Ep. 102 When It All Goes Wrong!

Hey there, Mark Brown. Have you ever had anything go wrong ever?

Oh, absolutely.

Never.

Are you kidding me? As a speaker? It's not if, it's when. Something's gonna go south on you, brother.

Yeah, well, we had a legend on last week, Jim Cathcart. If you haven't listened to that episode, please go listen. And he promised us that he had some great road story warrior lessons and stories and examples. And we've also invited Mike Davis, one of our coaches from Stagetime, to join us, who's a TEDx coach, one of our best. And we just want to talk about when things all go wrong. Let's do it.

Anyone can give a presentation. Few deliver unforgettable presentations. What's the difference? You're about to find out. Welcome to the Unforgettable Presentations podcast with your hosts, world champion speakers and coaches, Mark Brown.

Mark Brown, your life tells a story, and there's someone out there who needs to hear it.

And Darren Lacroix. And Darren Lacroix.

Stage time. Stage time. Stage time.

Ready for some powerful presentation. AHAs. Let's dive right in.

All right. Well, hey, Mark Brown, thanks for joining me. Jim Cathcart, Mike Davis. We just thought it'd be cool to just talk shop and tell stories to inspire people to know that, you know, they're not alone, that disasters happen. It's going to happen. And I think, Mark, instead of like the CSP and the cpae, there should be a badge that I survived an idiot or something like that, because it's going to happen. So, Mark Brown, since you have more experience in when things go wrong, I thought I would. Just kidding. Jk, jk, jk. I thought I'd pass over to you to lead this one. Mark Brown, talk to us.

Listen, I learned a couple of things about things going wrong. First of all, I'll be really honest. Things do go wrong. But sometimes I've discovered they're not always someone else's fault. Sometimes things go wrong because of what you did not do or you forgot to do. And there are times things go wrong because someone else messed up. So I want to bite the bullet. I want to confess myself how things go wrong when you mess up real quickly. I was called upon to do a program for young people. And you always talk to meeting planner. I know Jim will confirm this, so will Michael. And you make sure you know what the assignment is. And I do my talk on bullying for high school kids. And I get to the venue, and it's a huge school and a driveway. They have these signs with the Word scream on it. And that, that character, the scream from the movie, you know.

You did that well, Jim.

Thank you.

And I realize I have got the wrong message for these high school kids because I did not communicate clearly with the meeting planner. And I had to do some fancy footwork. And I did what I will not recommend anyone do. I'm in the wings going, omg, omg, omg. What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? And I put out one of my old business cards, Remember business cards with a white thing on the back. I had blank space on the back. I took the word scream and I wrote down S C R E A M. These are kids, youth leaders. What do I do? S is for I know service. What story can I tell about kids? Boom. And I wrote a keynote on S c r e am with 50 minutes to go backstage. I survived it. The benefit was I was able to create a youth keynote on service, commitment, responsibility, education, attitude and motivation based on that. I don't want to sound arrogant, but a lesser experienced speaker could have panicked and it could have been a disaster for me. For the person who planned the meeting for the audience, what do you do? Number one, it could go wrong if you don't plan properly. That being said, Darren, I know you want to respond to that, but that being said, I'd like us to look at what can and has gone wrong live, what can and has gone wrong virtually. And finally, how can we be prepared when we aren't? How can we prepare for the unexpected? I'm gonna go with Mike Davis first and then with Jay.

Wait, wait, wait. Before we do, I gotta talk about the Scream. Aren't you glad their theme wasn't screaming.

S C R E A M I N G. I give a nine point message. Listen, listen. I've had with youth audiences, I've had to go to a program, you do your PowerPoint, you all set to go in your auditorium and they say, listen, we want the whole school to hear this. And the best place for us to do it is in our amphitheater outside at 9:30am in California in bright sunshine. How well does PowerPoint work in bright sunshine? How about never? That happened to me as well.

Not enough lumens in the world.

I can't wait to hear some Jim Cathgart story. But real quickly, Mike Davis, coach, Mike tedx, coach and speaker and all that, what are your thoughts on when things all go wrong and what can you share with us real quickly about any scenario you dealt with?

Well, the attention Pay attention to the details. This just happened this morning. About a month ago, I got contacted by a group. They said, would you speak for us? We meet at 6, 6 o'.

Clock.

I'm thinking, all right, I'm in zoom mode for the last 18 months. And I said, sure, I'll be happy to speak. Found out three days ago that it was 6am, 30 minutes away from my house, and it was live.

Details matter.

Darren Lacroix has been my mentor for almost 20 years and he's always taught me, get the details. And I just got into that mindset. So be careful that you don't get lulled into a mindset. Whether it's Zoom mindset or 6pm who meets at 6am I know a group that does.

You do.

Now, details is a good place to start.

Well, the good thing was it was close to home. It wasn't the two and a half hour drive or hour and a half hour drive. And I've done hour and a half hour drives to do talks. Darren, you have Jim Cathcart, you have done that too. You've done the whole gamut. You've run the whole gamut. So thank you for that, Michael. Now, Jim, last week in our podcast, you talked about some really weird things that happened. What would you say is your strangest when it all goes wrong story?

