Ep. 145 Weird, Wild and Wacky Stories From The Road

Hey there, Mark Brown. I just got to go hang out with Jim Key. And just reliving those stories, those crazy stories from the road. I thought, why don't we just sit down and just talk about the crazy, ridiculous way out, Unexpected. Oh, crap. Stories that happened from the road. Mark.

Listen, man, it isn't always hard work and heavy stuff. Sometimes being on the road and being a speaker can be fun. Let's have a blast today with two of our best friends. Okay, let's do this.

Anyone can give a presentation. Few deliver unforgettable presentations. What's the difference? You're about to find out. Welcome to the Unforgettable Presentations podcasts 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.

Yeah, Mark. It's just like sitting around the campfire, grabbing a coffee, grabbing a beer.

Okay.

We're in the ultimate green room, hanging out with Ed Tate, world champion, and Jim Key, world champion, and I just thought it'd be fun. Mark.

Well, you had the pleasure of hanging out with Jim at his home in Texas a few weeks ago, so I would love to have you guys kick us off because you can remember what you talked about, and we'll just go with the flow. Friends, listen, I know we talk about content and technique and we interview great speakers, but there is a dimension to being a speaker that we don't often talk about. And today is the day. Welcome Jim Key and Ed Tate.

Howdy. Thank you.

This will happen to you. Maybe not in the exact format, but if you've given a speech at least three times, three different places, it's going to start happening. Like it's just. And Jim, the idea that spurred it for me was I remember sitting there, I always got to go to the bathroom. So always make sure you go to the bathroom before you take the stage. And, Ed, I don't know if you heard this one or not, but I was at a conference. I was rushed. Things weren't happening. Had to have the PowerPoint set up right. And I just forgot I'm on stage. It's the beginning of my presentation, and I show a video clip sometimes in the old days of my championship speech. So it's six or seven minutes long. I was like, yes, I'm going to run to the bathroom while the video is playing, because I'm. Otherwise, I'M going to be doing the, you know, the got a pee dance and I ran out, went to the bathroom like coming back in and all of a sudden the conference door locked behind me. I couldn't get back into my presentation. Oh boy. It was just definitely a moment of freak out. I was pounding on the door ever increasing to get someone's attention to let me back in. Jim, what's going give us one of your great stories.

Well, I'm disappointed. I thought the blinker was on. I thought we were turning into a direction of. You went to the bathroom and had your lavalier mic left on so well.

Jim, I'll tell you what, I've got that one covered. I do remember when Darren and I were in Europe together and we were doing two full years of training and we were both mics and I always, always, always turned my microphone off for some reason. I went out into the four year old and I began having a conversation and Darren runs out of the room, he says mike, Mark, the mic is off. So he left teaching, left the stage, ran out to me and said Mike. And I felt about this big but at 6 foot 1 it's kind of hard to hide. But I double checked and now when I go to the men's room I unplug the mic from the belt pack just to make sure.

You can't be too sure.

That was second nature thing. Anyway, I mean to break into your thoughts here.

No, no, no, that's okay. I had a situation a number of years ago. I was speaking at a conferen. They had the room set up tables in the round and they had had enough conference registration that the room filled and they actually had tables that came up almost to each side of the stage. So if I stepped forward on the stage they were actually very slightly behind me. So I'm in the middle of my presentation and I don't know if this is still as big a thing but custom ringtones being what they were, one fired off on one of these side tables. So I'm speaking and all of a sudden you can hear blah blah blah.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Now obviously it was someone's ringtone but I stopped, the whole room heard it, I stopped and I kind of looked over and I was like okay, you know, I said something acknowledging it because at some point you have to. And the lady whose phone it was was horrified that the impression being given was towards my speaking being blah blah blah blah blah.

Always a little bit of truth, Jim.

What's that?

Always a little Bit of truth, Jim.

Well, yeah, yeah, exactly. So she spoke up. She goes, oh, no, no, no, no, no. That's my mother in law's ringtone.

And I stopped.

And I said, I think you've just shared something with us about your relationship with your mother in law. Of course, the room just busts up and she's beet red. And I didn't want to leave her hanging. I also didn't want to say anything unfair or untrue about my mother in law. So I just turned to her and I said, it's okay, I have a mother in law. Too many of us have mother in law. And then moved along. That was one of those cases where, well, I have to acknowledge this. Let's just have a chuckle and move on.

Nice. I appreciate your restraint.

All right. I call this story the chain link bikini story. Oh, wow.

You have my attention.

As Ed Tate would say, I'm listening.

