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so in an improv scene if i make a mistake in the middle of a scene i don't stop the scene and then

apologize to my scene partner and turn to the audience and apologize to them or anything like

that we use it we keep on going with that thing and if we make a mistake in the scene we

turn it into something fun. And in podcasting, we don't do that. We stop, we might apologize to the

camera, and then we edit it all out in post. And when we're new to podcasting, many of us spend

hours editing out every breath or um or ah or some perceived mistake we made because we think that

it makes us look unprofessional if we don't or foolish or whatever it is. But psychology suggests

that we might have that thing backwards. And those are the very things that might be to our advantage

these days to our advantage on the internet because of all the generated content that is

filling up all the spaces that we're in. Welcome to the podcast performance lab. I'm your host,

Janda Han. In this show, we take the most effective tools from improv performance and

behavioral psychology and apply those things directly to your video and audio content.

Now, if you're a solo podcaster or a solo host of your show, you might feel a real legit kind of

cringe when you hear or see yourself mess up on your recording. And you're probably going to want

to cut that thing out. But when you start deleting those bits from your video, it actually starts

removing something that is pretty important for building up a relationship with your audience.

So you're going to give up that sort of element of connection if you cut all of those pieces out.

Now let's get into why your brain tricks you into this over editing yourself thing and how you can

use what's called the pratfall effect to make your audience trust you a little bit more because it's

just more honest by definition really first you need to understand the reason why you might hate

your own voice or your own mannerisms and you can be extra hard on these so-called problems

in yourself these perceived things and it comes down to a different concept actually it's not

Prattfall effect. It's called the beautiful mess effect. Now, this research was done by Anna

Brock of the University of Mannheim, and I'll link to the research and the articles about this thing

in the description. And this beautiful mess effect, it's highlighting a contradiction of sorts.

We actually see our own vulnerabilities as weaknesses, but those exact same things,

We see them in other people as strengths or like courage.

And this is happening because of something that's called the construal level theory.

And this is because when you're editing, you're operating at what's called a low level construal.

And that's when you're hearing all of those little things about yourself because you're so close to yourself.

You're hearing your breaths.

You're hearing the cadence of your voice.

You're hearing whatever little sounds that you don't like because you're just so close to it.

You're so close to yourself.

Now, low-level construal is kind of like bark on a tree.

You'll have to imagine it.

It's a whole bunch of those little details of the bark, the little crevices and the dirt or the moss on it.

I'll explain more in a second.

Now, your listener, however, is operating at a high level control.

Now, they're really distant from all of those kind of details, the little sounds in your voice or whatever the thing is in your head.

They're listening to what you're teaching them, for example.

They're taking the whole package in.

They're seeing the excitement on your face if they're looking at you or they're listening to the tone of your voice.

and they're not focused on those little details like the bark.

They're looking at, say, the entire forest as opposed to the bark of the tree.

Now, the odd listener might focus in on something like the bark,

the little details of your voice,

but those people are an anomaly, and you don't want to focus on the anomalies.

Now, when you over edit yourself, you're actually kind of editing out a part of your unique

personality. And you're doing this mostly to just kind of appease your own insecurities about

yourself. It actually has nothing to do with the audience. It's not helping your audience at all

that you obsess or remove every single little thing. Now, there's a caveat here, and this is

the Prattfall effect. Psychological psychology studies, they show that people who are seen as

highly competent already, they become more likable when they make these mistakes. So this is where

you can think of like a celebrity. They're just like us or people in your own life, like say a

professor who spills their coffee or something when they're giving a lecture. You're in the room,

you're watching them, but if the student next to you does that very same thing, now the professor

is seen as relatable or likable, but the student next to you is probably not seen that way. They're

just seen as actually messing up. So you need to establish your competence to an audience first.

Your content, for example, needs to be really good in the important ways, the things that matter, like the things that you're actually saying.

And once your authority is established in their minds, then mistakes or blunders or whatever they saw you do, that just signals to them that you're real.

Like it's that kind of parasocial thing, actually.

So there's balance to this.

The uncanny valley effect sort of comes into this as well.

The uncanny valley is that kind of unsettling feeling that we get when something looks or sounds human,

but it's just that tiny bit off, just a hair off.

Like you're watching AI-generated videos, for example,

you're probably feeling that uncanny feeling thing because of those tiny little mistakes that show up,

that show that that generated video is not actually real.

And now we can have the same kind of effect,

this uncanny valley happened,

if we over edit our own videos.

And that's because of your breath sounds

or the way that you're talking is just slightly off.

It's not quite realistic because there's so much editing.

Now this can happen also in live shows as well,

like webinars.

I went to this webinar where the person

had obviously done that particular webinar a million times,

and they were also reading a script on top of that.

