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What do you do if all of a sudden your teleprompter freezes?

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

This is a question that comes in from one of my online students. This comes from Toby. Dear T.J. how can I look comfortable if the teleprompter freezes, presumably while he's using it? And point of clarification, for those of you who don't know what a teleprompter is. It is a machine that allows you to project your speech, text a script up on a piece of glass. There are two types of teleprompters. There is the public speaker, executive presenter type. That's what you see the president using. That's what people use at conventions. Those are two pieces of glass, typically a little to your left, little to your right, and put up at eye level. If you're on the other side, if you're in the audience, all you see is a piece of glass. You either don't notice it, or you think it's some protective device to keep bullets away or something like that. You only see the script if you're right in front of it. On the other side, there's also the sort of teleprompter that newscasters use. Typically it's through the lens or right next to the lens of the video camera. And in that case, there's just one of them. So, Toby, what do you do in that situation? Let me break down the various options. Let's say you're making an internal video, corporate video, a video for YouTube, something where it's your project, your control, and it's not live, in that case, I would just stop and redo it. If you're using a teleprompter because you want to get everything just right, you have a set script, perhaps an advertiser is paying you to get it just right. In that case, just stop the production, fix the teleprompter, and do it over. Now, let's say you're giving a speech, and in the middle of your speech, suddenly the teleprompter breaks. This has happened in many, many occasions, major political conventions. That's why what you do see at most conventions, and most of the time, you see the speaker with a full script of paper in their hand. And for those of you listening on itunes, I'm holding up scripts in a piece in my hand, pieces of paper. So when that happens, you need to not say, oh, my God, the teleprompter broke. Don't look panicked. I wouldn't even comment on it. Instead, just look relaxed, comfortable. Pause for a second glance down. Now, if that's going to work, you're going to need to be turning the pages of your paper notes at the same time you're using the teleprompter. So it's not exactly that easy. But if you want to have a full measure of protection, you needed to be doing that. Presidents typically do that in State of the Union addresses. Now, famously, Bill Clinton, a little back story here. Not many people know this Bill Clinton, I believe it was his 1995 State of the Union address. He got up to deliver the speech and he noticed it was last year's speech. What had happened is his State of the Union address was labeled State of the Union. And when it was uploaded into the software for teleprompter, the person putting it in saw the prompt saying, do you want to delete State of the Union? Well, if you have two files with the same name, you have to delete one or override one. The person put no. So what happened is up popped last year's State of the Union. He quickly turned around in front of the whole world to Al Gore, his vice president, and said, tell Stephanopoulos it's the wrong speech. He then, once the applause died down, had to give his speech. And for the first 10 minutes or so, he did it from memory. Ladies and gentlemen, regardless of your thoughts of the Clintons, and this is not a political broadcast here, there is no doubt he is an extraordinarily talented speaker and by all accounts has a world class memory. So he was able to speak from memory for the first 10 minutes of his State of the Union address with the entire world watching. Now, let me tell you right up front, there's no way I can do that. In fact, I don't think that anyone else could do that. Very few people could do that. They would just sort of wilt. I don't know what most people do in that situation when the entire world, or at least the entire United States and the US Media is all focused on this one moment and it's live. That would be the worst of all possible situations. He certainly, given his skill set, reacted the best way possible. He alerted someone, got the solution coming, and did the best he could in the short term. And his best was still great. What I would recommend for most people in that situation is use your text, use your written notes and you'll be okay. Now let's say you don't have your notes in front of you and you are doing something, whether it is a broadcast studio and it's live or a speech. What I would recommend is try to be as familiar as you can as possible with the material so you can talk about it in an extemporaneous fashion. Not just making stuff up, but talking about the same points. Maybe you're not going to use the same wording, maybe they're not. Maybe not the same order, but substantively you're hitting the same points. That's why it's good not to just read the teleprompter live. I mean, the only people who can really do that well are people who've been broadcasting three, four hours a day for decades. For anyone else, if you're using a teleprompter, the teleprompter is not an excuse to prepare less. It's actually something that is going to motivate you to prepare more. You need to be more immersed in the subject matter, know even more about what you want to say. Do that and you will be prepared in any situation, regardless of how well the teleprompter works. Now the other thing you need to be aware of is practice on the teleprompter, especially if it's one of these newer ones and you have a foot pedal or you're doing it yourself, you might accidentally hit pause yourself. So try to solve the problem before it starts by really practicing and getting comfortable with it. Thanks so much for the question. Do appreciate your question, Toby. We'll be back with more questions from folks just like you in a moment.