So my first big speaking engagement is MDRT 2008 in Indianapolis. After I get done speaking, a guy walks up to me and he says, hey, I live in the Bahamas. Would you like to speak in the Bahamas? And he had me at Bahamas because after that it was just like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like, you know, just like the ringtone. So anyway, we arrange five speeches, and at the time, I was dating a woman, let's call her Anna, and she comes along with me, and we're staying at the Atlantis, the very extravagant resort. And it's about five hours before our flight to return home. And all of a sudden we have drivers, and the drivers say, hey, there's been a major accident downtown and you guys need to pack up sooner than we anticipated. Now, prior to that, we were actually at the pool, and the day before, she went to the, the gift shop and she saw this bikini. And this bikini had gold chain links for the bra straps and also for the sides that held the front and the back. It looked very, very nice, etc. Not very practical because when she was sunbathing, the. The metal turned into, like, microwave. Okay, so not very practical, but she looked good. She looked, she looked awesome. Anyway, so when the, when the guys called us up and said, hey, you need to pack and you do pack soon because we don't know how long it's going to take. We, we know we take 15 to 20 minutes. We check out the hotel, and it was just like they said, it took several hours. We. We thought we're going to miss our flight, but our flight was delayed and we make our flight. So when you fly you know, from the Bahamas. It's an international destination. You fly. We fly into Miami. So we go through security and all this other stuff. And then you have to go through domestic security. So we're going through domestic security. And again, the Miami airport, the way it's laid out is you need another flight just to connect, to make your connection. You know what I mean? I mean, it is massive. It is absolutely massive. So we're racing across this airport. I run through the metal detector. No problem. She goes to the metal detector, Everything goes off. So she takes off her jewelry, she takes off her earrings, she takes off her necklace, et cetera. It goes through security. She goes back through the metal detector, and it goes off again. And I'm thinking like, okay, what is it that's causing this? And all of a sudden we make eye contact at the same moment and we realize what it is. While she had taken off the, the top of the metal chain link bikini, she had not taken off the bottom. Oh, wow. It was under and it was beneath her shorts. Anyway, she's got this look on her face, and I'm just dying, laughing. I'm just cracking up. I says, you know what this is worth? Missing the connecting point. So tsa, you know, you have to have a woman to check you out to do like what they call a wand scan. So we have to wait for about 10 minutes. And a woman comes up. So Anna starts whispering to the woman what's going on? And, and the woman just starts laughing. And she, she, she does the one thing, and then she goes below her waist, and then the one goes off. The female TSA agent is laughing. I'm laughing. Anna, not so much. And the woman's supervisor has no sense of humor at all. He thinks either a, that she's a drug smuggler or she's a terrorist, you know, and, you know, he, he starts to quiz her right there. Now people are walking by, going through security, witnessing this. Some people are actually taking out their phones and taking pictures, of course. And, and me, I'm a bit of a smart ass. And I'm saying, sir, sir, sir, if she was a drug smuggler or a terrorist, don't you think the, the last material that she would use to go through a metal detector would be metal? So he, he looks at me. He has no sense of humor. He forces me to go back through security, and I get scanned. So anyway, she, they take her to a private room. She's forced to remove the chain link bikini. They put it in a tray for all the world to See? And send it back through security. And again, I am in tears, needless to say. And ironically enough, we make our connection. So I call that. This is the world premiere of the chain link bikini story.

Well, at least nobody got hurt.

No, nobody got hurt.

Yeah, I can remember. I was. I did a lot of youth programs when I was first speaking, and I would travel all across North America. Rental cars, hotels, you all know, the road, the road detail. And one of my assignments was to a Catholic high school for girls, which was interesting enough. And they had me in the auditorium and you know, school auditoriums, they have the wooden chairs and it's literally theater style with a raised platform and an orchestra pit in front. And I don't know how this happened. When you have an orchestra pit in front of you, you want to get a level of connection with the audience so you get as far forward as you can. And I'm checking where I am. I measure everything out. I'm fine. And I'm going through my program. About 3/4 of the way through, I see I'm close to the edge. I turn to go back, one of my feet slips and I go thud into the orchestra pit off the platform in this auditorium.

Wow.

And I'm thinking, I don't think I broke anything. So I pop back up and I say, he's alive. And the girls were laughing, teachers were cracking up. And I'm thinking, I hope I can hover back to my hotel room in one piece. Thankfully, at worst, it was a sprain. But talk about a crazy moment, an embarrassing moment. And I don't know why the word he's alive comes from, like Frankenstein, I made them laugh, and it was so out of my character. But ever since that day, I decided to be very, very careful where I walk, where I stand. And, you know, we always tell people to walk the platform before you speak. Listen for the creaks and the bends and the twists and the turns. And sometimes you want to be careful because when you step, you may find a bad step. You could hurt yourself. As far as steps go, I was coaching a CEO of a large franchise for their corporate convention, and I flew into Florida to join them a day early to work with them on their presentation. And they had three or four individuals who were presenting, who were leaders in the organization. And there were women, and I noted the platform. And I always say, women, if you're going to wear spike heel shoes or heels, you want to make sure you know exactly where the creases are in the platform. Wouldn't you know One of the women went into that crease and her heel got stuck in the platform. You can't make this up.

