199. Blunder Pressure: Mastering In-the-Moment Communication (3 of 3)

[00:00:00] Peter Sagal: Let's say somebody says something that is just the wrong tone and it brings the room down. You have two choices at that moment. You can say, oh god, that was terrible. That just ruined everything. You can dwell on that or you can say, well, we got thirty more minutes of show and that can still be good. 

[00:00:20] Matt Abrahams: I'm Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Whether it's introducing a colleague, speaking up in a work meeting or making small talk with a cashier, most of our daily communication happens in the moment. And yet speaking on the spot is something that terrifies so many of us. The good news, spontaneous speaking, is a skill and like any other skill, it can be learned and honed. This is the third episode in our three part miniseries on spontaneous speaking. Our talented team of coaches is made up of people for whom talking on the spot is integral to what they do for a living. Their jobs vary. High stakes auctioneer, game show host, UN interpreter, FBI hostage negotiator, and more, but they have a lot to teach us.

[00:01:11] In our last episode, we focused on the art of being present and how it can allow us to better adapt to the moment. But there's still an important piece of the puzzle that we haven't covered yet. What do you do when things inevitably go wrong? With spontaneous speaking, mistakes and mess-ups are par for the course. So in this episode, our coaches will cover their most important lessons for how to deal with and manage the challenges that come from mishaps. We'll be sure to go through some case studies from their real lives to see their advice in action. 

[00:01:47] Brad Rogers, who is an NFL referee and was also one of our coaches in our first episode, has a whole career's worth of experience of what to do when things go wrong.

[00:01:58] Brad Rogers: We've often said in officiating, if you ever work the perfect game, you need to retire because it's never happened. And funny enough, I had a college game a few years ago that we got eleven plays into the game and we had a lightning delay that eventually canceled the game. And we all jokingly said, hey, we might have worked the perfect game. And so the evaluator came back with grades for those eleven plays and had downgrades and comments and we're like, we couldn't even work eleven plays and do it perfect. So we know that there's gonna be mistakes made in life. And if you do make a mistake, you have to move forward, and in football, you have to focus on the next play. You can't allow yourself to dwell in what happened in the past 'cause that's gonna cloud what's happening in the future. There's nothing that can be done about that previous play. The only thing that matters now is the upcoming play. And so I look at life the same way. I've made a mistake. Tomorrow's a new day. I've got to learn from that mistake and move forward so that I don't create the same problem again. 

[00:02:59] Matt Abrahams: That notion of next play is something that I have really adopted. When I try to help people speak better in the moment. A lot of us can get anchored in the past and ruminate. And that prevents us from moving forward. So that advice I think is very well taken for any of us who have to speak in the moment. 

[00:03:17] The idea of next play is one that our next coach, Peter Sagal, also uses in his job as the host of NPRs Wait, wait...Don't Tell Me! He explains how this mindset prevents him from allowing one small mistake to define his entire performance and helps him move on with confidence.

[00:03:38] Peter Sagal: And let's say like I do a joke and it dies. Or let's say somebody says something and this happens. I've done it, my panelists have done it, everybody has done it. You say something that is just the wrong tone and it brings the room down. And you have two choices if you're me at that moment. You can say, oh god, that was terrible. That just ruined everything. And you can dwell on that. Or you can say, we got thirty more minutes of show and that can still be good. So let's get back on it. Let's put this aside and let's proceed with the expectation that from now on, everything's gonna be great, because it usually is. One of the things I've come to learn about baseball players is the ability to shake off a mistake, say, okay, that happened, but now I'm going to pitch well. 

[00:04:21] From now on, I'm still the player that I always knew I was, and I'm going to put that aside and move on with the same confidence that I had before I threw that pitch. And one of the things I've learned about elite athletes is that their mindset is such that if something goes wrong, it's an anomaly. Maybe because the ref got it wrong, or maybe because just a stroke of bad luck or whatever, but it doesn't reflect on them. And in a weird way, that's delusional. Like you hung a curve and he just hit it outta the park for a three round homer. But in other ways, it's absolutely necessary. 

[00:04:53] Matt Abrahams: The, the approach and the mindset really makes a big difference in terms of success in these moments. Now that we've tackled mindset and know that making mistakes is just part of the game. We can get started at looking at some of the lessons our coaches have to move us forward when things don't go our way. We thought it would be helpful to pair each lesson with a real life case study directly from our coaches, which will hopefully give you a chance to see how they apply these skills in their daily work.

