Not knowing how to handle the heat

Episode nine. Episode nine. That's right, episode nine. Out of the 20 biggest mistakes, all presenters, facilitators, trainers make sales, presenters make that, blow up their presentations, kill their sales, and how to avoid all of it. And hopefully out of the other episodes, you've got some amazing tips that are making a big difference both online and offline. Okay, so this is episode nine. And this is the worst nightmare, worst nightmare for every presenter, anybody that's ever got in front of a room. As a matter of fact, I'll tell you that it's this potential error or the fear of making this error that prevents most people from ever doing any kind of public speaking ever in their entire lives, and that is not knowing how to handle the heat. What I mean by heat. What I mean by heat is what happens in a presentation if somebody literally starts to give you grief, pushes back, doesn't agree, actually overtly wants to argue with you in front of the group, whether it's online or offline. And now that can be. If you're not prepared for that, it could be pretty embarrassing. It could be pretty embarrassing. And it's why? Well, because fear greater than death is public humiliation, looking like an idiot in front of other people. Now, couple things to remember. Don't avoid the heat. Don't avoid it. If you're prepared for it, chances are it won't show up. If you're not prepared for it, you act a little arrogant, you're a little bit of a fool of yourself, it may show up, particularly if you start pushing the envelope on your opinion rather than giving facts, which is another video for another time. Okay, so let's just say. So how do you do this? Let's just say that a participant gets aggressive with a question, a complaint or problem. Don't avoid it. Don't avoid it. Don't say, well, we'll take that offline, thank you very much, but we're not going to handle that right now. That's a little. Don't do that because that's going to kill your credibility in front of everybody. It's going to make them more upset, and that presentation will go down in a fiery crash. So you don't want that. You have an opportunity to be a hero here. So listen closely. I'm just going to give you three simple steps. Step number one, if there's pushback, in particular, there's some emotion pushing back on you. Take a deep breath, in through your nose, out through your mouth, maybe take a couple of them, keep the oxygen flowing. What happens under stress? CO2 begins to build up. You get lightheaded, your body temperature begins to shift, and all kinds of crazy things go on in your head. Your little voice becomes hyperactive. I told you you shouldn't do this. Why is this happening? You're going to look like a fool, and you're not even present anymore. You're more concerned about what you look like. You're more concerned about what's happening or rather than what is really happening in the room. Okay, so that's number one. Okay, easy. You can do that. Practice. Okay. Step number two. If you're in a live room offline, physically position yourself away from that person. In other words, if you're facing the room and they're on the right side of the room, stay in the front of the room, but move to the left side of the front of the room. Create distance between you. Because if you approach them in your desire to help or your desire to address the situation, you're actually going to create tension and confrontation and everybody's going to get freaked out and you may not even know it, but the other person is going to get even more defensive or more aggressive. So in an offline environment, create space between you. Casually walk to the other side. You. Now, if you are on a zoom call or if you have a lot of people in a live video conferencing, then you just take your position. Maybe move a little bit to the side of your screen, maybe a little bit to the other side of your screen, but don't worry about the positioning so much. As a matter of fact, I would just suggest taking a deep breath and, and addressing the person directly. Step number three. Now, this is the most important part. Step number three is to ask questions. Ask questions. The big trap is trying to answer or address the problem that the person has. This is a rookie mistake. Don't do that. If a person's aggressive. Now, if it's just a benign question, that's not the same thing. If this is heat coming at you, heat, meaning there's emotion involved. Ask questions. The minute you start answering, no matter what you're going to say is not going to make any sense. Because remember this, the other person's emotion is running high, right? And when their emotions high, their logic and intelligence goes down. So they're not even thinking clearly. You could give them the right answers, but if they're still upset about something, they're not even going to hear it. So logic is not typically going to work. You yet. Start by asking questions. Questions like, so it appears that you're upset about something. Is that correct? Yes. Well, what are you upset about? What's causing the upset? How do you feel about that? What's the problem there? Again, asking questions to try to pull out what is going on for them. The most important thing, and this takes a little bit of skill, but the most important thing is