You.

You see it coming and you can't do anything out. No. But these things happened happily. That wasn't too scary. And she didn't break an ankle. I didn't sprain a leg. And I live to tell the tale.

I just want to know, Mark, if they caught that on video?

I don't believe they did. You would probably find that really funny.

Absolutely. That's like demo tape material.

Well, I tell people if you can laugh at yourself, you may have some good material and fodder for great stories down the road. So.

Yeah, Jim.

Well, I hadn't even thought about this, but what Mark just shared reminded me of an experience I had. And I know this won't apply to everybody who is listening or watching the podcast because not everybody has been involved in the speech contests that we were a part of. But back in 2003, at my district level contest, the stage that they had was for most of the conference, just two stage sections put together. For the contest, they brought out another stage section, and where those two sections met, there were support legs underneath it. But if you stepped in a certain spot, there was this really loud creak. You could hear it in the back of the room. Now, I had prepared my speech, including all of the movements and everything I was going to do to basically use the entirety of the. Of the speech. Before the contest, I was walking the stage, as Mark alluded to, and I figured out where the creek was. I also figured out that where those sections came together, if you step on top of that, that's where it creaked. If you stepped farther and you were over or past the support leg, there was no creek. So I knew, just be aware of where that line is. And when I go to move over there, just take a little bit of a wider step so that I'm across that joining section and we'll get no creek. I had several friends from the North Texas chapter of the National Speakers association who came to watch the contest. And I was the last speaker and one of the. One of my friends from that chapter. After about Speaker 3 or 4, he said, Jim, that section of the stage over there really creeps out. Don't use that section. And I knew how to avoid it, and I knew I wanted to use it, so I said, okay, that's fine. And I did my thing and used the whole stage. When I got done, he said, why did it not creak when you did it? And everybody And I explained it to him.

He goes, oh.

He said, did you share that with the other contestants? I'm like, no, it's a contest. We all have the chance to walk that stage, you know, And I was maybe a ruthless competitor, but it's like, you know, we all had the chance to take in that information, you know? So, anyway, I had not planned on sharing that, but Mark's story about the stage separation reminded me of that, so.

Absolutely.

So anyway, make sure you walk your stage and, you know, everything that might be a disadvantage that you can overcome ahead of time.

You know, we could probably tell stories just about the rooms we've been in over the last 25, 30 years. I mean, we've had. Darren and I have had rooms where you walk in and there's a column right in the middle of the room holding the room up. And they've got 15 chairs behind the column. You wonder why they even do that. And I can't tell you how many times Darren and I, both together and individually, have reset conference rooms because it was not conducive to deliver in the optimal manner. But Darren's kind of been overseeing this. We need to get a Darren story in here.

Yeah, absolutely.

I remember traveling with Ed Tate when we were in another country and we took ATVs. Ed, I don't know if you remember, but we're driving down the beach, and then all of a sudden, Ed realized he lost his passport somewhere on that beach. Oh, my goodness. I'm like, oh, Ed, it's nice knowing you.

You're not gonna be.

Any speeches. I can fill in for you. But, Ed, I don't know if you remember, we went back to the hotel and this. It was in a beautiful hotel. And I felt very safe in the hotel, partially because there were armed guards out there. And they had told us, you can't, you know, don't leave the property. Got it. I'm clear. And, Ed, when we came back from that, I fell asleep because of jet lag in the back seat. And you were sitting up front with our host. And I remember being woken up by the butt end of an Uzi slammed on the window. And they literally said, is he alive?

Yes, I am now. Hello.

Ed.

I'm alive. And I need a change of clothing now.

I need new trousers.

Oh, man.

Oh, man.

Well, I call this story Oops. And I was speaking in California, San Diego, one of my favorite cities of all time. And as is my tradition, the night before, I'm practicing rehearsing, so I have some images I need to share. So for those of you just listening, I will describe as best I can some of these items, if you will. So, anyway, so I'm.

I'm.