What a list. I've got to work from here. One of the things that I do for clients is I send them what I call my service commitment. And the headline says, what Jim will do when he speaks for you. And I built it over several years based on what went well and what went wrong with a number of several hundred engagements early in my career. And it says, this is what Jim will do in preparation. This is what he'll do when he arrives on site. This is what he will do before it's his turn to speak. This is what he'll do during his speech, after his speech, and after he gets back home. I also included what I will not do. Things like I will not disclose sensitive information about their company or their people that they might fear some outsider would share with the wrong folks. So I put all of their fears and all of their hopes into that document. And that's been something that has been just a real help over the years. Do you ever have recurring nightmares? A lot of people do. They have a nightmare. That's a repeating theme over the years. Well, I've got one and only one. And it's played out I don't know how many times. Dozens over 45 years. Of full time speaking. And the nightmare is, and for some reason it's always at the same location, which it doesn't seem to have any meaning at all to me. It's my junior high school, Forest Heights Junior High in Little Rock, Arkansas, which is up on a hillside, and there's a big assembly and I'm the keynote speaker. But I'm down the hill, two and a half blocks away on foot, and they are beginning my introduction. And I'm doing my best to get up the hill and not end up dripping with sweat and ruining, you know, my whole appearance by the time I get there. But, you know, it never does play out completely. But I've had that image that's haunted me from time to time. I always tell my clients I will be, when there's a disaster, I will be the calmest person in the room. Now that's one you can take to the bank. Reassure your client you will be the calmest person in the room. Why? How? Like Mark asked earlier, you know, what mindset is required for something like this? That's the key, is your mindset. How can I be the calmest person in the room? Because I'm not caught up in the technical aspect of the performance. I'm caught up in the purpose and the meaning of the performance. What does it mean to them? So I was in Stillwater, Oklahoma, fairly early in my career, and I was the keynote luncheon speaker or before luncheon speaker at the Life Underwriters of Oklahoma State Convention. And the person running the meeting that year had never run a meeting or at least didn't know how. And so they allowed speakers to go over time and they allowed the whole meeting to kind of just drag along. And I was supposed to be introduced at 11, finish at 12, and then they would have lunch. Well, at 12:15, I'm standing near this guy going, you know, can we, can we get Darren to stop talking, please? Since 4am and he keeps thinking of another story. And the guy says, yeah, well, yeah, I'm sure he'll end up soon. Sure. Based on what? No, I mean, it'll be fine. Oh, it won't. If you don't stop this guy, he's going to talk all day. And so, yeah, you know, so this guy was a coward. He wouldn't walk up there and tell the speaker, you know, sorry, thanks for all that. We've got another speaker before lunch. So anyway, it gets to where it's like 15 minutes to lunch and finally this guy finds a landing. And so he brings it in for A landing. And they applaud like three claps. And he goes off the stage. And the meeting chair gets up and says, no, no, don't, don't get up. Don't get up. Well, they've been seated for two hours without a potty break, right? Don't get up, don't get up. We got another speaker before lunch. And they all do this. Oh, no, I mean out loud. It's a audible moan from hundreds and hundreds of people. And I'm sitting there thinking, oh, my gosh, I've got an hour speech to do. And their lunch starts in 15 minutes. Well, they're going to leave the room whether, whether I'm done or not. And so I positioned myself quite a distance from the stage. And when he said, welcome, our speaker, Jim Cathcart, I ran. I didn't walk fast. I ran to the front of the room, jumped up on the stage, grabbed the microphone. It was a handheld. And I said, wow, thank you for that introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, you're about to witness a miracle.

Nice. I love it.

You are going to hear a one hour keynote speech in 15 minutes. Get your pencils ready. And they laughed. And I said, seriously, 15 minutes. And I just launched into it. Stories and interaction. And I emphasized the humor and dropped off a lot of the explanation points. And then I said, who's hungry? We are. And I said, let's eat. I stepped off the platform to a standing ovation.

That was brilliant.

What did the event planner say? Did you have any comments from them?

He said, that was, that was perfect. I wanted to go over and. But I didn't. I just went on, you know, and a lot of people came up, said, you have a business card, you know, so I got, actually got referrals out of that and got additional business, but that's one of a number of them. I could go on for a while.

So. Well, to help with the. Help our listeners and our, on our, our emerging speakers. Jim, what was the thinking behind that execution? You're off to the side. What are you thinking to make that happen?

