There is an old expression that I first heard from a colleague in the consulting world, applied to presentations that had hidden weaknesses: “Pardon me, your slip is showing.” The reference is to an undergarment visible beneath a dress — something the wearer cannot see but everyone in the room can. Something that undermines the entire carefully constructed appearance. Something that nobody will tell you about because the social rules prevent it, so you walk around all evening with your slip showing, believing you look flawless.
Performers walk around with their slips showing all the time. We all do. The question is whether we are actively looking for the slip, or whether we have decided we would rather not know.
I spent a long time in the second camp. Not consciously — I did not wake up and decide to avoid honest self-assessment. But the default mode for most of us is protective. We evaluate our performances by looking for what went right, not what went wrong. We replay the big reactions, the smooth moments, the places where the audience was with us. We file those highlights in our memory and let the weak moments fade.
This is natural. It is human. And it is a nearly perfect system for guaranteeing that you never get significantly better.
The Ego’s Defense System
I came across a masterclass by Ralphie May, the stand-up comedian, while studying how comedians handle the brutal feedback loop of live performance. One thing that struck me was his attitude toward failure. “You can learn more from bombing than you can from killing,” he said. He talked about bombing not as something to be feared or avoided but as something to be studied. When a joke dies on stage, the comedian who investigates why it died gets better. The comedian who files it under “tough crowd” learns nothing.
This idea — that failure is a better teacher than success — is obvious in the abstract. Everyone nods along when they hear it. Yes, of course, we learn from our mistakes. But in practice, most of us do everything we can to avoid sitting with our failures. We look away. We rationalize. We blame external factors. The ego has a defense system that is extraordinarily sophisticated, and its primary function is to protect us from the discomfort of seeing ourselves clearly.
I know this because I watched my own ego defense system operate in real time for years.
After a show that had obvious problems — a routine that fell flat, a volunteer interaction that went sideways, a closing that did not land — my first instinct was never to examine what went wrong. My first instinct was to find the explanation that made it not my fault. The audience was distracted. The room was too large. The sound system was poor. The event ran late and people were tired.
Some of these explanations were occasionally true. A bad room really can undermine a performance. But I was reaching for them reflexively, before I had even considered the possibility that the problem was me. External attribution was my ego’s first line of defense, and it was remarkably effective at keeping me comfortable and stagnant.
Flipping the Question
The shift happened gradually, but there was a specific moment I can point to. I had performed at a company event in Linz — a product launch, maybe eighty people, good energy in the room. The show went well by most measures. Solid reactions, no disasters, client was happy. But there was a moment in the middle of the set where I lost the room for about fifteen seconds. Not catastrophically. Just a subtle drift of attention — the kind of thing that an audience member would not consciously notice but that I could feel from the stage.
After the show, I did my usual evaluation. The show went well. That middle section was a little soft but nothing major. Overall, good.
Then I caught myself. I was asking the wrong question. I was asking “how good was this?” and arriving at the comfortable answer of “pretty good.” What if I asked a different question instead?
What is wrong with this?
Not “was it good?” but “where are the flaws?” Not “did it work?” but “what is not working?” Not “how do I feel about it?” but “what would a hostile critic notice?”
The moment I flipped the question, the middle section stopped being “a little soft” and became a specific problem with a specific cause. I was doing a transition that involved putting one set of materials down and picking up another, and during that transition I was saying nothing interesting. I was filling air with a stock line I had used dozens of times, and the line was no longer doing any work. It was a verbal placeholder, and the audience could feel it. They did not know they could feel it. But their attention drifted for fifteen seconds because for fifteen seconds, nothing worth paying attention to was happening.
That is a fixable problem. But I only found it because I asked “what is wrong?” instead of “how good was it?”
The Consultant’s Quality Audit
In my consulting work, we have a concept called the pre-mortem. Before launching a project or presenting a deliverable, the team sits down and imagines that the project has failed. Not might fail — has failed. The task is to work backward from failure and identify what went wrong.
This is a psychologically clever tool because it reverses the direction of the ego’s defenses. When you ask “what might go wrong?” the ego protects you by minimizing risks. Everything will probably be fine. But when you ask “the project has failed — why?” the ego is disarmed. It cannot protect you from something that has already happened, even hypothetically. So you find yourself generating honest assessments of weaknesses that you would otherwise downplay.
I started applying this to my performances. Before a show, I would imagine that the show had bombed. Not a slight disappointment — a genuine failure. Then I would work backward. Why did it bomb? What specific moment was the breaking point? Was it the opening? The transition? The closing? A particular interaction with a volunteer?
This exercise consistently surfaced things I had been ignoring. A routine that I kept in the set because I liked it, even though it never generated the reactions I wanted. A habit of rushing through a particular reveal because I was secretly not confident in the moment. A tendency to start the show with too much energy, which made me seem nervous rather than excited.
These were slips showing. And I only saw them because I deliberately looked.
Why We Protect the Ego
I want to be honest about why this is hard. It is not just laziness or lack of discipline. There is a genuine psychological cost to constantly asking “what is wrong with my work?”
