What Forgetting My Speech Taught Me About Failure

I stare at the audience. My mind has gone blank. I can hear my heart thundering in my chest.

This week I forgot the words to my speech in the middle of a contest.

The audience looks confused. I panic. What exactly is the point I am trying to make? I can feel my palms getting sweaty.

Public speaking consistently places as people's number one fear precisely for this reason. It's stressful to stand in front of a crowd and offer ourselves up for judgment, and, well, when it goes wrong there is literally nowhere to hide.

I try to back peddle, find my place, but now I'm completely muddled. My chances of placing in the competition evaporate. I plough through the rest of my mangled speech as a sea of encouraging eyes stare back at me; the sympathy only seeming to make things worse. I conclude, sit down, and glow with shame. I've messed up and everyone knows it.

In the hallway after the meeting, people offer me kind words, but I know I don't deserve them. This is a mess of my own making.

As a former President of?Early Bird Speakers, one of London's premier Toastmasters clubs, there is always high expectations on me to perform. I'm far from the best speaker in the club, but I've consistently placed in contests over the past few years and was honoured with the 'Most Awards Award' in our club last year.

And herein lies the problem: because of my past success, I thought I didn't need to try so hard.

Being a Deviant

Failure seems to have become something to be lauded, indeed I've intoned to my team at?Version 1 ?that they should be failing more. But now I've come to understand that?failure exists on a spectrum?and not all of it is to be celebrated.

Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson posits we should consider the two poles of failure to be Blameworthy at one end and Praiseworthy at the other. Deviance, at the Blameworthy end, is not following a prescribed process or practice. Exploratory Testing, an experiment to expand knowledge, sits at other with seven different types of failure between.

The reason I had succeeded at Toastmasters before is because I'd developed a process for writing and memorising my speeches, a process which I did not follow for this contest.

I cut corners.

I didn't fully develop my mnemonics to memorise the sequence of my speech. I didn't practice in front of my wife before giving it to a full audience. I wrote my speech the week before the contest and then practised it to myself a dozen times in the days before.

I deviated from my process.

And then I failed.

This is a trap we can all fall into. We develop Ego. We're told we're amazing, so we stop trying so hard.

Developing Skills

Skills, of course, are a factor here too.

The better you become at something, generally the less effort that is required to achieve the same result, but until our ability matches the demands of the task we're undertaking we run the risk of failure.

What became clear during my bungled speech was that I overestimated my skill and I failed as a result. The mitigation for my lack of ability was time invested.

Using Amy Edmondson's spectrum, we can see that Lack of Ability is also considered Blameworthy which at first pass might seem unfair, but no one can give us skills, we must develop them for ourselves and steward our own learning and development.

The challenge then is understanding when we are sufficiently skilled to reduce our effort and achieve the same result, or maintain our level of effort and achieve even more.

Exploratory Testing

When we think of positive failure, what we're really describing is testing a hypothesis or experimenting to expand our knowledge.

Zooming out from this speech contest, Toastmasters has been a fantastic place to experiment and try things out. I developed skills as a speaker and I've seen the fruits of this effort in my professional life; I am confident speaking in front of large groups of people and when presenting to colleagues and customers alike I land my message with conviction and clarity. I've reduced my Lack of Ability.

As a laboratory to test things out with few consequences, when it comes to communication, Toastmasters is hard to beat.

When it comes to everything else, we must find safe ways to fail where the learning is maximised and the consequences small.

This is a far cry from failing because you've not done things properly.

I've booked to give this same speech again in a few week's time, albeit in a regular club meeting rather than in a contest.

This time I will follow my process. I will build mnemonics. I will practice in front of my long suffering wife.

It's possible I will fail again, but if I do, you can be sure it won't be because I've cut corners with my preparation.