Friday, February 1, 2013

Peter Sims learns from poorly-received public speaking experience

"Little Bets" author Peter Sims wrote a post on public speaking that appeared on the HBR Blog Network. Sims did a great job in the post of illustrating how a painful mistake helped him understand and process advice he had received years earlier from former New York governor Mario Cuomo:

[Cuomo] graciously shared the story about how he started speaking publicly in law school and was a terrible speaker until he started 1) talking about things he believed in passionately, and 2) knew his material extremely well.

When he was first paid to speak, at the time of his first book's publication, it didn't go so well. Sims' agent received a kind but brutally-critical email from the conference organizer, which said in part:

Peter did well overall, but it would have been nice if you would have shared that he never spoke to college students or in this type of setting. I think he was more focused on this being the start of his book tour versus personalizing it to the students. Not sure if this was a miscommunication between the two of you or his focus. I, and some of my committee members, felt it was overpriced for the experience. Would have paid $1500 for what we received. I have a limited budget and this could have been spent better. You were a little misleading but maybe you haven't seen him present before.

And it goes on from there. Sims explains that his first reaction to the email was (as should be expected) defensiveness:

I'd been going through a difficult time in my life! I did have doubts about the usefulness of my ideas to college students. Of course when I didn't know the answer to a question, I would turn it back around to the students and ask them! How was I supposed to know how they should manage college roommate conflicts?

But eventually Sims got past his emotional reaction and realized that he hadn't done well, and it was time to put Cuomo's earlier advice into action. Eventually, his speaking experiences had changed significantly:

As the audience came to see that I was just being me and trying to share and teach them, quirks and all, they stopped analyzing and judging me, and could just enjoy the moment. That's how I feel at least, noting how the energy in the audience now seems to shift about a quarter or a third of the way into each event. It's an experience for us all, not a lecture. When I can just be me, it gives the audience to just be themselves, and that human experience is what ultimately unlocks and empowers creativity, my ultimate goal. It has taken me thousands of hours of practice — and reams of hard-to-hear feedback — to improve.

This story is a great illustration of a couple of Mistake Bank points. One is that bad experiences can be great teachers. The second is that valuable lessons often take time (years, in fact) for us to absorb and process.

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