Okay, first, I'm not thinking about me. So if you're thinking about you, you're already in the tank. It's over. You're going to fail. If you're thinking about the circumstances, you're thinking about the wrong thing. Think about the experience of the audience members. What are they doing? They're fighting off the urge to run to the bathroom, and they're hungry. In 16 minutes, they're going to be hangry. And so your 17th minute key point that's going to change their life is only going to turn them against you. It's not going to help. So the last thing you should be thinking about is you. How can I tell them what I was here to tell them and give them genuine take home value and not require them to keep on enduring. Yet another presenter, but without a break, because these folks had gone. I think it was four and a half hours without an official break. Several had left the room and come back. That's what I was dealing with. So you got to be thinking about the only thing you should ever think about, which is the value to the audience or the experience being had by the audience. And when it's too cold, say, hey, let's all scoot a little closer together and take 98.6 and see if we can get a multiplier effect by not having so much cold space between us. Or if it's, you know, 112 in the room. Hey, Bob, there's a stack of paper plates over there. Could, could you pass them out, please? Ladies and gentlemen, follow me. Grab one of the paper plates and I want you to do this on my command. Take the plate and hold it in front of you like this. And on count number two, bring it back like this real rapidly. I said. Okay, one, two. Right, one, two. Keep that going. While you keep that going, I'll deliver my speech. So just come up with something that makes their experience more pleasing or more tolerable.

Well, thanks, Jim. I'll tell you why, on a very serious note, that is so important. It is natural for us, even experienced presenters, to think, I've worked so hard on my presentation. What will I do with my PowerPoint? How am I ever going to get my point across? And that's a natural instinct to have. But you're saying focus on how you can best serve the audience within the confines of the circumstances in which you find yourself, Darren.

But think first about the feelings and where the mindset and emotions of the audience are or their physical experience. You've got to empathize before you can make your message more meaningful to them.

Yeah. On Maslow's hierarchy of needs, food comes before motivation.

Food before fool.

Let's pick up a little bit of what Jim just laid down just to make sure you get this as listening to this. Jim Stovall, who was a friend and a mentor to me, he put it this way, when there's, you know, Jim, you talk about being too cold, too hot. Like you and I as presenters when we're on stage we got to be aware of what they're thinking. So if people are doing this, they're cold. You know, it might only be 5% of them, but if a few of them are doing it, all of them are feeling it. If it's too hot and you see a couple people fanning, okay, so Jim's brilliance was fix what you can, acknowledge what you cannot. Fix what you can, acknowledge what you cannot. Amen. That's why I want to bring it up. Because if you can go over to the event planner, if they're not aware that this is happening, you want to ask them. And going back to what Mark just asked Jim, we got to go to the event planner. What do they want? So a great question. If you see that your time is getting bumped back, it's our responsibility to ask the event planner. It's their game, not us. We're just the hired help. Do you want me to do my entire presentation or do you want me to get us back on track? And truly, we get paid. Anybody can present to an easy audience when everything's great and the audience is leaning in and it's a network marketing group, anyone can rock that. We get paid because we can handle the tough situations when all goes wrong. And then, Jim, you had also talked about your list. So for everyone, if you don't already have one, start that list of preparation, what you will do that goes to the event planner, what your expectations are, and then at the beginning of your career, every time something goes wrong. Let me add that to the list. Let me add that to the list. Because you're going to have things that come up that you're not aware of. Jim?

Yeah, I would say your list needs to be driven by their needs and interests and concerns. So it's not. Not about you, it's about. And that's the theme in everything I do. It's never about you. It's always about the effect it has on them. So if they're worried about whether you're going to understand who they are before you get there, tell them how you're going to do your research. If they're worried about whether you're going to show up on time, tell them that you will call them the minute you land at the airport and that you know. Or that you will be backstage in the Zoom meeting ready room before it's time for you to go on the air. Tell them if they're worried about whether you will understand the lingo that surrounds their products. You know that a C365 is A is a key product for them. Don't call it a zither, call it a C365, because that's what we call it. And if they're worried that you're going to disclose something to competitors or that you're going to insult an audience member, or that you're going to run overtime or undertime or, or whatever the worries are, list all those worries before you start creating your service commitment that you send to them. If they want to know, can we have a copy of your slides? We'll just include it on your list. I'll provide a copy after. I'll prepare the slides in advance and I'll probably send it to you or bring it on a usb. But afterwards, I may have made some changes before final showtime. I will send you a PDF, not a, not a PDF of the slides, so that your people can all have it. And by the way, the reason for PDF and not the slides is if you send them the slides, the slides are no longer yours. They will show up in other people's presentations and as if they owned them.

