TJ Walker answers a viewer question about stuttering during presentations. His advice: don't apologize or draw attention to it, pause with a relaxed smile, then keep going. Focus on your audience and rehearse on video. He says lack of memorable content is a bigger problem than stuttering.
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What do you do if you start stuttering in a presentation?
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This question comes from one of our regular YouTube viewers. Sabinello writes in TJ, what is it that you can do to get your speech back after stuttering during your presentation? Well, certainly if you are standing up, speaking and you catch yourself stuttering, there is the sense of, oh, no, everyone's looking at me. This is awful. This is all anyone's going to remember. I. I understand the feeling, but I need you to step back for a minute and look at this from the perspective of the audience. From the audience's perspective. All speakers stutter from time to time. It's simply how human beings speak. So my initial advice to you is to simply stop, have a little bit of a smile on your face. Do not act like you are in any way bothered, embarrassed, shamed, flustered at all. Give yourself a second or two, and then go right back into your presentation and say something interesting to your audience. Do not apologize, because the chances are excellent that most people didn't notice you stuttering. If they did, they forgot about it. But if you stop to apologize for it, that's what people will remember. You're essentially spotlighting it. You're underlining the stutter. That's not what you want to underline. You want to underline the actual interesting ideas in your presentation. I'll have more on this in just a moment.
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I put stuttering in the same classification. I put the uhs and ums and ers and your nos. When it comes to presentation problems, people talk about it a lot. I mean, any given day, this is my job, so you don't have to. There are more stories, bloggers, experts, supposed experts who write stories about how to stop saying the uhs and ums. And in my professional opinion, it's not that big a problem. The problem most people have in their presentations is not the stuttering. It's not the ums, it's not the uhs. The ers. You knows, the biggest problem is you stood up for 10, 15, 20, 30, sometimes 60 minutes, and you didn't have any truly interesting, memorable idea for people. That's the far bigger problem. Now back to this specific question relating to stuttering. Oftentimes it happens because you're nervous. Now, some people, I understand, stutter all the time. I'M not really addressing this to you, but if you normally feel like you're comfortable, confident, can speak in a compelling way, one on one. But now you're standing up, speaking to a larger group and you feel like a stutter is coming out or that you've been stuttering and you typically don't get. My primary advice to you, don't talk about it. Don't act like it bothers you. More important, don't actually let it bother you. Now I realize it's easier for me to say that than for you to actually experience it that way. At some level, it's like me telling you I'm going to hit you really hard in the arm, it's going to hurt, but just tell yourself it doesn't hurt. I understand my advice seems a little useless at this point, but I want to add a few more things and to perhaps put it in perspective. Remember, remember what the expectations are of your audience. They have low expectations. Now folks, when I speak different places, typically I'm given a nice build up. The audience is told, oh, TJ Walker is a world class professional speaker. He teaches this big shot, this big shot how to speak effectively. He's written best selling books on speaking. So people are told really good things about me as a speaker. And yet, pretty much anywhere I go, nobody's sitting in the front row. The back row fills up much sooner than the front row. The front row is the last one to fill up. Why is that? Because people have low expectations for public speakers because most of the time they're awful. Even when they're told someone is great and is a professional speaker, they still feel like this TJ guy might be really awful. Let's sit in the back seat so we can have a quick get away so we can sneak out of here quickly. Now, those of you who are listening to this on your cell phone or if you're in front of a computer watching this on video, hit pause for a second, then go back about 30 seconds. You'll detect that I did in fact stutter. I repeated a couple of words. It was a form of stutter. In any other circumstance, I would never comment on it. I'm not apologizing it and it wasn't planned. It's not in my script. It simply happened. So I'm using that now as a learning moment. Because here's my bet. If this weren't an entire show on stuttering, and if I hadn't stopped right now to tell you I stuttered, you would never, ever, ever notice it. Why? Because all human beings stutter from time to time. We all repeat ourselves. I don't care how smart, intelligent someone is. If you actually looked at a transcript of most of their conversations, including your own, you would be appalled at the non sentences, the repetition fact, the stuttering that you would read. But in fact, spoken communication isn't the same thing as written communication, so it's not a problem. So. But my biggest challenge to you is to really focus on some idea you have that's going to be incredibly useful and helpful to your audience. Make that come alive. Do everything you can when you are standing in front of people to help them to make some idea you have more useful, more understandable, more interesting, more relevant, more memorable to your audience. If in fact you are truly focused on your audience. Number one, you're going to stutter a lot less. Number two, if you are stuttering, not going to let it bother you because you're going to be so focused on your audience, if you see your child about to walk in front of a car and you're 15ft away, you're going to run, dive, scream, do whatever it takes to protect your child. You're not going to worry about, oh, does my shirt match? Did my shirt match come out untucked? Is my pant leg crooked? You're not going to think about any of those things. You're not going to worry about, well, is the person on the other side of the sidewalk judging me as a quick walker or do I walk funny or run funny? You're not going to think about any of that. You're going to be so focused on running, practically diving to pull your child out of that car that's barreling down the highway. At some level, great speakers have the same attitude. If you're in the middle of a presentation and you stutter, you repeat yourself, an um or an ER comes out. You can't even focus on it because you're so focused on helping your audience. At some level, and I certainly don't mean this to sound hyper critical or I'm picking on you, but at some level, if you stuttered and you're now thinking about stuttering and thinking about, oh, what do I do? People are looking at me and think I'm stupid. You're focused on yourself. You're being selfish. You're not being selfless. Great speakers, I believe, are selfless. They may be selfish in every other aspect of their life, okay? But when they are presenting, when they are speaking, they're selfless to the point of focusing exclusively on their audience. Because they're trying to make some idea incredibly compelling, interesting, memorable and useful to their audience. If you do that and do that consistently, the stuttering number one, won't happen very often. Number two, if it does happen, no one will notice it, no one will remember it, because they're going to be fixated on the passion you bring to these interesting ideas. And they're going to be fixated on the compelling examples you have and the stories you have that make them come alive. Now, if this really is a regular problem, you feel like you're doing this regularly. To me, that's a suggestion. You're not rehearsing properly. Many of you are tired of hearing me say this, but I'm going to say it again. You are never prepared to give a presentation unless you've practiced it on video and watched it repeatedly until you're convinced you love what you see. If you do that, it's highly unlikely you're going to find yourself stuttering. Let me know. And Savonella, please write back to me. I would love to know if in fact you tried that technique. Practice on video. Tell you love what you see. I happen to believe that will eliminate almost all stuttering. Any other stuttering, just don't comment on it and it will not be a problem. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. Hope you can come back tomorrow and the next day and the next day. Because I'm here for you every single day. This show is not about me, it's about you. Any questions you have on any aspect of presentations, speaking to the media, crisis, communications, I'll answer it for you based on my experience and we're going to go deep folks. This isn't superficial. It's not 30 second answers. We'll take as long as we need. Thanks.
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