Your message and other things you say

Got a bad haircut yesterday. It looks pretty weird. But in my world, the difference between a bad haircut and a good haircut is about 2 weeks. It’ll be fine.

But I hate it. It bothers me. I want so much to make sure everyone knows I hate it. That way I can make all the bad haircut jokes, and not have to endure such heat from them. But as I teach and speak, my audience who sees me for the first time (and probably those who already know me) likely don’t care — most won’t even know it’s bad, they’ll just assume I normally look like a wet rat by choice.

So I’m faced with three things to do about it as a speaker:

1. Feature it. Make note of it. Build it in to my content. Make it part of my routine. I can’t imagine why I’d do this over a marginal haircut.
2. Fix it. If it’s something that can be changed, then change it. If you drop the whiteboard marker, don’t draw attention to it, just bend over and pick it up. In the haircut case, unless I want to be bald or close to it (I don’t), this is not an option.
3. Forget it. This is the hardest thing for a speaker to do, because it is on our conscience. But incessant apologies or comments about something that don’t matter to our audiences is just distracting (remember Rule #1!). This seems like the best option for prickly hair, no matter how hard it is for me, the speaker.

When faced with something that is wrong, bad, annoying, or on our conscience,

Feature it, fix it, or forget it.