I conducted a new program this week for a group of professionals. Afterwards I gave myself a solid “B.” Not bad but not great.

On the plus side, the program immediately engaged the audience through some good story telling, some small group participation activities, and some large group sharing. Everybody, including me, was having a good time.

As I started to drill down into my content, I began to realize that I was succumbing to one of my greatest speaking faults…trying to give people too much information in too short period of time.

I was intentional about my outline for the program but as I proceeded towards the end, I realized I had erred in my approach, but after sitting down and detailing where I had gone wrong, I realized that I had taken a bit of a risk in how I approached the program and that I had been wrong. “Ok, no big deal, so some of these folks probably didn’t feel like they got from the program what they were looking for, but hopefully they received some tidbit that helped them in their role,” I told myself.

Learning from my mistakes, I redid my outline (as I think this is still a great topic to speak on) and I am preparing to share these ideas with other some client companies in the next several weeks.

Most of our errors are not life critical but we often critical of ourselves over seemingly small matters. Being resilient means recognizing them, owning them, understanding the errors, making corrections, and then moving on. As one my teachers, Cynthia Winton-Henry says about performance, Get On, Get Off, Get Over It.

© Richard Citrin, All rights reserved, 2017

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