has apparently rehabilitated his image. And Donald Trump is rumored to be about to nominate him to a very important cabinet position, Secretary of Energy. So Rick Perry has rehabilitated himself. I do give him credit for getting back in the arena. He ran again for president in 2016, didn't do very well. He has been on Dancing with the Start, not the greatest of dancers, but was able to get out there and sort of laugh at himself. So how could he have avoided that problem? Here's what he did wrong, in my view. He said, I'm going to eliminate three. Three. Once you put a number out there, you're putting pressure on your brain. And if you're feeling stress in front of cameras, in front of an audience, that's the worst possible time to try to remember stuff. So that was his big mistake. If he had just said, I am going to eliminate government waste. I'm going to eliminate the Department of Education, I'm going to eliminate the epa. And then inside, if he thought, oh, what's the third one? But outwardly, he had just stopped, smiled and said, and that's just the beginning of how I'm going to fight government waste. No one would have ever known he'd forgotten the third. So that's the real trick. Don't tell people how many things are on your list. Just keep going. Give as many as you can remember. If you forget some, tell anybody. The audience isn't going to notice your mistakes. They're going to notice your reaction to your mistakes. It's Rick Perry's emotional reaction of embarrassment, of humiliation. That's what got so much attention. Interestingly, Ted Cruz, another Texas politician who ran for president in 2016, had a similar problem. He said there were five agencies he was going to eliminate, but he handled it perfectly. He simply renamed one of the agencies. He listed it twice and he acted like he did it perfectly. No one even noticed it until a day later and it caused him no damage whatsoever. So here's the technique that I use myself and that I train my clients to do. It's okay to forget things from time to time. The key key is instead of looking panicked or saying, oops, stop, pause. Look at someone in the audience. Pause for a minute like you just said something so brilliant they need a moment to think about it and reflect on it. Do that and no one will notice your mistakes because no one's reading your script while you're speaking. Your script is for you, but the words out of your mouth are for your audience. Thanks for joining me. If you'd like more tips like this on how to be a better speaker presenter in all aspects of life, then please like my Facebook page, TJ Walker Interactive. Do like Alberto Lively's doing. He's with us right now. Hi Alberto, thanks for joining us. And please let me know if you have any questions on any aspect of public speaking. He says congratulations. This is your most commented on live video. A little humor there, by the way. I've been experimenting with live video a lot in the last few weeks and not telling people in advance, so typically there isn't a huge audience. But some videos do generate comments, some generated 30 comments, some have generated two comments. It's here for you regardless. And if you want more help on any aspect of public speaking, please go over to the website mediatrainingworldwide.com and you can look at our live workshops and on demand courses as well. Thanks a lot.