Yep. Make sure the copyright logo is on the one that you send them. I kind of started abruptly, but having fun, saying, you know, there's an idiot involved. And a lot of times I'm saying that because the idiot was me, especially early on. So one of mine was speaking in Arkansas to Tyson Chicken, so their headquarters there, but it's all the Tyson Chicken engineers. It was a speaker bureau event. She was there with me. I had my books, I was all ready to rock the house. Well, I was come in, I was brought in to talk about laugh and get rich and the use of humor in business. And if you have ever, if you have a lot of humor in your presentation, you know that you can do 35 minutes of material and it can take 45 to 55 minutes because of their response time to allow them to have that laugh and have that joy. Well, I was up there and I was throwing out my best stuff and it was just like it was all being absorbed and nothing was landing. And once in a while it'll be like a ha ha haha. And I'm like, what is going on here? And I'm burning through material. If you don't know what that is, that means you're, you're way ahead of the game and you're going to run out of material at the end. You got to create some new stuff or do some audience interaction. So it was a 60 minute presentation. I was 35 minutes in and I Had nothing. This was earlier in my career when I didn't have as much content and I wasn't as savvy. But when all goes wrong, you're going to learn new lessons. You're going to be better prepared for the next one. Just congratulations, you're human. You're. You're out there in the world doing it. And so when I walked off stage, I was like, oh, I was so embarrassed because the event, the speaker bureau was there and I walked over to it and I said, I apologize. I don't know what happened. Let me just grab my books and we'll just scoot out and turn to grab my books. There was a line of engineers to buy my books. And I was like, are you the same people? And then I realized, like Jim said, it was about me. I needed. I loved the response. I wasn't getting what Darren needed. They're engineers now. This isn't a thing on engineers. Engineers tend to be introverts. They're not expressive. We as speakers like the expressive. That's why we do it. We want the love. And I created a false expectation, not understanding my audience well enough to know. Know that's how it was going to go. They did enjoy it, or they wouldn't have bought the books. So they enjoyed it. But my problem, I was the idiot. And I had false expectations. I did not understand audiences the way I do now. So I just want to call myself.

Out, Jim, Mike, I want to give you a chance to talk, too, but there's something that hitchhikes on this. Tony, Alessandra and I were partners for many years, and we're best friends and have grown up in this business together. Early in our speaking careers, Tony went to work for a client. I've forgotten who it was, but it seemed like it was one of the big eight accounting firms, Arthur Anderson or somebody. After he got back home, the client called him, said, tony, I'd like to talk with you about the presentation the other day. And Tony said, you know, he's dreading this because the presentation was like Darren's. He had delivered his presentation and got nothing from the audience as far as feedback on site. And so he's back home now. Then the dreaded call has come and he's thinking they're going to say they're not going to pay him, you know, because the audience hated it so much. And he says, I want to talk with you about the call. And Tony says, yeah, yeah. I couldn't believe that. He said, yeah, I know. It was unbelievable. The client said, that. And that's, you know, Tony's just getting shorter by the moment. Then Tony said, I've never had an audience react to me like that. He said, tony, we've never had our people react to a speaker like that.

Oh, man. Wow.

Tony just said his worst nightmares are coming true. Right? And the guy says, it was fabulous. People haven't stopped talking about it. And Tony said, what? What? Turns out the audience loved him, but never showed it at the meeting. And Tony couldn't read the audience at that time, and he thought he had bombed when in fact, he was getting a call to request further engagements for the same types of crowd.

Wow.

Assuming he wanted to do them.

That is great. That is fantastic. Thank you. Jim, I want to go to Mike real quick. Mike, you mentioned the last year and a half doing several virtual presentations. Have you had a technical OMG in the last year and a half where things went wrong for a virtual program?

Since Jim mentioned not being able to read an audience and not getting response, I'd say yes. And it even goes back to before COVID when Jim Darren, four years ago called me up one day and said, I'd like you to host our weekly calls. Now, Darren's been my mentor for almost 20 years. That's the first time I ever told him no because I was so afraid of this medium. But being a good mentor, either that or he just had no one else to go to. He kept throwing me in the pool, and I. Every week. And Mark was part of these calls twice a month. I was making mistake after mistake, and, I mean, the pressure was on every week. I felt like. But, yeah, the OMG moments happen still. But what I've discovered in this environment is that audiences have been very forgiving. I think part of the reason is because they also have been put in position many times to be the presenter. So they relate to that more than they do the speaker in a live event, because a lot of them won't get on stage. But, yeah, those moments, it's technical. Mark, you're with me twice a month. I often say, mark, could you take over for a month?

I love when Jim is going to promote an attendee. We do a webinar style and we have live coaching, and we're gonna promote an attendee, and he has the wrong person to come up as a cope and a panelist. Jim, I think you want to get Mike, you want to get Jeannie, not Janine. So we do that. And then he can't demote Janine. So Janine kind of stays there and kind of for the next half an hour, kind of hangs out with us. But we'll make it work. You know, we adjust, make it work. You have a video you want to play and it's not playing properly or. One of our favorite was when the closed capturing comes on. And it's horrible.

Yes, horrible closed captioning language, almost what's happening there.

But these things happen, you know, and in a virtual environment, you have to kind of go with it. I once figured, you know, to be quick, I'll play a YouTube video, you know, one of our. One of our world champions. And I'm playing the video. All of a sudden it's like a commercial comes on. You're like, don't use YouTube video. Darren always says, embed the video in your PowerPoint. Darren preaches that. Darren does that. And I, a guy who messed that up and had the wrong, wrong thing broadcast or it would freeze because you forgot to do optimize. These technical things happen. But I agree with Michael. Audiences, for the most part, tend to be forgiving when they know your intent is to serve them. To go back to what Jim has.