to identify whatever the emotion is that they're exhibiting. Now, it appears to me that you're angry. Am I correct? No, I'm not angry. Okay, check that one off. I understand. So a bit frustrated then? Yes, I'm frustrated. So what's causing the frustration? Okay, so notice I stick with the emotional term, the emotional word, until I get, until I'm able to as is which one it is. And the energy and the intensity and the heat will automatically begin to drop. Automatically begin to drop. Now, if you can do that, great. If you can't do that, just keep asking questions, solicit. Well, how can we handle the upset? How. What would work better in this situation for you? What additional information do you need or what clarification? Keep asking questions and then to get to a point of an agreement where you can say, okay, so if I can provide that, if we can change this, we can do what you're asking, will that help? Now, if you can't do some of those things, say, look, I'm sorry, I can't do that, but is there anything else we can do to help alleviate the situation for you? Again, is it going to work? 100% of the time? No. But your presence as a presenter and teacher, leader and facilitator will be impressive to everybody because the more that person acts out and the more calm and present and inquisitive and serving you are you, you're going to look better, that person is going to look worse. So no matter what happens, you're going to be the hero. If you try to confront it. Even if you're right, you'll be the villain because you'll be seen as the person ganging up on the other person. So just ask questions, breathe, acknowledge them and ask them how you can solve it. Okay, a little hint here. If someone's emotional, they're not going to be able to have a very logical or constructive conversation with you. Okay, I mentioned that. So as a result, again, identifying the emotion. Now the other thing to do is if you have a group and the person says something, well, I'm frustrated because I don't have enough information. Thank you. So if I gave you a little bit more information about X, would that alleviate some frustration? Yes. Then Ask the group how many of the rest of you would like a little bit more information about X. Good, thank you. So again, what happens? Take the room with you. Don't get isolated on that one person, but don't run from the heat. Look, there's no perfect way to handle it. But I will tell you to breathe, ask questions, isolate whatever the emotion is and do your best to ask questions to solicit how you can handle the problem. Okay, again. We used to lock ourselves in a room every Thursday night for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks practicing, practicing, practicing these worst case scenarios. Why? Because we wanted to get better. But number two, we didn't want to be afraid when we were in the front of the room. I will tell you that not knowing how to handle the heat is not the problem. It's your concern or your worry about what if that happens that causes you to walk on eggshells, be sometimes too politically correct and not get your passion across and your authentic self across. Okay, so I recommend practicing a lot. Practicing a lot. Okay, now going along with this number 18, this is still episode number nine, but mistake number 18, not managing the environment. Not managing the environment. Okay, what do I mean by that? Okay, a lot of things online and offline that is this, the environment that we operate in is always more important than anything else going on. I think in a prior episode I mentioned that the temperature of a room being too hot, air conditioning going on out, a room temperature should be around 70 degrees Fahrenheit, 20, 21 degrees Celsius. If it's going up to 30, 35, that's too. I don't care how good your data is, that environment is not going to be helping. People are going to be angry, upset, agitated, uncomfortable, tired, sleepy, all those things. So none of it's going to work. So what I always tell people, environment, environment is number one, make sure that the context of the environment that you're in is pristine for learning. One thing we know about accelerated learning and the way your brain works, nothing is neutral in a learning environment. It is either adding to the learning experience or it's distracting from the learning experience. There is no neutral. In other words, if I had broccoli hanging out of my teeth right here and I kept talking like that, you'd be distracted. No matter what I'm talking about, you're going, would he please get the broccoli out of his teeth? Or if in fact I had no shirt on, some of you would be going, oh my God, why does he not have a shirt on? I can't even hear what he's saying. Now. These are crazy examples. But on the flip side, as a professional, as a great facilitator, you want to make sure that the environment is pristine for people to listen, to learn and to feel comfortable. So in an offline environment, what's that mean? That means people have tables and chairs. They're neat. So when they walk into the room, their place is neatly set up, their notebook is in place, the pens are in place, there's no trash on the floor, there's no wires exposed, the temperature is perfect. The right background music is playing. Everything perfect. Think about