Public Speaking Tips on Perfectionism
Public Speaking and Perfectionism should probably never appear in the same sentence together.
A good presentation is living, evolving, and dynamic, and so it can never be statically perfect like a statue or a painting.
There is an allegory about a pearl fisher who finds an enormous pearl. It is huge, beautiful and probably very valuable, but it has a small flaw just under the surface. The pearl fisher decides to remove the pearl's outer layer to remove the flaw, only to find that it appears to be one layer deeper. He becomes so fixated on removing the flaw that he takes off layer after layer until all he us left with is a pearl that is small and worthless.
So be careful that your quest for the perfect presentation does not end up destroying all the life and beauty that comes from being natural and spontaneous.
Perfectionism to Public Speaking stands in the same relationship as a Greek statue to a human being; they both have their place, but after a while we will want to swap the cold perfection of a statue for the fallible warmth of a human being.
And maybe in this age of airbrushing and AI enhancement, this is even more pertinent.
The idealised images we see before us belong on a page or on a computer screen, they are not real.
Real usually means fallible. Perfect can often mean sterile.
Public Speaking above all else is about creating a real connection between human beings.
Public Speaking is like the sad lot of every oboe player, who spends their life working to create the perfect reed for their instrument. Sometimes they might even create that perfect reed and then by blowing through it a few times, it is no longer perfect!
As speakers, as performers, we might occasionally hit that height that sportspeople call ‘in the zone’, but that will always be a living moment when everything comes together in motion, and never a self-consciously over-rehearsed state.
Sometimes on a Presentation Skills course, if I detect a strong atmosphere of neatness and order in the room, and I will ask:
‘Who here regards themselves as a bit of a perfectionist?’
And maybe a few hands go up. So I will inform them:
‘Today is not going to be a happy experience for you!’
However, I reassure them that there is one area in Public Speaking where there is a concession to perfectionism, Structure, which is more about flow and direction and less about exact words, which we will look at in a few moments.
A speech that is ‘perfectly’ prepared, word for word, will lose much of the spontaneity necessary for dynamic, fresh communication.
Therefore, the best Public Speaking is
less about trying to ‘achieve’ perfection and
more about learning how to ‘overcome’ our addiction to perfection.
10 tips on handling Perfectionism
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Get over yourself!
What gives you the right to try to be perfect in the first place?
Is the presentation all about you or is it all about your message?
If it is about your message, then you do not need to be perfect, you just need to make sure your message is clear.
If your house were on fire, I would be focused on getting you out of your chair, out of your living room, and out of your house as quickly and effectively as possible. I would not stand outside wondering whether my delivery is perfect and whether I look right.
In the end I might have looked good and I sounded great, but unfortunately you did not make it out of the house in time!
So the first step to overcoming the ‘curse’ of perfectionism is the same first step for overcoming nerves:
take the focus off yourself and put it onto your message and your audience.
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Focus on the end, not on the journey
In many ways, Public Speaking is a ‘results’ business. Success should be measured on getting your message across.
I remember visiting a Public Speaking club, that had a new President running the evening.
Now I also have my own obsessive perfectionist tendencies with doing things ‘right’ and I spent the first half of the evening frowning to myself because the evening seemed badly prepared, poorly delivered and unprofessional. After half an hour of internally tutting I suddenly stopped and looked around.
The room was full; the attendees seemed to be enjoying themselves, and much more to the point, everyone seemed keen to take part.
I don’t think the new President was being clever and deliberately stumbling through to demonstrate to the attendees that they did not need to be perfect to take part, but I do know that based on the results, what he was doing was working.
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Be nice to yourself
If ‘getting over yourself’ means taking the focus away from yourself, then ‘being nice to yourself’ means don’t expect too much.
As a devoutly Christian motivational speaker once said:
‘There has only ever been one perfect person on this earth and they crucified him.’
If you make a mistake, well, we all make mistakes, and if you are taking your audience on a journey, they will probably not even notice any mistakes.