So their reading just sounded so automated as a result

because they'd done it so many times.

It was just kind of too perfect.

It really took away from that presentation.

It was just slightly off because you're there wondering, maybe,

are you reading?

Well, I think you're reading,

And I think you've read this a million times.

This is just a webinar that you've been to.

We've all probably been to them where it's not scripted at all.

And somebody is just demoing their product or they're having a chat while they're doing something on the screen.

And that presentation wouldn't give uncanny valley at all.

Although they're all, you know, there's pros and cons to both of those.

Now, let's talk about the specific mistakes that you're making when you delete parts of your video,

like you're deleting mistakes from your videos. I'm talking about things like filler words or

pauses or breaths, that kind of thing. I'm not talking about if you cough or something like that,

you'll cut that part out. We're talking about the kind of things that you could potentially leave in,

but you're not. Now, we're taught in public speaking to just get rid of all of your filler

words. However, in conversations, I'm talking about like in-person conversations that you have

with a family member or a friend, those filler words actually serve a function when you speak,

and this is being researched as well. So research has shown that these kind of filler words like ums

or awes or pauses, they're actually used as signals in human speech. So they're like a signal

that you're making a complex thought, right? Like I had a little filler word in the middle

of that sentence. I was just kind of thinking about where I was going to go with it. But if,

say, you were trying to bring in a complex word that you don't commonly use, you might

have a little pause in there that actually signals to your listener that you're searching for

something. And you'll probably clock that thing as like, oh, that person is trying to think of a

particular word right now. So they're sending you that signal. I'm thinking about something.

And there's a lot of variation in these kinds of filler words and pauses. I use different filler

words and pauses and repeated words all the time. I discover new ones as I edit these podcast

episodes. And now, like when I'm doing that, my repeated words especially that I kind of use as

filler words sometimes, they really bug me a lot. But I will leave some of them in the videos. But

there is balance here. But when your listeners do hear those words that you're pausing for your brain

they might kind of perk up a little bit. Their attention, right? They're going to recognize that

you're searching for the right word, and maybe they're clocking you as coming up with like a

novel word, maybe, or a complex thought, and they should listen. They want to anticipate what you're

about to say. So a filler word or a filler like kind of expression, hand signals, they might also

mean that you are not finished speaking your phrase. Now that isn't relevant for these videos

because you're not actually here, but in person, that's the signal that a person might give to

another one. I'm about to say something else, so don't start talking quite yet. I'm not finished

with this thought. So humans are really used to these signals. And if you strip all of those signals

out, like every single filler word or pause, you're going to really destroy the natural

cadence of your speech. You're also removing that thinking time that your listener is really used to

using as part of conversational processes. They're losing that. So in your videos,

we're going to retrain your brain to stop kind of flinching when you make a mistake.

we're going to get really used to those things. Now balance again, as I mentioned, is really

important too, because you don't want too many filler words or too much pausing because that can

be distracting as well. So I'm going to share a strategy on how to balance these things. I'll do

that in another episode. So do make sure that you're signed up at stereoforest.com because I'll

send you all of these episodes and exercises written out in text in newsletters.

Knowing the science is one thing, but overriding your natural reactions, like when you stumble,

when you're recording is a whole other something something, I don't know. But in improv, we

encourage just rolling with the failures that you make in a scene. Now I'm going to link some

resources in the description about that as well. And I've made other videos on this failing and

how fun it is. Now we're those videos are more on the improv side of things. So you might not find

that as useful. But when things go wrong in improv, we don't deny it. We don't forget about that thing

or wipe it out of the scene or anything like that. We take that failure that somebody made,

we accept it and then we use it we use it in the scene and a lot of those failures they actually

are gifts to the scene because we can play with those gifts and we can make them part of the funny

part of the scene but to build this muscle for your podcast your show you can use a couple of

different exercises together to get used to this so you can use it as well and I'm going to call

this one a recovery drill and this is how you can do it you can do it on your own you don't need

any other people to practice this exercise it's a solo exercise so the first part of this exercise

is to just get used to flowing speech all right you're going to get used to just speaking

continuously without stopping no matter what happens you're going to do that for a few minutes

all in a row. And I'm going to encourage you as part of this process to record yourself

so you can get used to recording yourself as a rep. Sometimes it's a bit of a mental challenge to

know that the microphone is recording or the video is recording. So you're not allowed to stop

speaking for more than a second. All right. So watch the timer in whatever you're using to record

yourself. Or if you're not recording, set a timer on your phone. And when you speak, you just speak

whatever is in your head at the moment. Okay, so here's a demo. I'm just talking about whatever

is in my head, which surprisingly isn't much, or not surprisingly, depending on who you are out

there. I've got a camera there and a camera here and cameras over there and a lot of camera-ception

going on. This is stunning content, huh? So this exercise is really going to reduce that sort of

latency period between your thinking and your speaking, your brain to your mouth. It's going to

stop you from like filtering your own thoughts and sort of stopping and making big long pauses or a

bunch of pauses. It's going to also help with those filler words too. Now this exercise was inspired by

Julia Cameron, she uses this concept that I love called morning pages.

