Ep 66 What Do You Do If You are Being Kicked Off Stage Public Speaking March 6 16

What do you do if you're being cut short when giving a presentation and someone's trying to push you off the stage?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in Life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

This question comes from one of our regular YouTube viewers. This is from Gregory Barton. He writes in TJ what do you do if you're being cut short and kicked off stage? Now this happens if you do much speaking, at some point this will happen. It may be because you're awful and you're bombing and everyone is sick and they're leaving, but probably not. It probably has to do with circumstances beyond your control and that other speakers talked too long. Now there's some event, some organization, and the overall conference is behind schedule and the person running things is trying to figure out how can I get us back on track? How can I get these people to their lunch break on time or their afternoon coffee break? So it has nothing to do with you necessarily. It might, but the first thing you've got to do is take a deep breath and don't get angry. The worst thing is if all of a sudden somebody slips you a note or whispers in your say, well, what do you mean? I was promised 30 minutes and I'm going to take my 30 minutes. It can make you look petty, it can make you look thin skinned, and it can make you look like you're not a team player. I would not recommend that. The other thing you should not do is complain and talk about the time. Well, I was promised 30 minutes, but now I have 20, so I'm going to have to talk really fast. And I'm sorry, I'm not going to be able to get to everything. The time you spend complaining about the fact that you have less time is time you could spend actually talking, actually saying something interesting to your audience, actually saying something useful to them. This issue relates to the larger issue of just how do you deal with things beyond your control when you are speaking, when you are presenting, you have to make the most of it. Regardless of what happened, the power could go out. I'll tell you about it. I'll tell you that happened to me in just a moment.

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Part of being a good speaker, part of being seen as professional, as being a class act, is being able to react quickly, easily, professionally, and never seem bothered, never seem like you're upset, never seem like you're put upon or you're feeling like poor little me. So if a conference organizer tells you, hey, let's wrap it up, or let's say you're speaking to a board of directors meeting and your CEO says, okay, let's wrap it up in five minutes. And you've just started and you prepared a 30 minute presentation and now you're told you've got to do it in five minutes. Now for a lot of people, that's enough to make your heart stop beating. It's so scary. Let me give you a specific technique in that situation. When you're speaking to a board of directors and a CEO, they can be prickly. They're used to really boring speeches and they can quite often say, okay, you sent that in the deck. We read it. Okay, hurry up, get to the point. What you have to do there is realize you can't just think of your speech as a linear way of going through a bunch of slides. You have to think of it in terms of what are the ideas that are most important. And if you were going to try to convey 10 ideas about all the wonderful things your division did in the last quarter and you had a half an hour, you've now got to think about, okay, what are the top three ideas? What are the top three things we've accomplished in the last quarter? And let me make that come alive for the CEO and the board of directors and just talk to them. Forget the slides, they've already got the slides. And then if I've aroused their curiosity or they want to ask more questions, well, I'm certainly happy to answer that. But unfortunately what happens is people freeze. So they think, oh, how do I deal with this? So they just start speaking faster. Their head goes down, they start reading their notes, okay, I don't have a lot of time. Suddenly go, there's going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it just is so boring. It puts everybody to sleep. It's not effective. And people are thinking, I can't wait for this person to finish. So big, big rule right here. Never, ever, ever speak faster because someone's trying to kick you off the stage or saying, wrap up with less time than you thought. You need to speak in the very same way you always speak in a conversational tone, pausing occasionally, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, sometimes louder, sometimes softer. And the problem with rushing is none of those things happen. You make yourself monotone and it just puts people to sleep. I mean, if someone, we've all seen this in organizations. Someone says, well, give me a one page memo, limit it to one page. And then some smart aleck thinks, well, I want to cram everything in. So they change the margins, they make the font really small. Six point. Yeah, it's one page, but they're clearly violating what the rule was supposed to solve. Way too much stuff and people not getting to the point fast enough. You need to be at the point as far as basic preparation, at any time you're speaking to go longer than anticipated or shorter than anticipated. And I'll give you some techniques to do that in just a moment.

