Episode 65: When Your Plan Falls Apart — The Recovery Framework

Your plan will fail. Your slides will freeze, your notes will vanish, your 30 minutes will get cut to five — and what saves you isn't being smart. It's knowing what to do in the half-second after everything goes wrong.

In this episode, Sam tells the story of losing the entire middle page of a graduation speech mid-delivery — and the split-second decision that saved it. From that moment he builds the Recovery Framework: a simple, repeatable way to keep your composure and finish strong when your plan falls apart.

In this episode:

• Why recovery is a trap — and what to protect instead
• The three moves: drop it, bridge (don't backfill), and land where you were headed
• How to anchor to your "buckets" and your through line so nothing knocks you off course

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

I began the graduation speech just like any other speech. I was feeling good about it. I was comfortable. And I had this speech particularly outlined a little more rigidly than what I am used to doing. The reason for that is if you heard my previous podcast about the graduation speech, I had never done one of these. I'd somehow managed to not do one, just like I've not done a best man speech. And it was one of those types of speeches that I never thought I'd have to do. So I wanted to make sure that I was somewhat rigid with regard to the timeline that the school had given. So I had given my speech to one of the administrators. It wasn't our fault what happened. I know I'm sure the speech was up there, but she put the speech, it was in three pages and not three full pages, but it was bullet notes and 50,000 point font because I'm blind and I'm older. Not old, but I'm older. So, and I was going through the speech. I had it all flowing pretty well. And I turned from page one and it went straight to page three. The second page was missing in action. I had a fraction of a second to make a decision. And that's the decision the decision that I'm going to help you make today. You see, today we're going to talk about what to do when your plan to speak is destroyed. And I've covered a lot of topics and I've danced around this one in particular in different contexts. But I want you to imagine that if you're speaking for any length of time as an executive or as a leader, or if you're kind of a person that has to do this on a regular basis, your plan is one day going to fail. Your slides are going to freeze, your video isn't going to play, your talk, which was originally slotted for 30 minutes, is going to be cut down to five. Whatever. Something is going to go wrong. Or you're going to lose your notes, like I did. So what today we are going to, what we're going to build today, I should say, is called the recovery framework. What do we do when things don't go the way they're supposed to go? Now, a couple things. I'm going to give you two principles before we give you the recovery framework. And then I'm going to explain to you why recovery is a trap. And then we're going to give you the actual framework on how to truly recover. So, first thing, number one, when something goes wrong, your goal is to protect what remains, do not recover what was lost. Protect what remains. Don't recover what's lost. If you spend your time trying to reignite that video or trying to get those slides back, or trying to figure out what point you missed that got you all in your head, the only thing that you're going to sacrifice is the time that remains. Keep in mind, and this is the second principle that will give you the permission to do this, the gap only exists in your brain. Your audience has no idea for the most part. Now, again, you might have a tech crew that saw your notes and saw that it all went to pot. Your audience, most of those who are listening, even if you're an executive and you're delivering this on a smaller scale to your team, they don't have access to all of your stuff. So if you're in a high pressure situation and you have to deliver, your audience doesn't see your gap. So in that moment, and that was a fraction of a second, I knew I had to either sit there and go, oh, and this is what a lot of people would do. Oh, and apparently, apparently it's cool. I'm missing my whole middle page. Now, I'm not saying it's wrong that I could have done that. I could have. It's not wrong, but it's not going to serve me for the remaining time. I only had a 10 to 15 minute window there. So for me to sit there and fuss with my papers or say, hey, you know, try to pull my phone out, I have this on my phone. Don't worry. I would have essentially laid at the altar of sacrifice the good that was left in that speech. And so what I chose to do was the middle got cut. I knew enough of it. I was pretty strong in remembering the points that I was making. But the problem and why I needed the notes was I had personal things written about the graduates under each of the points. And I had scripture written under each of the points. So if I were to go rogue and just throw some point in there with no scripture and no reference to the graduates, it would deaden that space for the rest of the outline because it would be inconsistent. So because of that, I made a quick decision just to make the cut. And it was good stuff too, but I had no choice. So I decided to act seamless as I could by going from one thing to the next thing. So this was the right decision, and I'm thankful to God that I was able to make it. And again, this isn't the first time something like this has happened to me, but I approached it with curiosity because I've been doing this for so long. I wondered, well, what do I do? And what's the right thing? And I realized that it was the right thing. Because here is what I've discovered in having everything go wrong for me, wrong sides, forgetting points, interruptions, all of that. Recovery is a trap. And here's why. Because number one, recovery becomes the central focus, not the audience. The recovery becomes the central focus and not the audience. And the second thing is that recovery eats the same memory and working RAM, mental stuff, as you focusing on being present and connecting with them. So you trying to recover is going to take you out of that moment. And it's going to make you look very in your head. You can't run both of those things at once. And then the final thing is pulling from whatever time you have doesn't revive the piece that's dead. It just destroys the piece that's next. Again, it doesn't revive the part of your talk that is destroyed, but it does destroy the piece that's next. I know I'm speaking a lot mechanically, but again, there's going to come a time when you're going to have to make a choice. Do I have to try