[00:05:22] Our first lesson comes from Chris Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator. Are there ways in which you quickly adjust and adapt, or do you just stay the course and keep things going forward even if it didn't happen or occur the way you wanted it to? How, what do you do when things don't go the way you planned? 

[00:05:40] Chris Voss: You know, you've actually inadvertently, I think, hidden on the dilemma. The first thing is to realize there is no course that's easy to say, but as human beings, we think of everything in terms of duration, path, and outcome. Where do I wanna be? How long is it gonna take me to get there? How am I gonna get there? The course, if you will. And if you only imagine there's one course, then you're gonna stick to it when all the data's telling you you're wrong. So in kidnapping negotiations, I'd show up in an embassy and they'd say, how's this gonna work out? I'd be like, well, you know, it's gonna take one, it's gonna work out one of five ways, and we gotta go along for the ride, see which one it is. That would keep me from getting married to a course. 

[00:06:24] Colin Powell, the famous American General and Secretary of State, said, never gets your ego so tied to a solution that if the solution collapses, your ego goes with it. That's people thinking of a course, and that's not a, somebody who's not as smart as other people, that's human nature. So to recognize that it's your desire to want to think of one path, you're already limiting yourself because never be so sure of what you want, that you wouldn't take something better. So there are all these little ways where you gotta stay curious, you gotta look at it an adventure. You gotta realize there's another path that's gonna be better. If you can maintain that flexibility in a moment, then you're gonna do really well. 

[00:07:05] Matt Abrahams: Our next coach, Annabelle Williams, exemplified that flexibility in not getting tied down to a single course of action while she was recently speaking on TV for her job as a sports broadcaster.

[00:07:17] Annabelle Williams: I was doing a live cross, so I was holding a microphone and a particular athlete was going for a four-peat in a race. This was their fourth Paralympic games. They were going for their fourth gold medal in this event, and I was doing a live cross. I thought it was live. In hindsight, it was called a look live, which means you do it right before you're meant to be live, and they turn it around. So it goes live a minute later. And as I was holding the microphone, I said, blah blah athlete is going for a four-peat and I held up my four fingers and I dropped the microphone to the floor. So I went down and I picked up the microphone and I said something like, I guess that's what happens when you've got one hand and you try and lift four fingers at a time.

[00:07:59] You know, the risk of dropping microphone is high. And then I sort of moved on and kept talking for another ten seconds or something and wrapped it. And the person said to me, it was actually a look live. We can do it again. We're gonna do it live. And so we did it live. So that bit never went to air. And I remember thinking that bit should have gone to air. People think, oh gosh, what if I make a mistake? What if I make an error? It's a disaster. And in reality in the moment I thought, this is live, I just have to rise to the occasion. I just have to carry on. You know, what can I think of saying? And I, fortunately that sort of came to my mind, but that stuff makes television gold a bit, you know? 

[00:08:32] Matt Abrahams: It makes life gold, really. Because it's in those moments of vulnerability and awkwardness that our true humanity comes out and we learn a lot. You have one hand, and I don't think about the consequences of that, right? I mean, the consequences are, yeah, you can't signal four fingers and hold a microphone, but that also opens the door to lots of other questions like, but how do you do this and how do you do that? Which is part of what you're trying to do, which is open up people's conversations about disability and seeing you manage through that with aplomb is, is awesome. So I appreciate you sharing that story in, in the typical way you do with a sense of humor. 

[00:09:13] In fact, incorporating humor and not taking things too seriously can be an incredibly helpful way of dealing with mistakes, which not only humanizes you to an audience, but as NFL referee Brad Rogers tells us, it also allows you to connect more with them.

[00:09:29] Brad Rogers: When I've made a mistake, I've laughed at myself. I'm like, okay, I'm sorry. And I go back into my announcement. That kind of helps me reset in my brain, hey, look, I made a mistake. I didn't mean to add confusion to that, but let me start over again with it. And it's funny, whenever you get into something that you're so familiar with, sometimes the words can roll off your tongue and you're like, what did I just say? I can tell you a funny situation I had in Denver a couple years ago. I was talking to a player in a timeout and the weather was absolutely stunning. It was a seventy degree night. 

[00:10:01] There wasn't an ounce of wind and you could see stars a little bit up through the sky. And he and I were talking about where he was from. He said, I'm from San Diego, and I said, oh, I love San Diego. It's beautiful. This feels like San Diego kind of weather. And we were talking through San Diego so much that the next time there was a timeout, which was the very next play, they were preserving the clock. I stepped out and I said, timeout San Diego. And the crowd in Denver, they, it was so funny because they all started booing me and I laughed and I said, I'm sorry to the fine people of Denver. I meant to say timeout. 