Performing is vulnerable. You stand in front of people and say, essentially, “watch me.” You put your creativity, your skill, your personality on display. The audience’s response — laughter, silence, attention, boredom — is a direct evaluation of you as a person, at least that is how it feels. When the response is positive, the relief is enormous. When it is negative, the pain is real.
Asking “what is wrong?” means voluntarily seeking out the pain. It means looking for the negative responses. It means focusing on the moments where people were bored rather than the moments where they were delighted. It means choosing discomfort over comfort, evidence over comfort, growth over stability.
Most people, most of the time, choose comfort. This is not a moral failing. It is a rational response to a psychologically threatening situation. The ego’s defense system exists for a reason — it protects us from being overwhelmed by negative self-evaluation. Without some ego protection, performers would be paralyzed by self-doubt.
The trick is finding the middle path. Enough honesty to drive improvement. Not so much that it becomes self-destruction. I will talk more about this balance in the next post. But for now, the point is that the default is too little honesty, not too much. Most performers are nowhere near the danger zone of excessive self-criticism. They are deep in the comfort zone of selective self-evaluation, seeing what they want to see and explaining away the rest.
The Active Search
The “slip is showing” mindset is not about being down on yourself. It is not about deciding that everything you do is bad. It is about conducting an active search for problems, with the understanding that problems found early are problems that can be fixed before they matter.
I think of it like a software developer running tests before releasing code. The developer does not run tests because they believe their code is bad. They run tests because they know that all code has bugs, and bugs found before release are infinitely cheaper to fix than bugs found by users in production. The mindset is not pessimistic. It is professional. It acknowledges reality and works within it.
The reality for performers is that every show has flaws. Every routine has moments that could be better. Every interaction with an audience has beats that did not land as well as they could have. This is not because we are bad performers. It is because performing is complex, live, and imperfect. The performers who get better are the ones who actively search for the imperfections and address them. The performers who stagnate are the ones who wait for perfection to arrive on its own, which it never does.
The Practice of Looking
Here is what the active search looks like in practice, for me.
After every show, before I allow myself to replay the highlights, I ask: What would I cut? If I had to remove one minute from this set, which minute would it be? The answer to that question always points to the weakest material, because the weakest material is the most expendable.
Then I ask: Where did I feel the audience drift? Not where I think they drifted — where I felt it. From the stage, you develop a sense for the room’s attention. It is not always accurate, but it is a data point. When I felt the attention waver, what was I doing? Was I in a transition? Was I in a procedural section? Was I telling a story that went on too long?
Then I ask: What surprised me? Any moment where the audience’s response was different from what I expected is a moment worth examining. A bigger laugh than anticipated might mean I have stumbled onto something I should develop. A smaller reaction than anticipated might mean the setup is not doing its job. A moment of confusion where I expected clarity means my scripting needs work.
And finally, the hardest question: If I were watching someone else perform this exact show, what would I think? This question requires imagining yourself as an audience member, which is difficult because you know everything that is happening from the inside. But the attempt is valuable. When I watch another performer and notice that their pacing is off, I am being objective. When I perform and my pacing is off, my ego tells me it is fine. The question “what would I think if I were watching someone else?” bypasses the ego just enough to let some objectivity through.
Building the Habit
The slip-is-showing mindset is a habit, not a personality trait. I was not born with it. I had to build it deliberately, against the resistance of my own comfort-seeking brain.
The way I built it was through routine. After every show, the same questions. After every recording review, the same focus on weaknesses before strengths. After every rehearsal, the same active search for what is not working before celebrating what is.
Over time, the habit becomes less painful. Not painless — there is always a small discomfort in confronting your own flaws. But the discomfort becomes familiar, and familiar discomfort is manageable. The first time you watch a recording and see yourself fidgeting, it is mortifying. The twentieth time, it is just information. The emotional charge dissipates as the practice becomes routine.
And the payoff compounds. Every flaw you find and fix is one less problem undermining your performance. Over months and years, the accumulation of small fixes produces a significant improvement in overall quality. Not because you had one big breakthrough, but because you had a hundred small corrections, each one triggered by an honest observation that your ego would have preferred to ignore.
The Performers I Admire
The performers I admire most — and I am talking about the people I study, not just the people I enjoy watching — share one quality that has nothing to do with talent or technique. They share a willingness to be dissatisfied.
Not permanently dissatisfied. Not self-destructively dissatisfied. But constructively dissatisfied. After a show that went well, they are the first to say “the middle section needs work.” After a standing ovation, they are thinking about the moment in the third routine that was two seconds too long. They take the applause and the positive feedback, they appreciate it, and then they go looking for the slips.
This willingness is not natural. It is cultivated. It is a discipline that gets easier with practice but never becomes automatic. The ego never stops defending. The comfort zone never stops beckoning. The active search for flaws is always a choice, and it is always the harder choice.
But it is the choice that makes the difference. Between the performer who is the same this year as last year and the performer who is measurably better. Between the performer who believes their own press and the performer who checks the press against the evidence. Between the performer whose slip is showing and the performer who already found it, fixed it, and moved on to the next one.
Pardon me, your slip is showing.
The question is: are you willing to look?