And morning pages are to help you with your creativity and your artistry.

In Julia's exercise, you're brain dumping whatever you're currently thinking onto the page you're writing.

But in this case, you're recording it as like a video or an audio file.

Now, a tip if you're trying this is if you're on Apple devices like an iPad or an iPhone,

the journal app is now available on the iPad as well.

So that's new.

The journal app has been around for a while,

but in either version,

you can record yourself in daily entries

and they have this audio video option.

So if you really get into this one,

you want to do reps like the morning pages thing

and do it every single day, get those reps in.

That's a really good app for it.

And I'm sure that there's other apps

that do the same thing, probably a thousand of them.

All right.

So the next part of this exercise is adding in those distractions.

So this is the really important part.

It's that stumbling and then the recovery that you make after it.

So once you're really used to recording yourself, maybe daily, you've recorded yourself a lot,

you're in the groove, you're getting used to it, you've got a habit, you're feeling good,

then you're going to start introducing a physical distraction.

And this is going to make it a little bit more complicated.

It's going to make it more likely for you to just kind of stumble or mess up while you're speaking

because you're doing something with your hands.

So you could be doing anything.

You could be like dribbling a basketball.

You could be folding your laundry.

You could be cooking something.

You could be making bread.

Or you could film something outside like you're walking down a path and, you know,

you're trying not to trip over your feet.

And while you're doing this activity, you're going to be pretty distracted by whatever the thing is that you choose.

But you're going to deliver a speech or a story, something that you know really well, and you're going to do that without stopping.

Whenever you get distracted, you trip over your feet, you're just going to keep going with your speaking.

And you can work that into what you're presenting if you want, but you just have to keep going.

You can call out that thing that just happened, but you have to keep the speech moving and keep that energy up as well.

It's kind of like a live stream or a webinar.

And it is really good practice for webinars and live streams as well.

So if you're creating a professional show or resources for your business, you can just kind of roll with whatever happens while you're recording.

And you're not going to be signaling to your listeners that you have like anxiety about the thing that just happened.

or you messed up.

And the audience doesn't really notice a lot of these mistakes anyways,

the ones that you perceive.

Or if they do perceive it,

they might even enjoy that kind of unexpected surprise

or the unexpected humanity in the middle of your video.

They are going to probably notice if you react in certain ways

with the mistakes like with anxiety,

if you do have a little bit of anxiety in there they might feel that discomfort as well but if

you just kind of recover and keep going they're probably going to like that amount of confidence

so this also creates that sort of live stream feel when you don't stop even if you're pre-recording

your videos or your episodes like this one you might kind of want that live energy in there

It kind of reads like I'm just talking to you right now in my office for real.

Well, there's probably a lot of awkward in this entire episode.

So aim for that connection instead of some kind of perfection, whatever perfection is,

because I can tell you, I don't really know what perfection is at all, but I really do

hope I figure it out one day.

So when you edit your next episode, I'm going to challenge you to leave in at least one of those mistakes.

Whatever you think a mistake is to you.

A pause or an um or whatever that kind of signals to your audience that you're thinking or you're stumbling over a thought

or you have to clarify something or you said a word wrong or whatever it is.

Leave one of those things in.

I'm leaving some stuff in this episode.

But you can leave in something that you recovered from really gracefully or quickly or whatever.

Make yourself look good.

But just see how that changes the feel of that part of the episode.

That piece that you would have cut out but didn't.

Because nobody is expecting perfection in these things.

They're not expecting a perfect recording.

I hope they're not.

Like if you are, maybe you're an anomaly.

Maybe. And you probably don't want a perfect episode anyways, according to that research,

if we go by the statistics. And you also, if you're making these episodes, you want to get

used to hearing your own voice the way it is, editing your voice or your face, whatever is

bugging you, and leaving those bits in, some of them in the recording that you might have cut out.

It's about balance.

You don't want to leave everything in.

You just don't want to trim it all out into uncanny valley territory.

And those exercises that I gave you there are a great way to practice

and start getting those reps in recording yourself.

So that's all I have for this one.

I'll see you in the next episode.

Bye for now.

You have been listening to the podcast Performance Lab.

This show was created, written, hosted, edited, and produced by Jen deHaan.

You can also find the video version of this episode on YouTube and contact information on Stereo Forest.

Find the links for both of those things in the show notes.

Thanks for listening.