Own Your Mistakes to be Re-Markable

I was doing a storytelling presentation recently at a local elementary school, for its “Communication Celebration.” Instead of bringing in a PowerPoint, or showing them a bunch of web work, I decided to do a 30-minute workshop on what makes stories “work.”

The workshop is based on the idea that you start with a core – the essence of the story – and flesh it out from there.

• Tell a story in one sentence.
• Tell the same story in 30 seconds.
• Tell the same story in 90 seconds.

When I have done this workshop with other audiences where there’s been more time, a peculiar thing happens. People get the one-sentence and 30-second versions right, but they’re so fearful of not filling 90-seconds that they fail to come in under three minutes!

On this day, there wouldn’t be time to go with the full 90-seconds, but the principle was the same.

Stretching Beyond the Period

The exercise involves me moving around the room, and hitting up everyone with a sentence. This engages everyone, and gives me an opportunity to react to the suggestions as they are made. The end result is to find a sentence that has enough “hooks” in it that we can better flesh it out.

“The girl went to the park” is rather pedestrian.

“The girl walked to the park” is less pedestrian, except for the literal part where is is moreso.

“Ashley walked to the park, where she found an empty purse, car keys and a half-empty Diet Coke.” Now we have some hooks:

• active verb
• a character with a name
• details
• mystery
• in media res

Once you find the hooks, you can encourage the group to fill-in-the-blanks. It’s an exercise in bridging.

So there I stand in front of a group of 4th-grade students, when a girl gives me quite possibly the best starting sentence I have ever heard for this exercise. Better than any of the ones I heard from the many adults who have been through it.

I jumped up to the board and started writing it down, to the howls and shrieks of the students.

Permanent Record

At this point, you’d expect me to tell you the sentence. I don’t remember it, because it never made it to the board. Only the first few letters did, before the students pointed out that this was not a dry-erase board, but a rather expensive interactive touch screen (a Promethean, if you must know.)

So I did what any self-respecting facilitator would: improvise.

On the real dry-erase board, I wrote:

The idiot substitute teacher wrote on the expensive board.

Was it as good a sentence as the one the girl gave me? Not hardly. But it was instantly better, because 30 children were now engaged with the content. They all could relate to what was being discussed, and we ended up spinning that story out to a nice little couple of paragraphs.

Don’t Erase. Be Re-Markable.

When you make a mistake in a presentation, you are often the first one to know. Many times, you are the only one to know. Have you ever seen a speaker get so flustered because he inadvertently left out a point? Unless that point is the single-most crucial thing you could say, you can bring it up in the end, or even save it for part of an answer to a question. Nobody will ever know that it wasn’t supposed to be that way unless you tell them.

I didn’t try to hide my mistake. I owned it. It became part of the program, and apparently is left a mark. Not on the board (which was fixed,) but with the students.