Do you have a speaking related question for number one USA Today best selling author TJ Walker for more than 30 years. Walker has been a public speaking coach and media trainer to presidents of Countries, Prime Ministers, CEOs, Nobel Peace Prize winners, professional athletes and Ms. Universes. Send your questions to infoediatrainingworldwide.com or on Twitter jwalker.

Raina writes in with the following question. She's one of our online students. DJ does one's voice have an impact on the outcome of one's presentation? Now I'm going to take somewhat of a contrarian view on this and many of you have heard me talk about this before. I'm not saying that your voice has no impact your presentation, but in the scheme of things I do believe people waste too much time talking about thinking about their voice. Not enough time actually trying to figure out do they have something interesting to say, something memorable to say. And by the way, we're going to have some voice experts and voice coaches on as guests on this show in the next month, I've been approached by several authors, some of whom are coaches to Hollywood stars on their voice. So you're going to get some other opinions on this. I happen to have a contrarian view in that I just think the voice is such a low priority compared to what you are saying. And here's why. I say think of the following people I'm going to mention. Greta Van Susteren, Rachel Ray, Ben Stein, Barbara Walters. What do these people have in common? By most standards, they have an awful voice and yet they are wildly successful. Make millions, tens of millions. Some of them have made hundreds of millions of dollars in their careers using their voice. And that's what makes me think it's so much more important what you say than your voice. Of course, there are exceptions. If you're speaking so softly, nobody can hear you. Well, yeah, of course that's a huge problem if you end every sentence with a question mark as if you're not quite sure you know what you're saying. The up talk as it's discussed, yeah, that will undercut your message. There's a lot of talk about how women do that and harm their own image. I will be honest. I do work with a lot of women all over the world in various industries. I rarely encounter that problem. Now, it may be that by the time they're in a position to hire me, they've solved that problem or they just don't advance to the point where they get hired by someone like me. Of course, you want to come across your very best with every aspect of style and substance. In my experience, most people's voices are perfectly fine if they just speak the way they do when they are comfortable, meaning using highs, lows, louds, soft, fast, slows. It's that variety of your voice that makes you interesting and compelling to listen to. And that is relatively easy to do if you practice your speech on video enough to the point where you're comfortable with it. So I know some of you are tired of listening to me say this, but it really is something that solves a lot of problems. Practicing your speech on video until you love how you come across, how you sound, how you look and what your message is. For many people, the problem with their voice is, is not that their voice is bad. It's just they're not used to hearing their own voice. And that's why it's so helpful to practice your speech on video and listen to it 10 times, a dozen times. Because by then you get used to your voice. I'm going to give some examples here. Some of you may find this offensive, but I just don't know any other way of doing it. There are a lot of young men, boys, teenagers, who think they'll be much more attractive to women if they pump up their chest and pump up their arms. So they spend hours and hours and hours at the gym trying to get big arms and big muscles because they think that's what will make the women swoon. And the reality is that's just not what most women or young girls, young ladies really care about. They'd much rather you have something interesting to say or doing something interesting with your life. So there's that imbalance on the male side, and I would say apologies if I offend you, there is an imbalance on the female side. There are a lot of females who spend so much time on their nails in nail salons and buying fancy, expensive shoes to be more attractive to men. And the reality is most men couldn't care less about nails or shoes provided you don't have jagged edges on your nails and it's a lot of dirt caked under your nails. So everyone, male or female, can sometimes get preoccupied on things that they think are really having an impact on their image, but aren't. I put voice into that category, but Raina, thank you so much for writing. We will be hearing some contrarian views on this subject in the weeks to come, so stay tuned. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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