58. To Slip or Not to Slip: Been There, Done That

In 2010, General Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, shared his feelings about his Commander-in-Chief with an advisor, who was later quoted in a Rolling Stone article:

Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his f***ing war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.^F58.1

The very same week the article was published, his Commander-in-Chief relieved General McChrystal of his command.

During the same month, Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, in a statement to the media about his company’s disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, said, “I’d like my life back.”^F58.2

One month later, BP removed Mr. Hayward from his role as the company’s spokesman and, a few weeks after that, from his role as CEO.

In summer 2006, at a rally during his campaign for the Virginia senate seat, Senator George Allen, the favored incumbent, mocked a student of Indian descent as “Macaca.”^F58.3 On election day, Senator Allen went down in defeat.

In 2002, during a 100th birthday party for segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond, Senator Trent Lott, the Republican senator from Mississippi and Senate Majority Leader, said:

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.”