I'm practicing. I'm rehearsing. There's a knock on the door, and it's room service now, which is kind of weird because I've already had dinner. And when I open up, it is. It is room service again, and it's a gift from the organizers of the event. As you can see here, well, what everyone's looking at here, there is. There's a bottle of wine. There is some Fuji water. There's a box with a bow on it. And in that box, there is some dark chocolate. Now, the version of the story that my wife heard, there is no chocolate. That's just between us, fellas. That's just between us, okay? And you'll also notice there is this thing. It looks like a scroll, right? All right? And there's also a card on there. And so anyway, I don't drink the night before a presentation because I just. I'm just not much of a drinker, and I just want to be able to control my words the following day. And so again, I continue my rehearsal, I continue practicing, and all of a sudden, I get curious about the scroll. And I open this thing up, and this is what I see. And I say to myself, oh, my God, that's weed. You know.

Oh, yeah.

And, you know, I'm saying to myself, you know, I know, like, in California that marijuana is, you know, recreational marijuana is legal, but when did the Sheraton become a dispensary? Does anybody know? So I look on the. The menu of, you know, the. The room service menu, and I see there's no marijuana. But they have this card, and the card says, on demand amenities. And one of them says, if you need something special, you know, zero. So I'm looking on this list, on the bottom of the list, it says, fee or deposit may be required. I'm saying to myself, hey, I'm getting warmer. And then finally it says. I said, there it is. There it is. And it says, hair tools. Professional quality. Fellas. Do you know what that is? That's cannabis code. The Sheridan is a Fortune 500 company. They cannot say that. They are. They're giving away free blow, okay? So they have to. They've got to have a code here. So anyway, I call up my wife, Sarah, and I says, sarika, the Sheridan is trying to tell me I have glaucoma. She says, what? I said, honey, they're Giving away free marijuana. She says, what? I says, shh, keep it down. Somebody might hear you. And she says, there's nobody here except for me and the baby. And I says, hey. And I text her a copy of the picture, and she says, did it come with a label? And I said, well, yeah. She says, what is. You know, put on your glasses. What does it say? And it said, it turned out it wasn't marijuana at all. It said, cinnamon, sugared spice, pecans.

And going back to that glaucoma thing.

Now, two things took place. Number one, the event had given everyone one of those scrolls. So I decided literally at the last minute to open up that story. It killed everyone. Everyone initially thought the same thing about that. The other. The second thing that took place is every time I've told this story, all the. The weed heads walk up to me, says, well, I could have told you right away that was a marijuana. And I thank you. I says, well, thank you, Snoop Dogg, you know, Anyway, so that's.

That's.

That's my oops story.

Anyone have any good stories where they set up the problem where they messed up? I remember I was in Dublin and I was doing my normal presentation, and I had a video intro. At the beginning of the video intro, it's just words in silence kind of setting up the drama.

And.

And so I get everything, talk to the AV team. I'm sitting in the audience waiting for my intro and video intro to be played, and I hit play in the remote from my seat, just like I told him I would. I hit play and then the words come up, but there's no sound. All of a sudden, an overzealous AV guy runs up on stage to try to find out what was wrong, why there was no sound.

I was like, no.

And he's like.

He became the focus of attention.

Yeah, Unplugging things, replugging things. He turns to me and he apologizes. And I realized I never told him there was no sound. So totally got disrupted. Totally. My bad. Make sure the AV team knows exactly what's going on, Mark.

Well, I learned that the hard way. I told you I was doing schools a lot. And I had a couple of incidents with schools, with my laptop and with slides. I remember one time I was at a school and they had you set up those two portable either. They call them PV speakers, P E A V E Y. And it's another brand. They have, you know, jbl, small ones. In the middle of my program, they decide those speakers aren't big enough, and they bring in two other speakers. They unplug my laptop by mistake. My battery was low. My laptop dies in the middle of my slides and I gotta keep going because these are 13, 14 year old kids. You stop what you're doing, you're lost. Another time I used to. Darren is a big fan, friends of what's called the B button on your PowerPoint remote or your Keynote remote. B turns the screen blank. That way the audience will stop looking at the screen and start looking at you. That's what. That's the idea. Being the lazy guy I am, I would embed blank slides into my presentation. It works wonderfully. It worked for two or three years, but one day I'm at a location with a zealous AV person and I went to my blank slide. They couldn't figure out why it went blank. And Darren unplugging things. Basically, I lost my whole PowerPoint because he was. I said, no, I did that. Oops, sorry, my bad. But again, what do you do when you have this situation where somebody doesn't. No, I always tell people, and I rehearse, I run through my slides. You'll see some blank ones like this. I've embedded those. Don't panic. It's not your fault. And there is no audio in this deck, so don't be surprised. They're plugging in audio HDMI and they really want to do well. It's a small thing you have to be aware of. And sometimes a circumstance will change. I was in a school in California, all set for the assembly program. We're going to do the PowerPoint and last minute someone says, you know what? It's probably not great trying to get all these kids into our gymnasium. Let's do it instead. In the commons area, whatever, what do you call it? Amphitheater. In the commons. Amphitheater Outside in California at 9am in the sunshine. Guess what? Slides ain't gonna work in California in the sunshine at 9am but the lesson I learned very quickly was you are a speaker, you speak. Visual aids will support you. And Ed Tate. I love you, Ed, because you always say this. It isn't a matter of if, but when.