[00:10:38] And I said the team. And they called a timeout again on the very next play. And as I stepped out, I walked a few extra steps 'cause the crowd was waiting for what I was gonna say. And I held my hand out and I smiled and chuckled and said, time out. And I held my finger up, you know, kinda like I've got it this time. And I said the correct town. And they all laughed and it was funny 'cause it made Twitter and social media. So if you can humanize this thing a little bit that we're not just robots standing out there, it does go a long ways with the crowd. They may make fun of you, but they'll laugh with you. 

[00:11:12] Matt Abrahams: I think there's a really important lesson there, beyond knowing your geography, is to not take these things so seriously. When we're in a moment where we have to speak spontaneously, where something's happening that we have to respond to, it might not go exactly the way we had intended. And if we can recognize that, and essentially say take two, we're gonna do it again. It humanizes it. People can connect to it and it allows you to move forward so you're not ruminating and stuck in the past. 

[00:11:42] Onto our third and final lesson, which we'll hear from UN interpreter Giampaolo Bianchi, keep calm and carry on. I am sure you are human, that you have made mistakes or you've been less accurate than you intended. How do you recover in those moments? 

[00:12:01] Giampaolo Bianchi: The first thing that you have to do when you make a mistake, is if you're able to correct it immediately, then you can just correct it immediately. Because yeah, people make mistakes. So, obviously you want to do it as elegantly as possible. If you make a mistake, don't stop and start stuttering and going, oh no, what I meant to do was. And just, you know, if, if you got a date wrong and it was in the year 2025, uh, or rather 2024, things like that. Above all, you just need to keep calm and correct the mistake if you can. If you can't at that specific moment, then keep it in the back of your head and try and go back to it whenever you can. And if you do that, then I think you'll be okay. 

[00:12:50] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. Well, yeah, and I think that's true for any of us when we make a mistake. You have to make an in the moment choice. Can I correct it now or do I have to come back to it later? Or maybe it's not significant enough to even matter. 

[00:13:02] Giampaolo Bianchi: Well, that's the thing. You tend to notice your mistakes a lot more than others do because you're in your own head. If you make a mistake, it's very easy to say, oh no, everyone noticed, and I'm making a fool of myself. And then you'll realize that nobody even noticed that you, that you made a mistake.

[00:13:19] But staying calm when something goes wrong is easier said than done. To see how that principle plays out in action, we'll turn back to Annabelle. You and I have known each other for quite a while, and I truly appreciate our friendship. It's so much so that you were kind enough to share a very personal and stressful story that ended up as the epilogue to the book I released Think Faster, Talk Smarter. I'd love for people to hear that story from your mouth directly. Do you mind recounting a bit of what happened when you were called into action for the Commonwealth Games and how you had to speak spontaneously before a million plus people. 

[00:13:55] Annabelle Williams: Absolutely. I had been asked to commentate the swimming to the Commonwealth Games, so I had done a huge amount of research about the swimming, which meant that I had done absolutely no preparation on any other sport, and also hadn't had an opportunity to watch any of the first six days of the Commonwealth Games except for the swimming. The day the swimming program ended, I went home. I thought I was all done, and I woke up the next morning to like fifty thousand missed calls from the executive producer and she basically said, look. We want you, or please need you, to fill in for the primetime segment. It was, of course, an incredible opportunity. 

[00:14:32] I had never hosted a primetime segment before, but I had five hours to get my head around all of the content and the other sports. Plus I had no childcare for that day. Anyway, we walked on set and as we were about to go live, the producer said, have a look behind you and we have this big LED screen behind us. There were four images of different athletes, and we decided that I would speak about two athletes, and my co-host would speak about two athletes. And typically in live sport you don't use an auto queue, but on this particular occasion, I thought to myself, I've got so much in my head, I'm just for this opening segment, because I wasn't super familiar with the four athletes on the screen behind me. 

[00:15:14] I'm going to put what I wanna say about them on the teleprompter, on the auto queue. And we had the count down, ten, nine, eight, and we were live. I was welcomed onto the set and then my co-host read the parts that I had put on auto queue for myself. So the two athletes I was meant to covering, he read those scripts that I'd put on the auto queue. And I remember standing there thinking to myself, if somebody said, I will give you ten million dollars to remember which other two athletes are on the screen behind you, I couldn't. 

