Embarrassment has a surprisingly short shelf life when everyone is laughing with you.

Yesterday, I was Toastmaster at my club meeting, and the theme was “Game for a Laugh.”

There were bad jokes, terrible puns and playful introductions, but some of the biggest laughs came from the things that went wrong.

Yes, I stumbled over a few words and mistimed a few lines and, more than once, found that the joke was very definitely on me. I could have tried to cover it up. But when I laughed it off, the mistake lost its sting, the audience relaxed, and so did I.

It made me wonder: what happens when you stop treating every mistake as a threat to your credibility?

Perhaps the people around you relax too, because they realise they don’t have to pretend to be perfect either. That’s the essence of humility, one of the principles in my HACKS Code.

We spend a lot of energy trying to protect the perfect image of ourselves, especially when we are leading, presenting or speaking in public. But credibility does not come from appearing flawless. Sometimes it comes from being comfortable enough to say: “Yes, sometimes I get it wrong. Shall we carry on?”

Being able to laugh at yourself makes you more human, and people tend to trust the human in you more than the performance in you.