to go and reconfigure my talk and try to find it and get my phone out and ask them to restart the slides and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? And there's a million other scenarios that we can run through and how to handle them. But you have to make a choice of doing the best you can in the moment of trying to figure this out. So, what do you do in order to have a recovery, not recovering material, but have a good recovery? Here are the three moves. We're going to cover these in short order. Drop it, number one. Drop it. Assume the piece that's missing is optional until proven otherwise. So I will often give you an example. When I'm speaking in the church, we'll often use videos. There'll be videos that we use, opening videos. There are videos that I'll use mid-sermon that illustrate points of the sermon. Sometimes there's videos that we use to close that illustrate points of the message or bring the message home. There's music that we'll use. There's cues that we'll have, all of those things. And every single one of those things, at one point or another, has gotten messed up. Maybe the video person was trying to, yeah, I'll give you a real example. One of the most recent ones was they were trying to play a video of mine, and I noticed the video wasn't coming on, and I'm like, okay, let's take a look at this video. But dum bum, nothing. Then I'm like, hey, let's take a look at this video, but dum bum, and nothing happens. And then I'm like, okay, any time for the video. And my limit is usually two to three. After that, I realized, oh, you know what? They'll probably get that video sorted out tomorrow. And then I described what the video was about and I moved on. The video was optional. And I will take a moment to tell you that if you are putting all of your eggs in the basket of something outside of you being able to deliver that talk, that's a lot of faith. So, meaning if my talk can only exist in the context of a video being played or music or a certain slide being able to be shared, you're putting your faith in the wrong system. So you want to be able to drop any of those things that fall to pieces and your notes. You have to look at, okay, if I couldn't get to those notes, if I had the note card, the note card is missing for the third point. You're simply going to pretend as if that was a completely disposable part of the message, and you're going to move on from that as quick as possible. All right. So drop it. That's the first thing. Next, bridge, don't backfill. Bridge, don't backfill. So the temptation is going to be I had XYZ prepared, and this was a part of this message, and blah, blah, blah. So what instead you're going to do is bridge to the next piece. Bridge to the next piece. This is not reconstruction. This is a quick construction to get you to the next thing that you are confident in delivering. This I was able to do in that graduation speech. So I had the choice. I had the last two sentences of the previous taught, the previous point there. I looked for the next point and it was gone. And then I looked in the middle of the page and saw the final point. So what I did, instead of saying, uh-oh, I missed this thing, I say, so the last thing we're going to go with is, or this thought brings me to your transition. If you have a transition like that in your back pocket, this enables your brain, some bandwidth, to catch itself up. If you can't feel comfortable taking a pause and moving into transition, what's going to happen is you'll find yourself hyper anxious about the fact that you just missed a big piece. So the bridge is important. And the bridge is what makes you look like a professional, as opposed to someone who's trying to backfill someone who's trying to get their content. And again, have I done a backfill? Oh my God. Yes, a million times. I've done all the things that I'm saying. This is someone that's been doing this a long time, but if you're new, you're going to want to backfill. You prepared, you knew what you were saying, you knew what pieces were going in that talk. So of course you're going to want to backfill. Of course, you're going to want to explain to your audience, to your team, to the people around you that this was supposed to be a part of it. But my encouragement to you is to memorize a bridge and to take that bridge to the next bit of content that you are confident about, or that is on the slides, or that is a part of the next presentation, whether it's to you or to somebody else, just move along. I have never, never, and I mean absolutely never had an instance where someone complained about my talk or my meeting running short. I've never had that. Never in the history. I've been preaching and I've been doing announcements and I've been speaking from a pulpit for over two decades. I've never had someone stand at the door and say, I really wish you would have just given us maybe about two more minutes of this. No, people typically are happy when things go shorter. So don't be afraid if you messed up what was going on in the middle of the meeting to say, okay, well, the last thing I want to say, and I'm going to give you an extra 10 minutes of your day as a gift. This is what we're doing. And then bridge to whatever the next thing is. So the bridge is not a reconstruction, it is a quick construction to the next thing that you're confident on in your talk. Now, the last thing, the last move is you want to land where you were originally headed. So I do not like memorizing talks. I don't encourage you to memorize a talk. I don't encourage you to script a talk. I know there are some of you that might be speaking on the regular, and you do a phenomenal job with a scripted, like this to this, to this, or manuscripted talk. For most people, that doesn't work. And I just we could talk about memorization on another point. But what I would suggest that you memorize is how the talk begins and how the talk ends. And when I say memorize, I'm not saying word for word, but you want to know where you're going. You want to know where it's going to land, what the last thing is. So thankful to God that in this graduation speech I did, I had memorized the last bit of illustration. I had a closing illustration about seasons. And I had them committed to memory. So what I did was I accessed where I was heading and I let that fuel me to get through that bit in the middle. And so I knew where I was heading, I knew where I was going, I was confident in that. And in my mind, my mind just picked that piece up and started to run with it so that the people in the audience didn't think there was a problem. And if anybody was there, I don't think that you would have thought there was a problem, but my brain, I was kind of low-key freaking out. So