Oh, yeah.

And friends, I'm telling you, be prepared for the worst case scenario. And I forced myself to fall back on this truth. Above all, I am a presenter. My job is to present, regardless of the distractions. And I'll share one more later on before I go. But I'm not gonna monopolize the conversation.

Somebody, you reminded me of the first time I had to present. Next To a swimming pool. Again, PowerPoint gone, gone. And it's not a square pool, it's a round curvy pool. And everyone is sitting in these chaise lounges. They don't have irregular chairs, so people just kind of sit back. So I feel like a waiter who's giving a personalized presentation because the sound doesn't carry. So I'm literally walking to every person in a Chase lounge trying to tell them my speech and my story. And I do a couple of laps around this peanut shaped pool. So that. That was early in my career.

I had a situation many years ago that was a definite learning moment for me. The story does not have a happy outcome other than I learned and I have done differently. But I asked to do a luncheon presentation for the Independent Insurance Agents of Dallas. The presentation was going to be on the use of humor in business presentations. The guy who was going to introduce me, I had just spoken with him on the phone a couple times, but I had not met him in person until I showed up, as many of us do and should. I had my presentation ready and so I handed him a copy of it and he looks at it and he goes, huh, humor, huh? You think you got a good sense of humor Now, I. All of us can sense when the gauntlet is being thrown down and there is a challenge about to happen. But I felt like, you know what, I'm speaking after you. I can make up for whatever you do. I was like, yeah, I got a.

Pretty good sense of humor.

He said, you mind if I take a little bit of liberty with your introduction? Now, a little bit of liberty is not a definite term I had in mind. He would change a phrase or two. But he gets up there, they had had their lunch and the room has about 150 to 200 people in it. He said, our next speaker, our speaker for today is Jim Key and he's going to talk about. And then he opened his mouth and five really long insurance industry specific kind of words came out. And I thought he would pause and then say, not really what he's going to talk. There was no, not really. It's like, here's Jim. And so I go up and these people are all braced for a beating that this boring presentation is going to be because of my introduction. I had to spend five minutes putting it in reverse and backing up and kind of reintroducing. And I never did really fully regain that. It was a train wreck. And so my takeaway from that is unless you absolutely know the person well and know they would not do anything like that to you. Figure out a way ahead of time to politely ask them if you can just go with my introduction. I think that'll. That'll set things up better for the audience. Some. Something to say because that was horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible. And I expect you to send me bills for the therapy session.

Well, I've got an introduction, introduction story. So Craig Valentine has written this article on. I forgot what the article is called.

How to ignite your audience with an introduction.

I pretty much follow this, his philosophy, because it's about setting up the audience for the talk. It's not necessarily doing a resume introduction, which is, you know, the traditional thing. So I'm in California. It's Toastmasters. And I said, hey, did you get my introduction? And the woman did not give my introduction. So I says, well, here it is. And she says, and she says, well, I don't have time to memorize this. I says, well, I don't expect you to memorize it. Just. Just read it. And she says, well, I'm not going to do the. I'm not going to read this introduction. This is going to make me look bad. And I said, we are like two minutes away from starting. And I said, okay, here's the deal. Number one, option number one, you can read the introduction. Option number two, I will find someone else who will. Or option number three, I will introduce myself. What's it going to be? You know? And I said, this introduction is not about you at all. It's for the audience. So she reads the introduction, and in the introduction there are three laughs which are embedded. And she gets three very loud laughs. I just keep that between her and I. I'm not going to throw her underneath the bus, et cetera. But at the end of the presentation, much to her credit, she says, I learned a valuable lesson here today. And she describes the entire scene behind stage, what would happen between her and I and the tension that was going on. And she said, and then this particular case, you know, number one, Ed was professional. He didn't say anything about this. And number two, you know, it turned out he was absolutely right with regard to this. So that was one of those situations where it was extremely tense. You know, it was. It was very, very tense. It's like, what do you mean you're not going to read my introduction? You know, well, how do you plan to introduce me then if you're not going to read my introduction? You know? Yeah, yeah.

Well, credit to her. Credit to her for. Yeah, realizing that, but also making it A teaching and learning moment for the audience.

About that she did, I have to give her a complete and absolute credit because I didn't expect that at all. At all. That was a pleasant surprise.

