TJ Walker (The Habit Influencer) gives practical advice for handling tough questions during presentations: if you don't know an answer, acknowledge it calmly, offer to follow up or direct to someone who can, and then steer back to relevant points; if constrained (legal/regulatory), reframe responses positively rather than appearing defensive. He emphasizes treating questions as helpful opportunities, maintaining composure and enthusiastic attitude, and closes with a promo for a free course from Media Training Worldwide.
Chapters
What do you do if you're giving a presentation and someone asks you a tough question, either interrupting you or waiting until after your speech? It's the thing that causes people to lose sleep the night before presentations. What do I do if someone asks me a tough question? My clients all over the world ask me about what to do. And here is my advice. We can't predict every question. Obviously, there are going to be questions that are tough, but at the bottom line, with every question, you either know the answer or you don't. If someone asks you a question and you don't know the answer, you have a couple of choices. One choice, I don't know, I'm overdoing it. But just a tad. We've all seen speakers where they're asked a question, they get flustered, they look embarrassed, they act embarrassed. And unfortunately, that becomes the most memorable moment of not only the question and answer period, but the whole speech, their whole presentation. So if it's an hour of them on stage or in front of the room and they spoke for half an hour and there were Q&As for half an hour, that's the most memorable moment, because that was that one moment of surprise, of emotion. That's what you don't want. Now, it's perfectly okay not to know the answer to a question, but here's the trick. Don't act embarrassed, don't act flustered. If it's something that is easily quantifiable, you can tell the person, I don't know. Smithers in accounting does know. I can reach out to him as soon as we're done and email you the answer within an hour. But what I can tell you that is relevant to this issue is. And then keep going on something else. Now, you've got to actually follow up. If the person wants to know how many people work in your Singapore office and it's public knowledge, follow, find out and get back to them. If you answer it that way, then no one's going to remember it, and instead you can get people to focus on what is most important to you. Now, sometimes someone might ask you something and you know the answer, but you can't say for legal reasons or for other regulatory reasons. Again, the trick is don't act embarrassed. Don't act like, oh, you caught me. This is what we didn't want to talk about. The second you act like there's something you know that they don't know that you like to tell people, but you can't, that is going to arouse more curiosity. So My advice? Let's say someone's asking you about a lawsuit. Rather than saying, I can't comment, oh, I wish you hadn't asked that. Just say, be happy to inform you on all the details of this situation. I once we have gone through the whole court system and the judge has given us the okay, something where it's positive as opposed to you being defensive or negative, that's really the key. Question time is a great opportunity because if you're a presenter and you're trying to get people to understand your ideas, when someone's asking you a question, they're doing you a favor. They're trying to help you by giving you a topic that you know at least some of the people are going to be fascinated in. Otherwise, why did the person ask the question? So don't look at it as an interruption or an attack. Look at it as they're helping you with your speech. With that attitude, you're going to have a much more positive attitude and it's going to go across very well. Remember, you have to act at all times like you're loving this. You'd love to stay here all day and ask questions if you could. If you exude that attitude, people will take away a very positive feeling about who you are, your organization and what you're all about. Thanks for joining me. As always. This is brought to you by Media Training Worldwide. If you would like a free, no obligation online public speaking course, go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and sign up for the free course today. I'm TJ Walker. As always, may all of your speaking opportunities in life be a successful.