Said, and there's a key in that. I was in one yesterday and the lead speaker was, you know, highly credentialed, big deal guy. And he spent the first minute and a half going, okay, let's see. What. Okay, I don't see my cursor. It just ruined the experience for everybody. You know, when you're put in that position, I get it that you've got something to deal with. It's difficult. But item one, make it really, really, really a big deal in your mind, am I muted or not muted? Right. And second, are they looking up my nostrils or looking at my face? So, you know, get that part clear. But when it's your turn, if you have a technical difficulty, for the most part, go on and deliver. And then if you have to take a pause for a technical difficulty, do it, but have it. Have that space filled with something else, like another person giving an example or something like that. Because if you say, well, hang on, hang on. No, I can find it right here. No, no, no, no, no, please don't do that. We did that in elementary school. I don't mean grades one through six, but I mean early Covid zoom era, that was elementary school. Now we're all in secondary school or graduates. Most of us, we've got different expectations. So raise your game.

Yeah, Mark, I had. I had two virtual mistakes that I made yesterday, and one of them, we've got to remember that we can't take things for granted. Hey, sometimes I'm on. Most of the time, it's zoom. Sometimes it's stream, yard, or teams or something that I'm not as familiar with. So when it's one of those, I'm like, okay, so I got to be on early. I got to remember that my slides might show up. I can't have. Have build, so I'm ready. Yesterday, I was speaking to a group in Mexico. Well, I got the zoom link, you know, and it was in Spanish in between. And. And I go and just pop it in and drop it on. And then it asks for my password.

In espanol, and I'm.

You know, I saw the word password, but I went back to the invitation, and I couldn't figure out which was the password. Oh, okay.

That in Chinese? Yeah.

No, no. I couldn't even handle Spanish. And then the other one I did, which is a mistake of mine, is I had an interview back to back with the presentation in Mexico, and I didn't. This is my bad. I didn't let the event planner know in Mexico that I was gonna be right wall to wall. So I was gonna literally be jumping on and jumping off and jumping into their meeting. So they were panicking. So after I got. I saw that there were, like, two or three emails from them saying, where are you? Because they expect me on, like, five or 10 minutes early, and that's my bad. See, the event planner, like Jim brought up earlier, they are stressed out. They have tension. They have a lot to worry about. It's our job as professionals to relieve their tension, to give them the reassurance to know. Like you said, I landed. I'm here. That's all. It doesn't. But I guarantee you, on the other end of the phone, they're like, you know, there's one, you know, one digit down. We just gave them that relief. I'm in the. I'm on site. You know, I made it to the. And so there's a lot of different things, but I was a little overconfident, and I learned my lesson that we can't take anything for granted. We got to be professional, even if it's for free. Like, it's still our reputation.

Mark, by the way, if they are asking or are you on site? Hey, where are you?

That's stage three, they're already.

Now there's one, they're wondering where you are. Stage two, they're worried whether you're coming. Stage three, they're about to panic.

Yeah.

And so when they finally express it, it's gone too far already.

Great point, great point.

Yeah, very good point. And you know, in terms of procedure, like I said, we can prevent some of these things from going wrong because going there early, arriving there before you call, I'm at the airport, the car's here. And what I generally do is I meet with the meeting planner and the tech expert the day before so they see me in the room the day before. Now with virtual, you're not going to go to Mexico water speed, as the case may be. But certain phrases I find can help us. Like I have a hard stop, top of the hour, so they know I'm coming in after a hard stop, didn't know what's happening. Also the tech check. I recommend doing a tech check under as similar circumstances as possible. If you know it's a 4pm your time, talk on Saturday, do a tech check 4pm Thursday or 4pm Friday. At least 48 hours early to iron out the kinks, make it easy. If you're going to be on an unfamiliar platform, form, for argument's sake, get a run through on that platform. Yeah. Is that you time of day, right? Yeah.

Put this little thing in the window.

Darren did the same thing. For those who are only listening, Jim just kind of showed us what it looks like in different kinds of light when the sun comes in through the window on his right. You got to be aware of what people can see, you know. And I had, I saw an inexperienced presenter do a virtual meeting several weeks ago and I actually had to call them up and have a conversation. In this particular meeting, the young presenter, a college student, had got all prepped for the zoom at his desk and he had the camera all set and he decided to deliver his presentation standing up. So what we saw was his neck to his belt for the whole seven minutes of his Toastmaster speech. And ironically, his whole speech was predicated on the idea that different characters are represented by different hats that he wore during his presentation. And we saw from his neck to his belt.

So he was naval presentation.