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To be truly confident with a presentation to the point where you don't even care if the organizer comes out and says, wrap up in five minutes or hey, I'm sorry, we gonna have to go. To get to that point, you have to truly know your material. Not in a memorized sense, not in a sense of the slide sequence, but in the sense of what are the ideas you are truly most concerned about your audience understanding and remembering. If you actually know that, if you've given real thought and put ideas in a priority, then it's going to be pretty easy for you to forget the slides and go right to that idea that's on perhaps slide 23, because that's how it was created. But you know, it's really the most important thing. The other thing you can do if you're being asked to get off the stage is be a little creative. So for example, let's say it's through no fault of your own, everyone is running late and you were supposed to start at 11, 15 and finish at 12. Because the lunchroom for a big convention, the lunchroom has to be empty at 12 for them to bring the food in. And now you didn't get to start until 10 minutes till 12. And the person introducing you says, hey, we're really excited to hear from Sam today, but we also apologize because I promised him 45 minutes. But if we don't leave this room in 10 minutes, no one will be able to eat lunch or any food till dinner. At that point, you don't want to be the person responsible for no one having any food till dinner. So you're going to have to finish at 12. Straight up, you've got 10 minutes. How do you make the most of it? My recommendation, don't just start at the beginning and get to the 10 minute mark and say, well, if you want the other 35 minutes, you'll have to Invite me back or you'll have to make me speak after lunch and make everyone else late and then we won't have dinner. You've got to just give them what is most important. Put a spotlight on it. Don't talk about the time, don't apologize for the time, don't whine for the time, don't reference time. Just talk to your audience and use every precious second you can. Now, there are a couple of innovative ways that you can turn this disaster into something better, too. And that is tell people. For those of you who want to hear the rest of the prepared presentation or you have questions, I'll be sitting over here at lunchtime and we'll be continuing the conversation in an informal way. So please try to sit at table 17 over here is one way of doing it. Another way certainly is. If you have books, materials, resources, a PDF, let people know that here's the webpage for it. You can email them. They simply drop off their business card. You'll email them the presentation. But I wouldn't just send the slide deck. I'd actually send them the video of your rehearsal of the presentation. Little aside here, I would never, ever send somebody a deck of slides that they asked for your presentation, because it's not your presentation. Your presentation is you speaking. So if someone asks you to email the presentation, always send a video well as the slide deck. Now, let's talk about situations that are not a function of just running short or someone getting impatient with you. It's just situations beyond your control. About 10 years ago, I was giving a presentation to a group of oil executives on how to give effective presentations. Earlier in the day, I tell them, you got to be ready no matter what to give your presentation. What if you're giving a PowerPoint and the bulb burns out or the computer is not compatible? You don't want to have to just apologize and go home. You've got to be ready to do it. In fact, you got to be ready in case the power goes out and everyone's leaving an hour later for the airport, and everyone's going to different cities. And your last chance to ever talk to these prospects or clients, you got to be able to walk out of that building, go deliver the presentation in the parking lot if you need to. So that's what I told them, and I actually do believe that. Morning went by, lunch went by, mid afternoon went by, we're doing more and more training. I'm doing more speaking. They're speaking round about 4 o', clock, the power went out. Now Those of you who are here in New York City may remember this was when the power went out for about 24 hours. Kind of scary, inconvenient. It went out. I was speaking around 4, starting to wrap up for the day, and giving people their final assignments for their final presentations. And lo and behold, the energy goes out, the power goes out, the lights go out. This was a TV studio where there were no windows. So, folks, it was really dark. What did I do? Did I just say, I guess we're done, let's just go home? No. I decided to make a learning moment out of it. I said, follow me. I cracked open one door that finally let a little bit of light in. We grabbed some beverages from the refrigerator, which was still cold, said, follow me. We felt our way down the steps. It was only on the second floor out of the building. We went half a block to the middle of Bryant park, right behind the New York City Public Library. A beautiful park, formed a semicircle, and I kept on going. Jim will now hear your presentation. And you know what? They gave their PowerPoint presentations without PowerPoint, how were they able to do that? Were they just such uniquely talented, gifted presenters? No, they were able to do it because they'd been practicing it all day long. They were familiar with their speech, they were familiar with their presentation, and that's why they were able to do a good job with it. So that's really the most important piece of advice have for you, is be ready for anything. Be looking at it as an opportunity to do better than people thought. It's quite often when you're thrown a curveball and people see that, you react well, not in a petulant way, but in a creative way that in fact can boost your reputation. So please be always on the lookout for those opportunities.

Your questions.

Folks. A reminder, this show is about your questions. I don't come in here and every day just try to sell you my latest online training course, although I do offer one at no charge to people in a very brief ad in the show. This show show is about answering your questions. Any questions to do with public speaking, presentation training, media training, spoken communication or body language when you are trying to communicate. So if you have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. A lot of different ways of doing that. You can send it on Twitter. JWalker is my handle. You can post your question on our Facebook page, which is TJ Walker Interactive. You can go to our YouTube channel. The best way, of course, is to go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and go to the blog and then just post under any one of the shows that you see there. All of the shows, by the way, are in on audio version. Those of you listening to this on itunes, on your podcast, on your cell phone, you know that there's also a video version. You can watch this program on YouTube, Facebook, video, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Flickr, and a lot of other places too. So trying to make it as easy as possible for people to have a discussion about public speaking issues and to have their questions answered. You might not agree with me all the time. You might think I'm off on a particular point. But the one thing I can tell you is the insights I'm giving you are mine. They're not just something I read in a book. They're insights based on actual practical real life experience. Having given thousands of speeches and having trained thousands and thousands of executives from six continents all over the world and and these days training more than 100,000 student enrollments from 166 countries in the online world. So I'm trying to bring that expertise to you in a way that I hope you'll find meaningful and useful. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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