Stop Putting Pressure on yourself to Present Perfectly!

When we speak in front of a group of people, of course we want to communicate clearly and confidently. We want to do our best. So why, despite being an expert in our field, does our communication sometimes come out ‘wrong’?

Additionally, if you’re a non-native speaker of English I’m sure you feel the extra pressure to speak perfectly! But stop right there. Feeling the need to communicate perfectly is the exactly the reason that you won’t, in fact, be able to do so!

In Matt Abraham’s fantastic book, ‘Think Faster, Talk Smarter ’ he says we should ‘dare to be dull’ or put another way, we should ‘maximise our mediocrity’ especially when speaking spontaneously.

The reason is that when we strive to be perfect, we inevitably become more anxious. This in turn, causes our rational, thinking brain to start closing down as our emotional brain wants to take over and protect us from the ‘danger’ of public speaking by activating the body’s stress response.

The very act of ‘trying to get it right’ is an obstacle to communicating naturally. It’s an obstacle to sharing our knowledge and points of view and coming from the place where we should always (ideally) be coming from – our personalities.

If you just let go of aspiring to be ‘perfect’ and the assumption that everyone is judging you against a measure of ‘perfection’, you will become comfortable with going with the flow, adapting naturally to the cues from your listeners and learning from ‘less satisfactory’ performances. You will become a more natural and by default, a more confident speaker.

Matt’s point about ‘maximising our mediocrity’ focuses on those ‘on the spot’ speaking moments, but it can also be applied to presentations in the sense that although we know WHAT we want to say, the words that actually come out of our mouths are never exactly the same as when we were rehearsing.

It sounds counterintuitive but taking the pressure off ourselves to be perfect and allowing ourselves to be ‘mediocre’ frees us up to do our best. And of course, you will do your best, right? Why would you choose to do otherwise?

Food for thought…