What's interesting is when you get introduced in a way you don't expect. I can remember I was in Connecticut years ago, and I'd agreed in the middle of all my youth programs to do a program for a Girl Scout group in Connecticut. I don't quite recall the whole situation, but I had done some work through the company I was working for at the time with different Girl Scout groups in Florida and Texas and so on. So I'm in Connecticut for this Girl Scout event, and I'm going back and forth. Somebody else booked it. I'm good. I get to the venue and I see their program. I am the featured speaker for the day, for the evening, and I'm listed as a humorist. Never in my life have I ever been listed as a humorist. I don't know what the company told him. He's a funny guy. And they ran with that. I'm finding this out literally 15 minutes before my presentation.

Wow.

I'm thinking, I'm gonna be funny for these women. I'm only funny looking. I'm gonna make this work. I do not recall what I said that day, but they did respond fairly well. And I learned a valuable lesson. Always be clear on the expectations of the audience and always make sure that what you have to deliver is what is going on to serve them. I almost got burned that way. The youth program, a state youth convented Pennsylvania many years ago. I had my standard program that I had built from my Beauty and the Beast speech that I was told. You're going to get almost 2,000 kids. High school is going to be great. I pull up the morning of the event an hour early. And throughout the entire property is a scream theme. The movie Scream with the, you know, the painting with the white face of everything is a scream theme. I'm talking about relationships and bullying and name calling. It had nothing. There was no connection to what they were dealing with and their mindset. And my speech would have come across as an admonition and a sermon. And, you know, don't do this. Be nice. That was not their mood, right? And I'm literally backstage thinking, how in the world do I salvage this?

Wow.

And I did what I would not recommend to anyone. I took out a business card, I took a pen, and I wrote S C R E A M down the back of that business card. And beside S. I said, okay, these are kids. What can I do for these kids? What can I tell them? Okay. S is for service. C is for commitment. Okay. R is for responsibility. Good. E is for education. Good. A is for attitude. M is for motivation. Now I need a story for each of these. What am I doing? The clock is ticking. Backstage, I literally wrote a six point keynote in ten minutes. I would never recommend to anyone. And the only reason why I could do it was I was so in the zone at the moment and I focused on students leadership. So service, commitment, responsibility, education, attitude and motivation became a program I did for kids called Screen. I have not delivered it in years, but it was written on the fly because I wasn't aware of what they expected. I wasn't the one to make sure and do the background check. I was trusting someone else to do that legwork for me. Lesson learned and happily never had to be applied again. Right.

Going back to Ed's introduction, I think introductions is one of the, the challenging points because we're often introduced by people who are more nervous about their two minutes introducing us than we are about our 45. I told Jim this story, but I was introduced by a guy. I had this great setup. I was speaking in the top of this beautiful building in Providence, Rhode island for the Providence Chamber of Commerce. And the meeting planner gave him the intro. Everything was good. One minute before I'm about to get on, they have, the president gets handed the introduction. Okay. I've not spoken to him. I didn't realize he was the introducer. He gets up there and he starts reading it. And in the day, comedy was part of my credibility. So he says here he was a stand up comedian. We'll see. And this is a breakfast meeting. It's already three steps backwards from after lunch or after dinner because they're not awake yet. Coffee hasn't kicked in. And the theme I'm kind of seeing here for all of us is that the ability to improvise, the ability to mark, you wrote it in five minutes, but you tapped into 10 years of experience to be able to write it in five minutes.

And also, Darren, the way we always teach people, it's also. I had to fall back on my story file in my head because that's where I found supporting evidence and examples to back up the points I tried to make. We tell our listeners and our students and our clients keep a story file for a reason. And I had stories to call fall back on. I'd have been really, I'd have really been like, it's important, Darren.

Yeah. Improv. If you're listening to this and you like improv, you want to be trained in improv. I'm so thankful from my improv background. And you guys got good at this naturally from having situations thrown at you. I was in Canada, and you guys remember we were always complaining. Well, maybe not out loud a lot, but technology, Technology. We love it and hate it. We love it and hate it, but sometimes we forget how bad and how challenging it was back in the early 2000s. It's moving along the scale. I was in Canada in early 2000s, and I was playing a video clip, my championship speech. Cause I was trying to show people how I delivered in that moment. I could redo it, but I will never have the pressure I had in that moment. So the video clip's playing, and all of a sudden it just stops. It just freezes. What do I do? And it came from the improv training. All of a sudden, I ran. I jumped up on stage, and I finished my speech.

Nice.

I finished it live. But it came from having that ability to be in the moment. What can I do? What can I do?

Yeah.

And I know we're getting low on time here, Ed.

Just talking about in the moment. So, number one, Mark, I bow down to you in front of teenagers. That is not my jam.

Amen. Preach it, brother.