I remember a young student delivering a wonderful presentation. It flowed beautifully for a minute and then she got one word wrong. Her shoulders slumped and she asked:
‘Can I start again?’
‘If you really want to’, I said, ‘but I promise you if we were outside and you were telling me what you did over the weekend and half way through you got a word wrong, you would not ask to start again, you would stumble and keep going and I would probably not even notice.’
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It is not what happens, it is how you respond.
Of course we want to speak well and we prepare and rehearse so that it flows and comes together, but we will make slips. The problem is not making the slip, it is how you react. If you show through your body language and face that you have gone wrong, your audience will register embarrassment to the same degree that you show it. If you slip up and just continue – it did not seem to matter to you, so it won’t matter to the audience either!
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Ask for help
I listened to a presenter who throughout their talk would seem to get stuck for a moment and would ask the audience for help: ‘What was the name of…?’ or ‘What do you call it when…?’
He would get an answer, acknowledge it and then continue. At no time did we lose interest or belief in him.
It turns out he was making a point, because at the end of the presentation he said:
‘Over the last hour, five times I got stuck and asked for help. However, on four of those occasions I actually knew the answer already, only one time was I genuinely stuck – and I am sure you would be able to say which one it was.’
He was showing us that not only is it not a problem to ask for help occasionally, but it is a great way of building a connection with the audience, as they become equal participants in the presentation, not simply passive listeners.
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Share, don’t lecture
If you set yourself up to be above me, then maybe I will expect more from you.
I used to be a ‘cellist. I learned in East Germany. Often the emphasis was purely on technical correctness.
I went to a ‘cello recital where the technical ability of the player seemed paramount. He played one wrong note and everyone was shocked. I have been to other recitals which were maybe not as ‘perfect’, but the playing conveyed something.
Maybe the first cellist was trying to display his brilliance and the second was sharing a piece of music.
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Acknowledge (but don’t dwell upon) your mistakes
If you try to come across as better than you are, or more to the point, better than me, I will be looking to find fault. I don’t like people who are telling me they are better than I am (even if it is true).
You will engage me better if you show us that you are not perfect – in this case I mean in the content of your presentation, rather than in your delivery.
What mistakes did you make and what did you learn?
Now you are coming down to share with me rather than lecturing me from the top of your perfect ivory tower. I will like you better; I will listen better and I will respect you more because your mistakes relate directly to my mistakes and so you have shown me that you understand.
(And now I am less likely to get upset if you make an error in your delivery)
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Shut up the chatterbox
The chatterbox is the little voice in your head that does not help!
All it does is to criticise.
When Whitney Huston sang to us that ‘the greatest gift’ was learning ‘to love yourself’ she was not being incredibly egocentric, she was reframing the biblical command:
‘Love your neighbour as yourself’
(I hope she was listening while she was singing.)
The chatterbox does not want you to be perfect, it wants you to think that you need to be so that it can criticise you.
Allow yourself to get something wrong.
If imperfection is OK with you, the chatterbox has nothing left to say.
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Focus on the good
OK I got something slightly wrong, but I got a lot right!
I remember a speaker drawing a black dot in the middle of a large piece of white paper and then asked the audience:
‘What do you see there?’
Various answers came back: black dot, full stop, black hole, an ant.
And then he said:
‘Funny! Whenever I ask that no one ever says, ‘A large piece of white paper.’ We always seem to focus on the little black spot.’
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Practice
Practice does not make perfect and poor practice certainly does not make perfect.
The urge towards perfectionism leads us to try to memorise, to get every word ‘right’.
As I mentioned earlier, the only concession to perfectionism is Structure.
Don’t prepare word for word, prepare idea to idea.
You don’t want your audience to remember every word, you want them to walk away with your ideas.
So you can get your words wrong, as long as you get your ideas across.
Thus ‘perfect’ preparation is about walking through your ideas; learning to join them together; having a clear overview of the structure so that when you stand up, your words can flow (for better or for worse) from clear idea to clear idea.
It is that ‘planned spontaneity’ that will occasionally get you into ‘the zone.’
And if that happens....
Enjoy it while you are there!