Yeah, exactly. And we never saw any of the hats. We had to visualize in our brains what he talking about. And we talked about it and he realized, said, yeah, I didn't know what to do and he could simply tilt to the screen. But that didn't occur to him. He was inexperienced. So you want to think, as Jim says, what is the experience that we, we give to our audiences? If you're going to do virtual, know the platform. We had to do Streamyard we had to do teams, we had to do WebEx, we had to do Zoom. And sometimes you find yourself in a place where you can't see what the audience can see and you have to trust that they can see you. That's kind of weird. Sometimes you see yourself, but you want to eliminate the possibility that you can make things go wrong because you didn't do your due diligence and you weren't concerned first about how can I best serve the meeting planner. Now, Mike, you've been involved in TedX as a coach and so on. You've done TedX. Have you seen any kind of funny things go wrong in a TEDX environment that kind of got your attention? Oh, that will happen to me. Or any of your students express a concern about what went wrong for them in the TEDX environment.

Nothing jumps out about TedX because I think the most important part of this entire discussion is you can avoid a lot of this with preparation. And our particular TEDx. We make them drill over and over again. Yeah, they've been, they've had technical issues before, but it's run so well. I think the two best areas that we can can get the practice so that those unexpected moments do not throw us. Number one is improv. A year ago at Stage Time University, we started twice a, twice a month improv class. And these were not people that had experience and they have seen a benefit to them when the unexpected occurs. And you mentioned Toastmasters. Mark, I know three of us in this room got our start in Toastmasters. Jim, I'm not sure about you.

I was involved for about three months in the 1970s, but mine was American Society for Training and Development and then nsa.

Yeah, yeah. Mike, don't know if you know this, but in 2001 when I won the contest, Jim got the Govan gavel.

Yeah, you mentioned that last week. Yes, but what a place to go practice and make mistakes galore because there's nothing on the line. But that's seven minutes.

So real quick, Darren, you've also done improv in one sentence. Darren, how would, what would you say? Improv helps us to deal with it when it all goes wrong?

I think it's critical. And that's one of the reasons when Kevin Burke brought the idea up about doing an improv class on Zoom, I was like, you know what I keep telling people? Go take the class. Duh. We have some great experts in that area with Kevin and Mike and so why not? So I think improv builds you that muscle that you can handle anything I want to tell one quick story. And then, Mike, I want to toss it to you and to Jim, early on in your career, what are some of the mistakes? Did a fire alarm go off? Give us one of those. One of those unexpected mistakes. What happened, how you handled it, and maybe what you'd do differently now. But one of mine was just like, what we're saying. Preparation. I ended up telling a 17 second version in my championship speech. But the truth of it, I was really excited to do the credit union. Massachusetts Credit Union Association. This, Jim, this was like my big first break because I had heard in the nsa, in the national speakers world that, you know, when there's a group, these were board of directors from all the different credit unions in the state. And I thought, well, here's all these decision makers. This is going to launch my career. I'm going to get it. Every, you know, every credit union is going to hire me and bring me in. And so what I didn't understand is board of directors for credit unions. Forgive me, but just my initial thought as a newbie, I walked in the room and all I could think of was the cast of Cocoon.

Oh, wow, there was.

They were senior and nothing wrong with that. I'm like, you know, seniors like me. You know, I'm likable. They'll like me. So I'm trying to, like, do this little justification in my head. I walk in, I walk up to the event planner. I notice the room holds about 200 people. And I thought that the event planner said that there was 400 people. I asked her about it, and she said, oh, yeah, we actually have 400. This room holds 200. And down the hallway there's another room that holds another 200. We're gonna pump the sound down to that room. Don't worry, they'll hear you. I'm like, what? Like, I like. I'm animated. They like facial expressions. You're not gonna see that. I'm just. Lemons, lemonades, lemons, lemonades, lemons, lemonade. So back in my early days, because I didn't have a lot of material, Jim, whenever I got a paid speech, it was a big deal. I did two weeks of raw research. And so I did my homework, I called people, I had conversations. What I didn't know about my research was I wrote custom jokes about theirs. So let's say, you know, Mary. Mary, you know, crochets during the board of directors meeting. But don't mess with Mary. She might be crocheting, but she'll call you out. Bob is a Horrible golfer. So what I didn't know was that Bob is only known by his credit union. Mary is only known by her credit union. So I was, like, doing, like, table dances. There was one tiny little laugh over here. One tiny little laugh. Laugh over there at that table. Yeah. Thank you. It was not going well. So, anyway, I'm preparing, and of course, they go late. The thing runs late. I'm supposed to go on at 8. It's 8:30 quarter 9. And all of a sudden they get up and start leaving. And I haven't even gone on yet. And I'm like, oh, that's right. Judge Wapner is on. They don't care that there's a speaker. And there was literally half the room. Half the room. And I'm just. They didn't know. And. Okay, so I'm trying lemons to lemonade. Lemons. Lemonade. So I literally. Jim, kid you not. I don't think you heard this story. I run down to the other room, and I'm in the other room, and I'm trying to invite people to the main room. At least they could see me. So I'm inviting them. There's open seats. Why don't you come join us? And while I'm down, just like your nightmare, Jim, I hear in the distance, they're introducing me. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the stage, Darren Lacroix. And I turned to run, to run on stage, and I knocked over a guy's oxygen tank. I could see the headline now. Motivational speaker kills one man by disconnecting his oxygen tank. And I was just done. And so I ran down and I did my best. I did my little table dances, and I was bombing. I went for my sure fire bit. That one, that thing that always worked for me. It was an improv routine that I brought up someone on stage, and it worked best. The more animated she is. And she just stood there like an ancient statue with her arms out straight. I'm like, this is not going well. And then I said, please do something with your hands. And she covered my mouth. It was the only big laugh I got that night from her. And I just. And I walked off stage. I quit. I'm done. I'm never doing this again. I called my friend, mentor Rick Siegel, at the time, and I didn't realize everybody bombed. Like that didn't dawn on me, because I was the newbie at nsa, and I see all these great people, and they're passionate, content, driven, and all of this. And here I am, Mr. Wannabe, not really having A routine, yet still working on everything. And anyway, so, number one, I realized everybody bums because Rick said so. I was like, what do you mean, so? And I didn't know how to process that because I didn't. I thought I was the only one. So, number one. Number two, I didn't do the right homework. I interviewed people, but it didn't dawn on me they didn't know each other. Number three, I then learned a valuable lesson about the improv person. I needed to prime them, that they needed to be animated. I needed to ask the event planner, okay, I need somebody who's very extroverted, who is boisterous, who talks with their hands. I need someone like that, and they instantly know who it is. So I learned valuable lessons from those bombs that served me from every other audience. Mark.