Anyway, but. But I get. Someone convinces me to speak in front of something. It's called leadership something. It's the top juniors and seniors in the state of Colorado. So I'm thinking, like. And I mean, I got pressured into it. I says, all right, fine, I'll do it anyway. So my son hears about it. You know, he is a junior at the time. He says, dad, I hear you're going to be speaking at this event. Don't embarrass me.

You know, that's invite right there. That's his encouragement, like his true son right there.

So I've never been to this thing before. So let me. I said, let me. Let me get here early. So I arrived, like, several hours early. And there's this. I'm looking at the agenda, and there's this one guy, and the name of his company is Creative Something Something or other. And my first thought is, if you're really that creative, would you have creative in the title? So I go to his session, and it is chaos. This guy is just talking at the kids. The kids are throwing spitballs and all kinds of things. It's 500 kids. And I'm saying to myself, what in the hell did I get myself into? So I immediately look at my laptop, I says, the PowerPoint gone. And I do a Mark Brown. I said, okay, what can I talk about? What can I do to grab these kids attention? I says, okay, I've got my bully story. Okay, I got the bully story, I've got the trust story, I've got that story. And then I got my championship story. So I literally say to myself, I'm going to to tell these three stories and somehow I'm going to string them together and make a point. And so that's what I do. And I tell those three stories, I make it through, I get a standing ovation. Later on, they vote for the best presenter. I'm voted as the best presenter. I'm invited to come back the following year. That's. That's my reward. Exactly.

Let me give it to the creative guy. He needs more experience.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. The aha was several kids, like I have a story about bullies and about a dozen kids reached out to me because they had, they were being bullied. And so I reached out to the school and made them aware of that, et cetera. And we put them in touch with appropriate resources. So you never know the impact you're going to have. And again, this, our ability to improv our story files, our ability to think on the cuff. And the most important thing, all of us, we have this ability. What's the most appropriate thing for the audience? When is it appropriate for us to completely abandon our original plan and go in the moment?

Yeah. And the tail end of that piece, Ed, is this. We can debrief, we can do the postmortem, we can figure out what went wrong afterwards. But in the moment, serve your audience.

Any final quick funny stories, good stories that you want to make sure we get in the podcast.

I had one number of years ago, speaking at a three one day conferences that were consecutive for safety engineers and managers for various companies. As part of my presentation, I told the story of my Toastmasters contest experience and it generally ended with me redelivering my championship speech. In that speech, I stand up in a couple of chairs for people who are safety professionals after the fact. First day they came and they said, please don't stand in the chairs because we're very tense about that sort of thing. And I attended a few of the sessions and so I heard them say over and over again, when stepping from one level to another level, whether up or down, always maintain three points of contact. In other words, if you were going to lift a foot have both hands holding something. So day two, I'm giving this presentation. It's an entirely different group of safety engineers. The conference organizers are the same, but different group of attendees. And so I get to that point of my contest speech and I raise my foot up, I grabbed the back of the chairs and I turned around and said, hey guys, look, three points of contact. Got a huge laugh.

You know, I stepped up in the.

Chairs and then released my hands. So, you know, I stayed within their guidelines. But, you know, it got a laugh. And the conference organizer said, all right, okay, I guess we can let that slide. But they appreciated the fact that it was acknowledging something about that organization and about their concerns. That wasn't part of my topic, wasn't part of anything formally prepared, but it just acknowledged that. And then I'll share one other very, very quick one. Years ago I was in Singapore to speak at a conference and they asked me pre conference if I would speak to a school. It was an all girls school and I think they were roughly third or fourth grade. It was in a gymnasium, no chairs. They had them all sit on the floor. It was about 400 little girls. And I was up on this platform, which was empty excep off in the back corner there was a drum set, which was weird, but it was off to the side. Well, in part of the story I told them, I spoke to them about the process where I learned to play the bass guitar like Mark is. I'm a, I'm a musician. I play the bass guitar and drums. And I made a passing reference and I played bass guitar and also drums. And I just kind of gestured to it, didn't think anything else about it. We followed it up with a Q and A. Most of these little girls were very timid and very shy. And one little girl came to the microphone and said, can you play the drums for us? What do you do? How do you, how do you say no? I mean, you know, I did and, and you know, a very, very short little set. And then I, I said, now everybody needs to applaud her for her bravery and asking that question.

Any of you may have been thinking.

But she had the, the nerve and the courage to do it. And so it was a, it was a fun little moment, but I, but I learned only reference something if you're okay with it being brought in and made a part of what you're doing.

My last and my craziest stories. They say you always save the best for last. I don't know about that, but in my young days, Giving talks in junior, junior and senior high schools across North America. I made a mistake. I was delivering a presentation and I've seen kids literally faint in the bleachers and fall. And one kid at one particular school.

I haven't had that effect on him yet.