the the beauty of this is you know where you're headed. You know where your talk is inevitably going to go. But if you mess up the middle part, you could always land early. This is like the illustration that people have used when it comes to building a business or when it comes to a life plan, is you have a map. Let's say I live in Pittsburgh. So that's where I live in western Pennsylvania. So I live in western Pennsylvania. There is a map that I could open, or I could use Google Maps or Waze or any other navigation app. And let's say I wanted to plot out how to get to New York City. So I plot out and say it takes five and a half hours, six hours to get to midtown Manhattan. I have it plotted out. As long as I know I'm going to New York City, if I take a detour along the way, and let's say I get lost, which I have, one time my wife and I, we we drove to New York City, and we had in our navigation, and this is, oh man, this is gonna make me sound so old, but it was before you could access navigation on the phones really well. They were just starting to do that. So I had a a regular GPS that you had to hook up to the to the car like a caveman. Oh my goodness. And the navigation was put in. I had accidentally, and I might have been my wife, it was probably her, but no, it actually was probably me. I had accidentally selected as an option no toll roads. Well, between Pittsburgh and New York City, there's a handful of toll roads. Well, I put this in, and it took us about six hours instead of five hours or whatever it was, seven hours instead of five and a half hours, whatever it was. It added time. And we went through all these back roads and countrysides, and we went through state college. And I'm I said, this is weird because I don't recall seeing that we were going to go through state college to get to New York City. And it was weird because I felt like it was off. Well, it wasn't until we were almost in Manhattan that I realized that that setting had been clicked, that we were avoiding all toll roads. So my point is it didn't matter because we ended up landing. We ended up getting there. And we got there, it took a little bit longer, but we got there. So as long as you know where you're going in a talk, if you veer off or if something happens, as long as you know where that landing place is, you can always navigate yourself to it if something knocks you off. I hope this is helpful. All right. So a couple things that will also help you that I, again, I would suggest that might be useful. So here's some other suggestions. Memorize, and I've said this a lot, and my clients seem to like this, so I'm I'm using it a lot. Memorize your buckets and not your points. So you know you have bucket A, bucket B, bucket C. You kind of know what's going on in each of those buckets, and that becomes essentially the things that you focus on memorizing. It helps you when you know, ooh, okay, I might have messed up bucket B, but bucket C is where we're gonna land and I'm gonna spend the line share of my time on bucket C. You can do that. The second thing is you can memorize what I call the spine. This would be what people that are speech writers or copywriters, they would call this the through line. What is really undergirding each part? Like, what's the main emphasis of this whole entire talk that is a part of this? So let me try to give you an example of somebody famous. Um, so Simon Sinek, if you have ever watched anything of his or you know anything about him, he has a famous talk called Start with Why. And he has a book called Start with Why. And what's the point of the book? The whole point of the book is that your why is so important. It's important to your company, it's important to you as a person. And so the whole point is know your why. That's the through line. So no matter what he says, as the branches that come off of that through line, the through line is remember your why. Know what the purpose is, know what the point is. If the branch falls off, the through line doesn't change. We just move to the next branch, we move to the next illustration. So you can memorize that through line, and that would be the thing, the one thing that you want your audience to get, or the one thing you want your team to do, or the one thing that you're trying to convey to the group of people who you're speaking to. That through line is immutable. It doesn't change regardless of what's going on inside that talk. So the through line keeps you anchored. Oh, I kind of got off track. But you know what? We have to start with why. Uh whatever the through line is, and that's really important. So that's another way to look at it if you don't like the bucket system that I have where you memorize components of kind of rough subjects, knowing that there's one central theme of your talk and anchoring yourself to that will help you if things go south. So all of these things are tips and tricks because you might say, and you might rightly so say, well, Sam, you know, it went really south and you don't know what that's like. I don't, I don't know, I am not clairvoyant enough to know everybody's situation. I don't know your story, I don't know all the details of your talk, but this is what I do know. The audience doesn't know where you're going. The audience doesn't care about you forgetting a point. The audience cares that you're present and that you're focused on them. They need to know that you're focused on them. Because if they think you're not, they're gonna that's not gonna pass a smell test and people are going to tune out. And so if you're in your head, if you're focused on you, if you're worried about what's happening, people are gonna notice and it's to your detriment. So you have just experienced a setback and it's not the end. Keep in mind it's gonna happen, and if it happens again, that means you're on the right track, you're doing something right. Reps are gonna cause some bumps in the road, and that's okay. Now, for those of you that need help getting to navigate those bumps in the road, I'd love to coach you. In fact, on my website, I have a quiz asking you how confident you are in terms of your own communication. And that quiz is samuellinton.com slash audit. Go ahead and take that quiz and let us know how confident you are, and then you'll be prompted to book a session with me where I get a chance to hear a little bit about what you've learned and see some ways that I could help you. It's risk free. You're not gonna have to buy anything. Of course, I'm gonna tell you what I offer and maybe give you some pointers, but I would really love to be a person that you use to help make you the best version of yourself as a communicator. So, until next time, thank you for tuning in, and we'll see you soon.