Well, this would be a fun conversation. We learned a couple of key things. One is prepare yourself for what could go wrong. It's a mindset that Jim spoke so eloquently about earlier. But I think number two, really, again from Jim, is if our intent is to truly serve the audience and find their needs, and I repeat this, it's easy when things go wrong to think about us. Our slides, our speech, our time, our favorite operation, our journey, our, our, our, our. If we can shift that to, how can I best give them the best experience and serve them even when things do go wrong? Even when you go to a school event in a gymnasium with bleachers and a kid loses their lunch and passes out and they call an ambulance, and the EMTs come and the school admins put up a sheet while they begin to put this kid on the IV and tell you to keep speaking to 400 kids with a sheet up there. Even when that happens, you say, okay, how can I best serve the audience, maintain my calm, and we have to be the calmest people in the room. Now, I cannot land this plane. Jim, with at least one funny, weird. Oh, my goodness, when things go wrong, cops throw you out, whatever. Give us one. One funny story, Jim.

I was speaking to a group of accountants in Washington, D.C. on a Sunday in the wintertime. And it was in a nice hotel. I think it was a Hyatt. I'm not sure. But it was in a part of town that was undergoing a big change. And so it was mostly vacant around the hotel, but the hotel itself was nice, and we were three levels below the street, and I had about 700 people in the room. And I always go into the room early and check out the exits to find out where does that door lead? Because some of them lead down a blind passageway and others lead outside so that in an emergency, I can guide the audience if I have to. So I'm in the middle of my speech to 700 people, three levels below the street. It's 20 degrees, if that. Outside, it's late in the afternoon, so it's wintertime. It's starting to get dark. I punch the little remote for my slides. Back in the days of carousel slides.

Yep.

I punch the button and it goes poof. And smoke rises up out of the slide thing, and everybody laughs. And I said, that wasn't planned. And then the fire alarm starts going off, you know, the flashing lights and all. And then I said, you know, I paused for a minute and I looked around and I said, folks, I don't know if this is an actual emergency or if that was just the result of my slide machine blowing a fuse, but let's pause for a second. And then if we have to leave this room, I want you 350 to go through this door and follow me up this staircase, this inner staircase, which comes out on the street. And I want you 350 to go out that back door, not this side door, because it'll just lead you back there ultimately, and the elevators will be shut off. So don't worry about that. Just go up the the escalators and get up to the street, and I'll meet you outside. So I paused for a minute, and someone said, yeah, it's a real deal. So we evacuated. Well, we're out there for 15, 20 minutes. And they say, okay, I'll clear. And we go back in. And we're back in the room. Room. It happened again. Turns out what had happened was something had exploded in the kitchen and really caused a fire. But they hadn't discovered the fire yet. And that sent a shock through the electrical system to my slide projector.

Oh.

And so when we're back in the room, we're all settled now there's really a fire. And so we had to evacuate a second time. Now it's pitch dark outside, and we've got no place to go. We can't go up to our rooms. We couldn't even go up to our rooms and get a jacket. So I said to the assembled mass outside, the mob, I said, hey, folks, let's go across the street and sit on the steps of this building. And it's cold out there. You know, it's dropping below 20 degrees. And we go over, and they sit on these cold concrete steps And I said if you would huddle together because we don't know how long we're going to be out here. It turns out we were out there four hours. Oh, wow. And I said, we got two options. I can continue my seminar and give you an abbreviated version, or we can just mill around and just find something to talk about. And they said, why don't you go ahead? And so I shortened my material, focused on what got the most interaction, open it up for questions and things like that. And then, you know, finally we went back over near the hotel, and ultimately they let us back in. Well, the meeting planner said, oh, my God, you're my hero. And I got a testimonial letter that was pure solid gold. Now, I couldn't have done it if I didn't know where the exits were. I couldn't have done it if I thought, I've got to do my presentation. This is about me. I could only do it if I was thinking in terms of crowd control and what are we going to all do out here anyway? But as it was, what else was I going to do? Stand around, make use of it.

