112. From Mistakes to "Missed Takes"
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Hi, Matt here. I invite you to look into Stanford Continuing Studies. For over 20 years, I have taught in the program. Discover a diverse range of courses available both online and in person to anyone, anywhere in the world. Classes cover everything from fundamental business skills to the fascinating world of AI. This fall, join me for Communication Essentials for Work and Life, a new course designed to enhance and hone your communication skills in various situations.

Each week, guest speakers will join me for interactive lectures and Q&A sessions on topics like persuasion, storytelling, nonverbal presence, and reputation management. The course starts September 24th, and registration is now open. Learn more at continuingstudies.stanford.edu. One of the biggest barriers to better communication is that we get in our own way.

I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. When it comes to communicating well, we need to strive for connection and not perfection.

Here is an excerpt from my new audiobook, Think Faster, Talk Smarter, How to Speak Successfully When You're Put on the Spot, that provides guidance on how we can all improve and hone our communication by daring to be dull and making missed takes. Dare to be dull. How do we stop from judging ourselves so much? One big technique that is surprising in its simplicity is that we can give ourselves permission to do what needs to be done.

Nothing more, nothing less. Rather than striving to do it right, we focus only on relaying the information we have to our audience. This technique is actually a core tenet in the world of improvisation. Great improvisers get over the hump of their perfectionist tendencies by telling themselves that good enough is great and that they should dare to be dull.

As they know, the more we can dare to be dull, the greater the chances we'll be anything but dull. Because we'll be communicating using our full cognitive resources. Be obvious is the most powerful creative mantra that there is, improvisation expert Dan Klein told me.

When you're trying to be original, you sound like everyone else trying to be original. But when you're obvious, you're yourself. And that's what's genuine. Entertainment executive Steve Johnston served as president and managing partner of comedy icon Second City for almost 20 years and now helps run Mindless Inc., an academy that uses applied and freestyle improvisation methods to enhance mental fitness.

He observes that we tend to think we must come up with the big idea when we speak, contributing something important, beautiful, or transcendent. What he likens to a cathedral. But providing the building block of a conversation, the brick, also matters. We serve as bricks by waiting, listening, and at times offering up logical connections between others' ideas.

We don't have to say something original or path-breaking every time. It's enough, and sometimes uniquely powerful, to help keep a conversation going and connect the pieces. Don't strive to be a cathedral. Focus on being as useful a brick as you can be. Cultivating dullness can feel odd at first, even a little scary.

When I invite Stanford students to dare to be dull, they look at me and gasp. Nobody in their lives has ever told them to do this. But suspending judgment and ceding a bit of control is precisely what these students require to do better with spontaneous communication. They already have intelligence, motivation, and diligence.

The next step for them to improve their communication is to take some of the precious cognitive resources they're spending in the dogged pursuit of perfection and redirect them to being present and engaged in the task at hand. This shift takes effort at first, which seemingly contradicts my point that this is about using less energy. But students find that their communication does become smoother and more authentic with practice.

Remember, there's no right or wrong way to communicate, only better and worse ways. Shifting from doing it right to just doing it reduces the pressure we feel. It allows us to focus less on the best possible ways of communicating and simply allows us to put things in our own words and terms. Our communication becomes easier, less cognitively demanding, and more unique to us.

We can focus on what needs to be done rather than diverting some of our bandwidth to judging what we're doing. Try it. Take a minute to think about a successful spontaneous communication or two you've had. A time when you simply did what was needed and didn't monitor and evaluate your performance unduly. What did this feel like afterward? Remind yourself that you can do this well and so should trust yourself to adopt a dare-to-be-dull mindset. Make missed takes.

Once we've granted ourselves permission to engage without obsessing over our performance, we can begin to free ourselves of the pressure to avoid making errors. To embrace mistakes, we can learn to adjust how we think of them, not as the opposite of success, but as a means to it. When Stanford marketing professor S. Christian Wheeler appeared on my podcast, he remarked that mistakes and failures are a natural and essential part of the learning process.