[00:15:47] I remember I thought, I have absolutely no idea what the, what, which other two athletes are on the screen behind me. And so I thought either one of two things is gonna happen. He will either just speak about all four athletes, or he will throw to me after he's read my two athletes. And the latter happened. So he threw to me. And I had to turn around and look at the screen behind me, and I saw that it was, from memory, beach volleyball and a hurdler. It was the men's beach volleyball. I knew that our women were doing very well. I didn't know exactly how the men had performed, and so I made some statement about how well were women had done and how like I was excited to see how the men were gonna go.

[00:16:27] And then with the hurdles, I knew we had this one hurdler who's quite well known, and she has this really interesting way that she warms up, she does this dance. And I spoke about that, not actually knowing whether or not she was in the race. Thankfully she was. Then I thought I knew that the next segment we were throwing to the commentators at the athletics. And so I remember saying something like, let's get to some people who know far more about athletics than I do. And I threw to them and I remember just thinking, oh my goodness. Like it felt like this total blur.

[00:16:55] Matt Abrahams: So how was it exactly that Annabelle was able to pull off this Herculean feat? 

[00:17:00] Annabelle Williams: I don't know what it is, but in really high pressure situations, especially live television, when you know there's really no choice, I actually become really calm. I don't know if it's because I have been an athlete and been in lots of high pressure situations. Or my upbringing. To those listening, I have a disability, I'm missing my left arm. And I've grown up with, you know, having to deal with certain challenges. But in that moment, I just thought to myself, there's no choice here. You've just got to do the best you can. It'll be over soon. Just go for it. And I was proud in hindsight how I handled that.

[00:17:32] Matt Abrahams: I think you should, well, one first, thank you for recounting that story. When you first told it to me, I was blown away and I think you remember I said, oh my goodness. That has to be the way I end my book. Because a book about spontaneous, I cannot imagine a worse situation of being in front of millions of people on live TV with nothing to say. What I find so amazing about that is in that moment what you did is you got centered when many of us would've gotten flustered. You were able to pull forward some things that you did know and articulate it well, and then move forward to a point where nobody could tell. I mean, if you're watching that segment, you can't tell you didn't know what you were supposed to be saying, which is a true testament to a professional.

[00:18:17] Okay. So now that you've heard the lessons and case studies from our coaches, it's time for some homework to help you put what you've learned into practice. We'll hear from Phyllis Kao, a Sotheby's auctioneer, who we first heard from in the previous episode of our miniseries. If you missed episodes one and two, we encourage you to go back and listen. In them, our coaching team tells us how we can prepare to speak spontaneously and the art of meeting the present moment. Phyllis's exercise takes us full circle by helping us reflect on how we did and recognize what we can improve on the next effort.

[00:18:55] Phyllis Kao: I think a really helpful exercise, that I was forced to do and now I force myself to do, is to watch video of myself and really just sitting down and I take notes. I critique myself on all the little things that bug me. I find it really helpful when you watch yourself because you think you're coming off one way and you realize you really aren't.

[00:19:16] Matt Abrahams: I also will watch myself. It was very hard for me to get comfortable doing that. I imagine that I am somebody else and that helps me not cringe, but you're right. We are not the best judges of our own communication because of our perspective on it. While we're saying it, it's hard to see how others see us. I am often relieved in what I see that it's, you know, I felt really nervous and it doesn't come off that way, or I felt I was speaking too quickly and maybe I wasn't. But sometimes I'll see things that I'm doing that absolutely I have changed as a result. So I, I will take that homework and double down on it. And it's great to hear that you employ that as well.

[00:19:54] Congratulations, you've completed our spontaneous speaking training. By now, you've hopefully learned the importance of preparation, ways you can better engage with your audience in the moment, and how to turn the inevitable mistakes and mishaps into moments of gold. Although our training has ended, I hope you'll think of this as just the beginning of your journey to improving your spontaneous speaking, whether it's in social situations or meetings with your boss. I invite you to continue practicing these skills and techniques from our wonderful coaching team. For even more resources and guidance, you can check out my book on spontaneous speaking. The title might sound a little familiar. It's called Think Faster, Talk Smarter. 

[00:20:33] This episode was produced by Aru Nair and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium podcast company. We'd also like to thank all of our incredible coaches for their help and advice. Annabelle Williams, Giampaolo Bianchi, Brad Rogers, Chris Voss, Peter Sagal, and Phyllis Kao. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. And check out FasterSmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings and more at FasterSmarter.io/premium.