The Perfectionist Trap: why we need to practice talking…
I watched a fantastic video recently about The Perfectionist Trap.
I’m certainly guilty of it.
The notion of looking at others success and enviously wishing you too were perfect at something.
As the video by ‘The School of Life’ explains, it’s not often we see the early drafts of those we admire. Their failures and false starts along their journey to success.
No-one ever clicked their fingers and was an expert architect, journalist, accountant, actor….. you get the picture.
To be great at something you first need to fail, over and over again.
To master a skill, you need to practice it.
The Perfectionist Trap (03:47 watch time)
Talking is a skill we don’t remember learning.
Everyone can do it and we do it every day, consequently, we believe we should be good at it.
But when we’re confronted with the task of public speaking, presenting or even being interviewed – whether it be to an audience of 1000 or 1 - many of us croak.
But hold on a minute.
If I hadn’t played say, tennis before, and decided to pick up a racket I wouldn’t expect to be serving aces would I?
So why should we expect to ace Communicating without practice?
Communicating and communicating well, is a skill like any other, and if you want to be great at it you have to practice.
My three tips for communicating effectively:
Know your audience and what they care about.
Keep it simple. Big words don’t make you sound smart, they make your audience switch off.
Less is more. Microsoft scientists found the average human attention span is 8 seconds. A goldfish's is 9.
Need I say more?