As toddlers and small children, we think nothing of making mistakes. We're always messing up the simplest of tasks: walking, using a spoon, tying our shoes. As adults, we distance ourselves from failure and, in turn, prevent ourselves from learning and growing.

We need to recognize that failure is a great thing, Wheeler says, because failure suggests that we're operating at the outside of our abilities and that we have some skills that we can acquire to better adapt to our circumstances. We can actively dial down our reflexive judging and evaluation by making a choice to practice accepting and even embracing mistakes when they happen.

Stressing over every little mistake we make, or might make, is mentally taxing. I find it helpful to envision mistakes as missed takes in the making of a film. When a crew films a scene, they'll often do several versions or "takes." They might do a close-up instead of a distant shot, have the actors stand instead of sit, have them modulate their tone, and so on.

They do this not because any one take is right or wrong, but because the director and crew want to broaden their options and make sure they didn't miss any potentially great but unforeseen ways of rendering the scene. They seek out variety, takes that might be more creative, unique, or imaginative. We can think of our communication situations as opportunities to try out possible approaches. More on this in the next chapter.

When we take the pressure off each interaction, each encounter becomes just another take among many, one that helps illuminate what better communication might look like. Mistakes in this vein can focus our efforts. Rather than diminishing us, they can empower us and put us on a path to become better communicators. Reframing errors as "missed takes" can be incredibly powerful, and not just in communication.

As an avid practitioner of martial arts, I once went through a period when I hit a wall, metaphorically, not physically, and didn't know what to do. I had reached a certain level of proficiency, but I wasn't improving further. A big problem, it turned out, was the way I was punching. In my drive to deliver the ideal punch, I was moving my body in a way that limited the power of my punches. My punches might have looked good, but they lacked enough oomph.

To solve this problem, I allowed myself to focus on missed takes. Deviating from what I thought was the perfect form, I experimented with different ways of moving my body while punching. With each shot, I noted how I felt and the results I obtained. Some of my adjustments didn't help. I would feel pain in places where I wasn't supposed to, or the force of my punch would remain the same or even decline.

I set aside each missed take and experimented with other adjustments. Over time, as these experiments continued, I discovered a way of aligning my body while punching that allowed for much more force. My form wasn't perfect in conventional terms, but it worked for me. Only when I began to view mistakes as invaluable parts of a larger learning process did I improve.

In professional contexts, we can accept or welcome in mistakes by publicly celebrating failures and working systematically to learn from them. A software company where I worked held what they called "Failure Fridays." Each Friday, the whole company would enjoy a free lunch together. Individuals would take a few minutes to share a failure they had experienced, and leaders would bestow an award for the best failure.

The point was to normalize failures so as to encourage risk-taking and also to encourage teams to learn from mistakes. Critically, the winning failure couldn't be one that others had already made. Failures were valuable, but only if we took the time to learn from them. Try it. Think of a common communication you regularly deliver, such as a weekly status update or a virtual check-in.

Challenge yourself to try different takes. You might vary your emotion, changing your vocal intensity, reframing a statement as a question, inviting others to speak first, injecting humor, adjusting your body posture, and so on. Conversations, not performances. Whether we realize it or not, many of us approach certain spontaneous interactions as we do formal speaking situations, as performances.

When meeting people for the first time, making small talk, or speaking in front of a larger group than you normally would be comfortable with, we can feel as if we're on stage before an audience. This can happen even if that audience is only one or two people whose presence adds pressure to a situation.

We presume that this audience is critically assessing our every move, judging it according to some set of rules and expectations. This perception on our part ratchets up the pressure, leading us to monitor and assess ourselves in an attempt to please our audience. Think about areas in our lives in which we typically perform. Perhaps we play a musical instrument, or play on a softball team, or act on stage.

In these settings, everyone's eyes are on us. There's a right way and a wrong way to behave. If we hit a wrong note, drop a ball in the infield, or forget our lines, the error is clear to all. Some sports actually keep track of how many flubs players have made.

