TJ Walker advises public speakers on responding to audience questions they cannot answer. He reframes the bigger problem as being forgettable rather than occasionally failing to answer, and recommends maintaining calm, admitting uncertainty without embarrassment, offering to follow up, and bridging to related points you do know to preserve credibility and leave a strong impression.
Chapters
What happens if you're giving a speech or you finished a presentation and somebody asks you a question and you can't answer it? Oh my gosh. That is a lot of people's worst nightmare. Indeed. Anytime I'm working with a group of people on their public speaking skills, whether it's five people, 500 or a thousand, I'll ask the question, how many of you have either experienced this or seen somebody asked a question at the end of the speech? They didn't know the answer, it was embarrassing and awkward. Sure enough, 20% of the hands will go up. So it is a real problem. It's a legitimate problem. But I always ask another follow up question and here's that question. How many of you have seen somebody give a speech and it was so incredibly boring, uninteresting and unmemorable, you didn't remember anything the person said two minutes after the speech? Guess what percentage of hands went up then. Now it's 100%. So I say this because I want you to focus on the bigger problem. The far more likely problem you're going to encounter is that people don't remember anything you said. It's not that they remember some horrible moment or some embarrassment, or that you didn't answer a question. They could. But the far bigger problem is we leave no impression. So what I want you to focus on first and foremost always is have you delivered real value, an interesting message in a memorable way to your audience? Focus on that first and foremost and the issue of an unanswered question will often fade away. Now, here's what you do if someone asks you a question, because nobody can know everything. It's not a problem if you don't know the answer. What is a problem is if you look embarrassed, flummoxed, like you want to swallow yourself whole or have the stage swallow you up. That's what people remember. So it's not important if you know or don't know the answer quite often your reaction if you don't know the answer. There's nothing wrong with saying I don't know. Smithers in accounting does know. I can find out from him and email you the answer by 4 o'clock today. Would that be acceptable? And as long as you don't look bothered or flustered, that's typically a fine answer. It's our reactions to the questions that get us into trouble. Quite often. If you look over like you're completely happy to have the question asked, you're not bothered by it all, you're not flustered, you either know or you don't know. If you don't know, you're not afraid to say that. But then bridge to what you do know that's relevant. If somebody says, well, T.J. if extremist political leaders are elected and the world goes into a recession, are you going to go out of business? Nobody really knows the future. I can simply say I don't know. What I do know is regardless of who's in power, political leaders, private sector leaders are always going to have to speak. Those who speak well are going to have an advantage. And that's why, regardless of political outcomes, there's going to be a demand for my services. I said I didn't know. I don't really know who's going to win, not win, or if we're going to go into a recession. But I didn't sound embarrassed or flustered. That's really the key.