You know, Darren always says, you want to be the meeting planner's favorite. You want to be the technical expert's favorite. They want to go to you and say, you are the one I want to work with. So you've just reinforced what Darren has been feeling for a very, very long time. Darren, your thoughts before we land this plane?

I had opened it up to Mike. Mike, anything early on out of the ordinary happen in one of your presentations?

Yeah, I went to an event where it was scheduled in a room that was so big that it made Mammoth Cave look like a closet. I mean, this thing was cavernous, right? It was the echo get there. And I was inexperienced. And I didn't have the confidence to go up to the meeting planner and say, these tables are too far away. They were 20ft from the stage, at least 5ft apart. And Darren, you taught me years ago, if those tables aren't close together, humor is not going to contage, as you say. So the tables are too far back, the room was too big, and there was a revival going on in the next room.

Oh, glory.

Third mistake I made is I didn't go to the back of the room and listen to the previous speakers to seek to hear that people in the back of the room couldn't even hear. The speaker system was so bad. Other than that, it was a great event. What I did not do is have the confidence, but I also did not acknowledge the elephants in the room. Jim, I love your story. I kept thinking you acknowledged everything going on. I didn't have the confidence to do that, and it was not a good experience. But to Darren's point, I learned from it. Now, if the tables are too far apart, I strongly suggest. Or sometimes I've just gone in and moved them myself.

And then, oh, tables were turned.

Oh, thank you.

My first bad pun for the day. I had to do at least one mark.

You usually get it in in the first 60 seconds.

I know, but thank you. Thank you, Darren. I appreciate that.

You have room for one more?

Yeah, sure.

Okay. I was in Ohio early in my career, doing a series of speeches for Century 21 real estate, and I've forgotten the guy's name, but the guy who was my host drove me from city to city, and he was my introducer and all that. So we get to the final city. I think we're in Youngstown or someplace like that. He had taken a nap before the engagement, and then he came downstairs, and I'm there, all dressed in a suit, ready to be. Wonderful. And he is still groggy. And so he gets up and he says. He says, hey, folks, you know, for the last week, I've been driving around the state with this guy. He is awesome. You're going to really enjoy him. He's got so many good ideas. Plus, he's funny, and it's just going to be a delight. And let's. I've got his name here somewhere. No, no, he didn't say it that way. He said his. His name is let's welcome. And it goes on. And so I. What the heck? I run to the front of the room and I get beside him and I say, wait, maybe I've got it. And I look in my pocket and I pull out a piece of paper from my pocket, and I say, wait a minute, hold it. It's Jim Cathcart. And he says, yeah, Jim Cavkart. And so he goes off the stage with a laugh, and I say, you know, and then I jump right into my presentation and had a lot of fun, and nobody was the wiser that he was still half asleep.

Nice.

What's cool is from what Mike just said and you, Jim, also said, I've also. It's reaffirmed to me the fact that we can prepare ourselves and be ready for things before they go wrong. And we hope, as you listen to this, you replay this podcast, hear some of the stories, here's some of the scenarios and some of the ways that we have dealt with them. Because again, it isn't a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Something will go wrong in your career. Even you're emerging or even experienced things can and will go wrong. How you respond to them and how you serve your audience as a result of them can be the difference between you being a bust, you being good, you being okay, and you being truly unforgettable. Darren.

Exactly. By the way, that guy, my goal was to save him from an embarrassing moment. So it was not about me, it wasn't about even the audience. It was to save my hero, my helper from an embarrassing moment.

Yeah, and I just want to back up that. If you are interested in improv at all, go to stagetownworkshops.com check out the next improv. They do it twice a month on Fridays, 5pm Pacific Time, 90 minutes. It's not recorded. You can't do improv with a recording. It's. It's only live stream. So. Stagetimeworkshops.com you'll see all of our workshops there. But check out the improv one. And Mike, the people who started with you, they're not the same people they were back then as they are now. Is that correct?

No, they are not. Kevin and I are amazed because they had no improv background at all and they just jumped in with both feet. And we talked about it early. We had no idea if improv off at work on zoom. And in some ways it's better.

Yeah, absolutely. Mike Davis, Jim Cathcart, Mark Brown, thanks for joining us. Look at every time something goes wrong, there's lessons to be learned. Sometimes it's your fault, sometimes it is their fault. But it's still your responsibility. Mark Brown, take us home.

It may not be your fault, but it will be your responsibility. Be prepared. Be ready for when it all goes wrong. When you do that, you truly will be be unforgettable.

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