A short live-stream transcript of TJ Walker offering practical advice for recovering when a speech or presentation goes wrong (e.g., slides fail, equipment malfunctions, audience disruption). Walker emphasizes staying calm, not visibly showing frustration, focusing on delivering interesting and useful ideas to individual audience members, improvising without slides, and offering services for further training.
Chapters
It's the middle of the speech, then it happens. Ah, everything falls apart. You've just fallen to pieces. What do you do? Sooner or later, this could happen to you. I want to give you some very specific tips and tactics on how to handle it. Let's say your. Your text has gotten out of order. All of a sudden your projector doesn't work, the slides have stopped, maybe the bulb doesn't work. People have gotten up and let. Everything is going wrong. The human tendency is to sort of to show the frustration on your face. And here's where it gets a little contradictory. Of course I want you to be human and not to have some sort of fake, phony, robotic smile on your face. But I don't want you to visibly show all your frustration because unfortunately, that emotional moment where you're like, oh, I can't believe this is happening. This is so awful. Whether you're actually saying it or your face is saying it, that will become the most memorable moment in the entire presentation. So I do want you, frankly, to act a little bit phony there. Don't show how frustrated you feel. You can feel it inside. But I also need you to realize your audience doesn't really care about the slides or your paper notes or your outline or the people who left. The only thing your audience cares about is me, themselves. You giving them some ideas that are interesting and useful and helpful to them. And every second, there's a new opportunity to either meet that expectation or. Or fail in that expectation. Doesn't matter how bad the first half of your speech was. You can start right in the middle of the speech by just saying things interesting, useful, and memorable to your audience. And sometimes you have to get rid of the canned speech. Sometimes you have to realize the PowerPoint isn't going to work and just talk to them. Tell them the ideas that you know that you care about. And I need you to ignore the bad stuff. Don't show frustration on your face. Don't think about poor little old me. Think about poor little old person in the first row or the second row listening to you. You need to focus on them. Have your pity party after the speech. But when something bad happens and you feel like it's just crumbling around you, focus on giving someone in your audience interesting, useful ideas. If you do that, the speech is still going to be a huge success for the people in the audience, which also means it's going to be a success for you. I'm TJ Walker. I help people speak their best. Because how you present your ideas is the number one factor in your success. If you'd like to become a better speaker, then check out my online public speaking courses, my public workshops every month in New York City, and also my private one on one and group trainings that happen all over the world. If you want more information, give me a call or click on the website now.
