Be the Duck: The Key to Calm

Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Robert Graham of GrahamComm.

January 10, 2007: Apple CEO Steve Jobs was rolling out the iPhone at MacWorld. It was an event that, as he correctly predicted, would “reinvent the phone.” A third of the way through his keynote, however, his slides froze. He tried his clicker. He tried his other clicker. He went to his laptop. Nothing helped.

Most people, if rolling out a franchise product in front of thousands of people and something went wrong, would panic. But Jobs is a master. He casually said, “Guys, the slides are stuck.” Then he made a joke about “Somebody backstage is scrambling,” which everyone knew to mean, “Somebody is fired.”

Next, he launched into a story of a prank he and Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak used to pull in high school. They had invented a TV jammer and would wander the dorms of UC Berkeley with it in their pockets. They would go into dorm rooms where people were watching Star Trek. At the critical time in the episode, Woz would “jam” the signal and the TV would go to static. Someone would jump up in a panic and adjust the rabbit ears, and when they were in their most awkward position, standing on one leg leaning over the back of the TV, Woz would un-jam it, and Spock would return. The adjuster feared that if he moved, he'd lose the picture again, and would stand on one leg for the rest of the show.

By the time Jobs finished spinning the tale, the slides were fixed, and he seamlessly carried on with his now historic keynote.

What does a Steve Jobs keynote have to do with you and me? What he displayed in that crucial moment was calm. He was calm when by all rights he should have panicked.

There are many instances in professional and personal life where something goes wrong, and our instinct is to panic:

• Your projector freezes.
• You lose your place in the presentation and have no idea what to say.
• Someone asks a difficult or antagonizing question in a meeting, and all eyes are on you.
• You get an angry or emotional call from a client.
• Your wife asks you what you do all day at work.

Whatever happens, if you want to give an air of calm, poise and professionalism, you must be the duck. Picture a duck swimming across a pond; it glides across the water effortlessly. Under water, however, its feet are paddling like mad.

When presenting, your mind is like the duck’s feet. At any given point in a presentation, you are thinking about five or six different things (your content, the slides, your delivery, the person texting, the noise from the next room…). Inside, you feel that people can read your mind; they know how nervous you are and are judging you harshly.

But they can’t, and they don’t, and they aren’t. You remain calm. You pause to collect your thoughts. You make a self-deprecating joke that breaks the tension. You admit that you don’t know the answer to the question and promise to get back to the hostile questioner with the answer.

And you move on. If you’ve ever seen yourself present on video, then you know the difference between how you feel (horrible, nervous, panicky) and how you appear. Usually, you appear much calmer than you feel.

Be the duck. Don’t make a big deal of the situation. If you’ve lost your place, choose something to say; they have no idea what you were going to say. Refocus and move on, because perception is reality. What’s real for your audience is not the panic you feel, but the calm, poised professional they see in front of them.

An entertaining video of Steve Jobs making dozens of blunders over the years.

photo credit: Danny Novo and brendan.lally.