We can also relax more by reframing spontaneous interaction as conversations rather than performances. Conversations are more casual and familiar than performances. We usually don't rehearse for conversations, we just have them. We usually don't think in terms of mistakes, we just try to sustain a flow and connection.

Although conversations can be uncomfortable at times and we might still feel judged, these feelings are much less pronounced than in performance situations. We can relax and just be ourselves. To help us reframe communications as conversations, we can take three steps. First, we can adjust our use of language.

When we feel ourselves to be on a stage, or at least in the spotlight, we sometimes use words that are cold, formal, and passive. We do this because we're anxious and seek to establish authority. Otherwise, we might get physical distance by stepping back and folding our hands in front of us. Let's say you're a doctor and you're standing in front of a group of your peers. You might find yourself making statements like, It is imperative that doctors help solve this problem.

Language like this creates distance between yourself and others. When you say, "We must solve this problem," you are not only speaking more simply and economically, but more persuasively. The word "we" is more inclusive. The communication feels more direct, more like an informal conversation.

When you use language like this, your audience members might begin to do so as well. Your joint sense of the interaction as a performance dissipates, and you become more connected with one another. You get closer to actually solving the problem simply by directly pointing out that it is all of yours to solve. Another way to reframe communication as conversation is by posing more questions.

Questions, even rhetorical ones, are two-way interactions. You and others around you enter into a back-and-forth. No longer are you alone on stage, in front of your audience, you're engaging in a dialogue. Even when you're making a statement, you can think of it as an answer to an unasked question. That in itself can give the encounter a conversational feel and lower the pressure you might experience.

Answering your own unasked questions can help ease pressure in formal speaking situations as well. One distinguished academic I know, a Nobel laureate, wanted to improve his public speaking, which he regarded as good but a bit stiff. He began structuring them around important research questions, using these questions as the titles of his slides. These in turn served as cues to relay his intended content. He simply provided the answers to his questions for his audience.

The technique makes his presentations more connected and conversational, allowing him to feel more relaxed. He doesn't worry about presenting his every idea in a pre-planned way that his audience will perceive as elegant or perfect. He's just speaking casually with his audience members, asking questions they might have, and answering them. Finally, we must beware of the memorization trap into which so many of us fall.

In advance of job interviews or other situations where we'll likely have to speak spontaneously, it is tempting to have some key lines or talking points nailed down in advance. That way, we'll know just what to say when the time comes. Writing down what we might want to say can help, but memorization also can come back to haunt us.

Giving our communication the feel of a formal, over-rehearsed presentation, it can ratchet up our nerves as we struggle to remember a great zinger that we thought of in advance of the actual conversation. We wind up scrutinizing what we're saying, paying attention to every little deviation from our script and framing it as a mistake.

Also, by taking valuable mental energy to remember our lines, we inhibit our ability to react naturally to others around us. We have less cognitive capacity at our disposal to listen to others and react in kind. We're in our heads, not where we should be, immersed in the social world. Instead of rushing to memorize, try writing out what you'd like to say and then turning that into a short, bullet-pointed outline.

Doing so allows you to think through the material in detail while giving you a brief structure that's easier to keep in mind. Using that structure, you can more confidently fill in the gaps as you go.

So there you have it. By adopting specific mindset shifts, we can focus our communication on connection and not perfection. To learn more, please visit faster, smarter.io and consider checking out my new book. Think faster, talk smarter. This podcast is a production of Stanford graduate school of business. Jenny Luna is our executive producer. Many thanks to podium podcast company. Check us out wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, Matt here. Quick question for you. When was the last time you took a step back from your daily life and took the time to invest in yourself and your education?

For a lot of us, it's been a long while. But here's the truth. Great leaders never stop learning. If this sounds like you, I encourage you to explore Stanford Executive Education Programs. These programs are jam-packed with insights from Stanford GSB professors and bring together top leaders like you from all around the globe.

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