Oh, The Embarrassment! (And The Engagement)


You know that feeling when you're talking to a group of people, quite passionate about the topic, and suddenly your brain resets? You have no idea what you were about to say. Total blank. Especially when it happens in front of a class or on a live broadcast, you feel an immediate flush of embarrassment and confusion. I know it well.

What to do? Own up and share your predicament. Everyone messes up at one time or another. What you'll discover is that people will rush to help you recover, to rescue you. (Dare I say Canadians are particularly good at this?) Suddenly, whatever you were talking about has become a shared experience, not just a discussion.

I was reminded of this embarrassment factor while watching a Facebook Live where my friend and colleague, Anita Kirkbride, momentarily lost her focus... and gracefully recovered. Later in the discussion, she talked about how the fear of embarrassment shouldn't keep us from doing our own social media marketing.

Embarrassment happens to everyone. And so it can be an engaging shared experience wherever it happens - online or off.

As an aside, if you're teaching a class when this happens, it turns out to be a great way to review the discussion up to that point. This I know from experience.

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Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 6, 2018 at 1:29 PM

    Sometimes you get so far into the details of the story, and trying to tell them everything about the story, you just forget the point you wanted to make in the first place. It does happen to everyone, so why get embarrassed?

    ReplyDelete

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