it this way. When you go, if you travel and you go to a hotel at the end of a busy day, you walk into your hotel room. What's it look like? It's perfect, right? It's completely clean. The bed is made, there are no wrinkles on the sheet. And how do you feel when you walk into that room? Right? You feel relaxed, you feel at home, you feel taken care of as opposed to all kinds of distractions and noises and things running around and trash on the floor. You wouldn't even think of that. Learning environments should be the same. So how does that apply here online? Well, whenever I'm doing a program, I have a logistics team, two or three or four people that are on the call as well, that are doing their best to make sure people are muted so there's no outside distractions. To make sure that when we play music, the music is at the perfect level and it's playing at the right time. To make sure the sound levels are good, to make sure everybody has their cameras on, all kinds of little things like that. The lead up to the program is the registration. Easy and fluid. Are people confused and they don't know what links to go to and they're stuck in waiting rooms and all kinds of crazy things that can happen. You want it to be manage the environment as best you can. Because if they come in irritated, it's going to make your job a lot more difficult. Dr. Buckminster Fuller used to say, environment is stronger than will. Environment is stronger than will. That means that no matter how much willpower a person has in a tough environment that is abusive to learning or abusive to your mindset, or abusive to your well being, you're not going to learn well and you're not going to be comfortable and you're going to be agitated and your little voice is going to be going crazy. So you, as a facilitator, manage it. One quick story on this many Years ago, I did some work for a very large organization you've heard of called J.P. morgan. We did a little training in their training room near Wall street in New York City many years ago. And it was the first time I had done a training in their facility just for a small executive group. The training room was very small. The training was to start at 9am I asked, when can I get into the building? They said, well, the building opens at 7, but we'll just meet you there at 8:45 and we'll take you over to the room. I go, no, I'd like to be there early. So at 7am I showed up, went to the meeting room and sure enough, even though this is one of the wealthiest companies on the planet, okay, I go into the meeting room and you know what? A couple of the light, the fluorescent balls are flickering a little bit. There are white boards with stuff still all over them. There's a couple computer boxes and keyboards laying in the corner. There was dust in certain places. You know, the chairs around the tables that have the little. I don't know what you call them, the little things on the bottom that stabilize. A couple of them were missing in my mind. The place was a mess. They trained there all the time. They didn't think it was any big deal. I thought it was a mess. I took those days. I was wearing a suit, took my suit jacket off, stripped down and just started cleaning. Got some janitorial staff to help me mop the floor, changed the bulbs, changed out chairs, got rid of the trash, got everything just pristinely cleaned everything, set up my music, had a good quality boombox, which I recommend, or online. It's really simple. You just plug in your itunes or whatever sound system you're using into your system and had light jazz playing, had the temperature all set. I go into the restroom, get my suit back on, come back into the room. As the first person was walking into the room, the first person coming into the room for the training, they had some kind of. I don't know if it was a newspaper or something they were reading in one hand, cup of coffee in the other, and. And the light jazz playing in the background. And as they walked into the room, I didn't say anything, but they walked into the room and they just go. I got them. They could physically feel a difference as they walked into that room. They could physically feel that they had walked into a different environment, a more rarefied, purified, conducive, serving, grateful type of environment. So whatever you can do. I have a friend that is amazing. When doing online programs, he sends a whole care package to his participants. They get in the mail and they open the box. It's got a name tag on. It's got little treats and snacks in it. It's got all kinds of little gizmos and gifts, a T shirt for the program, all kinds of things, a thank you notes, flowers, whatever, dry flowers, whatever. In anticipation of the upcoming event. Because he wants to do his best to make sure they know it's very, very special and that he considers it to be special for them. Now think about that the next time you're putting on an event or the next time you're doing a meeting. Manage the environment. The flip side is if you don't, you're slogging an uphill battle. And you will always have the environment working against you. You want it working in your favor. Those pieces will help make the group more receptive, more conducive to learning. At the end of the day, they're going to appreciate you a lot. Be awesome.