Happened to, the kid must have collapsed or something. And a teacher saw it and they didn't want to draw attention to it. They didn't want to draw attention to. Called 911. Oh my. They came in with a sheet of cloth while the emergency worker, the emt, was tending to the child. And I'm talking and I'm seeing a sheet go up. An EMT is there, I'm gonna stop. And the principal comes to me and says, no, just keep talking to his kids over there.

Wow.

I'm like, what?

They'll be fine because they got him. Just wants to see what they're doing. I guess they'd give the kid medication. He was breathing fine. But just to not have a crowd watching, they put a sheet up. Guess where all kids minds are going to be. Guess where my mind's going to be? On the kid behind the sheet being treated. The good news was they weren't going to be real on a stretcher, but they simply wanted to avoid having the attention of treatment while the kid was being taken care of. Guess what? It's bad enough an EMT walks in, you put a sheet up. Yeah. The whole thing is lost. And you can't make this up. The fact that the principal wanted me to continue under those circumstances, wow. I'm like, wow, you can't make this up. The good news was the child was fine. EMTs went on their way. We did eventually end the presentation, but in that moment I'm thinking, what in the world? How am I even supposed to continue doing this? Listen, friends, stories from the road can be fun, can be funny, but sometimes it can be just plain crazy. Darian.

Yeah. Final bit of advice. If you guys could share just one bit of advice. I'll start by just saying, look, this is going to happen to you. The, the extraordinary is going to become the ordinary. Have fun, tell your friends. Because other speakers get it. That's one of the reasons I thought this would be a fun episode, but also some learning in there that it's going to happen. You can't avoid it. People are involved. As soon as people are involved, there's going to be some challenges along the way. And sometimes, just like me, you'll create the problem yourself. So just know you're not alone if you're listening to this and you. You want to work on your improv, you can check out. We have an improv class first and third Friday of every month. Check it out. Go to stagetimeworkshops.com stagetimeworkshops.com by the way, it's not recorded because it's improv, but use the discount code POD25. POD25. Ed Tate Final Bit of advice.

As speakers, we never have bad days. We just have new material. So just. Just roll with it. And it reminds me of a time that Darren and I, we were in the Middle East. We were warned that the crown prince might stop by. And if the crown prince stops by, you are to stop mid sentence. And he will take over. He will speak. And that's exactly what happened. I'm in the middle of an exercise, an activity, and then we get word the royal prince. Prince is coming, and he has his entourage, and they're coming in and get off the stage, you know, so I get off the stage, he comes up. He is an outstanding speaker.

He was great.

He is an absolute outstanding speaker. So I literally dropped my program and I say, hey, what worked with his presentation. So after he left and we just. And we had like a 15 to 20 minute discussion about all the things he did well with this presentation. So again, we never have bad days. We just have new material.

I know. I noticed you didn't critique at all on that one.

I was thinking that.

No, no, I did. I did not say anything.

You. You were a moderator. You're the moderator.

Yeah, I was a moderator, yes. I had nothing. Nothing to say.

Jim, you would have heard crickets if you said. And who can identify something poorly he did.

Crickets.

Crickets, Crickets.

I would have been moving away from Ed. The couch.

Exactly.

It's a damn shame what happened to Ed.

Yeah.

Someone'S gonna have to fill in for him.

Whatever happened to the 2000 world champion of public speaking? He's been missing for decades.

He critiqued the wrong person. Jim, key final advice?

No, I would just say that in addition to what Darren said about taking improv, learning, learning those things, just, you know, in the moment when something distracting or frustrating happens, just, you know, realize it's not the end of the world and you can move on past it. The other thing I would say is I'm a big fan of if you can't, if it is all possible with your schedule, obviously equip yourself with as much information ahead of time as you can about the organization, the event or things, whatever. But if you can get there and attend and be around some of the people because there may be some things that you pick up on that you can integrate or just by generating the goodwill by being there and interacting with people. If and when something goes wrong during your presentation, they'll be more willing to extend a little bit of grace to you because you're not just some stranger who just walked in the building and got on stage. You were there with them and they're.

More familiar with you.

And by the way, we're paid as professionals to be able to handle those situations, right? Anyone can handle the perfect easy audience and look good. We get paid to help under those situations. For the event planner, for the audience, Mark Brown, take us home.

Yeah. And you know, I know it's a cliche to say expect the unexpected, but as Darren says, if we can overcome the obstacles, if we can be flexible, we can write a keynote in five minutes on backstage and we can change our program when we have these unexpected situations. That's one more way that to our audience, to a meeting planner, we will be unforgettable. So work on your craft and all your technique, but keep your eyes open, keep your mind clear and be unforgettable. And don't forget, keep track of all those crazy stories from the road. We'll see you next week.

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