How do we stop from judging ourselves so much? One big technique that is surprising in its simplicity is that we can give ourselves permission to do what needs to be done. Nothing more, nothing less – rather than striving to do it right, we focus only on relaying the information we have to our audience. This technique is actually a core tenet in the world of improvisation. Great improvisers get over the hump of their perfectionist tendencies by telling themselves that “good enough is great” and that they should “dare to be dull.”
As they know, the more we can dare to be dull, the greater the chances we’ll be anything but dull – because we will be communicating using our full cognitive resources. “‘Be obvious’ is the most powerful, creative mantra that there is,” improvisation expert Dan Klein told me. “When you’re trying to be original, you sound like everyone else trying to be original. But when you’re obvious, you’re yourself. And that’s what’s genuine.”
Entertainment executive Steve Johnston served as president and managing partner of comedy icon Second City for almost 20 years and now helps run Mindless Inc. an academy that uses applied and freestyle improvisation methods to enhance mental fitness. He observes that we tend to think we must come up with the Big Idea when we speak, contributing something important, beautiful, or transcendent – what he likens to a cathedral. But providing the building block of a conversation – the brick – also matters. We serve as bricks by waiting, listening, and at times offering up logical connections between others’ ideas. We don’t have to say something original or pathbreaking every time. It’s enough – and sometimes uniquely powerful – to help keep a conversation going and connect the pieces. Don’t strive to be a cathedral. Focus on being as useful a brick as you can be.
Cultivating dullness can feel odd at first, even a little scary. When I invite Stanford students to dare to be dull, they look at me and gasp. Nobody in their lives has ever told them to do this. But suspending judgment and ceding a bit of control is precisely what these students require to do better with spontaneous communication. They already have intelligence, motivation, and diligence. The next step for them to improve their communication is to take some of the precious cognitive resources they were spending in the dogged pursuit of perfection and redirect them to being present and engaged in the task at hand.
This shift takes effort at first, which seemingly contradicts my point that this is about using less energy. But students find that their communication does become smoother and more authentic with practice. Remember, there’s no right or wrong way to communicate, only better and worse ways. Shifting from doing it right to just doing it reduces the pressure we feel. It allows us to focus less on the best possible way of communicating and simply allows us to put things in our own words and terms. Our communication becomes easier, less cognitively demanding, and more unique to us. We can focus on what needs to be done rather than diverting some of our bandwidth to judging what we’re doing.
Once we’ve granted ourselves permission to engage without obsessing over our performance, we can begin to free ourselves of the pressure to avoid making errors. To embrace mistakes, we can learn to adjust how we think of them – not as the opposite of success, but as the means to it. When Stanford marketing professor S Christian Wheeler appeared on my podcast, he remarked that mistakes and failures are a natural and essential part of the learning process.
As toddlers and small children, we think nothing of making mistakes. We’re always messing up the simplest of tasks – walking, using a spoon, tying our shoes. As adults, we distance ourselves from failure, and in turn, prevent ourselves from learning and growing. “We need to recognise that failure is a great thing,” Wheeler says, “because failure suggests that we are operating at the outside of our abilities and that we have some skills that we can acquire to better adapt to our circumstances.”
We can actively dial down our reflexive judging and evaluation by making a choice to practice accepting and even embracing mistakes when they happen. Stressing over every little mistake we make – or might make – is mentally taxing. I find it helpful to envision mistakes as “missed takes” in the making of a film. When a crew films a scene, they will often do several versions or “takes.” They might do a close-up instead of a distant shot, have the actors stand instead of sit, have them modulate their tone, and so on. They do this not because any one take is right or wrong, but because the director and crew want to broaden their options and make sure they didn’t miss any potentially great but unforeseen ways of rendering the scene. They seek out variety – takes that might be more creative, unique, or imaginative.
We can think of our communication situations as opportunities to try out possible approaches (more on this in the next chapter). When we take the pressure off each interaction, each encounter becomes just another “take” among many, one that helps illuminate what better communication might look like. Mistakes in this vein can focus our efforts. Rather than diminishing us, they can empower us and put us on a path to become better communicators. Reframing errors as “missed-takes” can be incredibly powerful, and not just in communication. As an avid practitioner of martial arts, I once went through a period when I hit a wall – metaphorically, not physically – and didn’t know what to do. I had reached a certain level of proficiency, but I wasn’t improving further.
A big problem, it turned out, was the way I was punching. In my drive to deliver the ideal punch, I was moving my body in a way that limited the power of my punches. My punches might have looked good, but they lacked enough oomph. To solve this problem, I allowed myself to focus on missed-takes. Deviating from what I thought was the perfect form, I experimented with different ways of moving my body while punching. With each shot, I noted how I felt and the results I obtained. Some of my adjustments didn’t help – I would feel pain in places where I wasn’t supposed to, or the force of my punch would remain the same or even decline. I set aside each missed-take and experimented with other adjustments.
Over time, as these experiments continued, I discovered a way of aligning my body while punching that allowed for much more force. My form wasn’t perfect in conventional terms, but it worked for me. Only when I began to view mistakes as invaluable parts of a larger learning process did I improve. In professional contexts, we can accept or welcome in mistakes by publicly celebrating failures and working systematically to learn from them.
A software company where I worked held what they called “Failure Fridays.” Each Friday, the whole company would enjoy a free lunch together. Individuals would take a few minutes to share a failure they had experienced, and leaders would bestow an award for the “best” failure. The point was to normalise failures so as to encourage risk-taking and also to encourage teams to learn from mistakes. Critically, the winning failure couldn’t be one that others had already made. Failures were valuable, but only if we took the time to learn from them.
Excerpted with permission from Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the Spot, Matt Abraham, Pan MacMillan India.