TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

Speaking with TJ Walker Dissecting the Communication skills and practices of World class leaders.

Welcome to Speaking with TJ Walker. I wanted to give you a sense of how to prepare for technological disasters. If you speak long enough, you give speeches, presentations, PowerPoints talks, you're going to encounter technical problems that is unavoidable. But how you react to it, how you prepare, that is something you can give thought to and plan in advance. So I want to share what happened to me just last week. I just got back from Las Vegas, great convention, great organization that hired me and I was able to do a talk, a general public speaking tips presentation on how to be a better communicator. That's part of what I did. It was going to be a speech involving PowerPoint. I also did a crisis communications workshop and then I did a speech slash workshop on how people can create their own videos and audios for podcasts to promote their own organization. Now we were at the Hotel Circus Circus, which is admittedly not the newest fanciest hotel on the strip in Las Vegas. But but it's still a huge, huge, huge hotel that has workshops, conventions, trade association meetings all the time from all over the world. They have a large AV department. So I want to just walk through with you what and I hope this doesn't sound petty. It really is about a learning experience I hope will help you. And I also try to show that I can practice what I preach from time to time. So my event started at 9. This is front of 350 people. I was slated to speak around 9:20, doing an hour speech, then shifting rooms to do a three hour workshop, then switching back to the main room to do a four hour speech workshop. So that in and of itself was technically trickier than usual. So here's what I did. I did get to first of all the hotel a day and a half in advance. I didn't want to leave anything to chance. Plus truth be told, I wanted to take a little vacation. Brought my wife, saw some fantastic shows, saw the Michael Jackson Cirque du Soleil, the one show, also La Rev at the Wind, fantastic shows. But I my point is I didn't just get there five minutes before the event was supposed to start. I gave myself plenty of time, went to the rooms the day before, got acclimated. Next what I did is again I had a 9, roughly a 920 start the meeting. The event was going to start at 9. I got into the room at 6:55am Because I wanted to make sure everything worked properly and sure Enough, there were problems. This was a complex room because there were gigantic columns, like four major columns. So an awful lot of views were obstructed. So that was part of the challenge. Nothing we could do about that. But there was no one big screen. There were two pretty big screens on both sides of the room. One of them simply could not seem to communicate with the input from the computer. Again, we're there two and a half hours in advance, so typically you would think that's plenty of time. I'm working with the hotel staff, their AV team. We tried cord after cord connection. Nothing could work. Now, I do bring extra video cameras with me wherever I go and I used to bring projectors all the time, but I've just found that with travel checking bags, that. That was just too much and it wouldn't have helped me in this venue because we had to have two projectors. So we tried and tried and tried. And the staff, again, I don't want this to sound like a wine fest. They were just, shall we say, less than concerned or bothered by the fact that the PowerPoint projector could not take the feed. So the event start, it's 9 o'. Clock. We still have absolute no communication between the computer, my presentation on the USB and one of the projectors. So now I'm left with a choice. I could project my images on one of the screens, but then about two thirds of, well, half of the room wouldn't be able to see it. So I had to ask myself, do I really want half of the room? Sort of wondering why I couldn't present on both screens or screen, or wondering what's there? Or why am I missing out? Or why did I get the cheap seats? So I made a decision at about 9:15 to just not use my PowerPoint slides. So I just killed. I turned off both of the projectors because the tech team had just left the other projector on and it's just showing a white, a big white bold screen with the image with the logo of the projector up. Highly distracting. Looks very unprofessional. So I didn't want any distraction. So I turned off the machines, not commenting on it, of course. I don't ever want to call attention to any technical problem. When I'm working with an organization or the audience, it's not their problem. And I just made a decision, okay, I will give my entire presentation, my entire PowerPoint presentation without using a single slide. Now this is what I always preach to clients. You're never, ever, ever prepared to give a PowerPoint unless you're prepared to give it without the PowerPoint. But in fact, few people actually follow this and a lot of people preach it and don't follow it. But I am happy to say I do practice what I preach. I had notes written out on a single sheet of paper in large bold font and had three different copies of them dispersed around the room and around the stage. So I didn't need the slides to tell me what was next. I gave the keynote speech about a half an hour and I think from the perspective of the audience, everything was great, Everything was wonderful. In fact, some of the people came up to me afterwards and said, love the way you gave us a great presentation without using PowerPoint slides because we get sick of people using boring data dump slides. So I was able to salvage that situation. Now that's only the starting problem of the day. Throughout the day, I basically lost count of how many times the microphones just stopped working. We switched out one LAV wireless lav mic. And that's just the name for the mic that clips onto your jacket or your tie or your dress and you're not holding it. I don't like holding mics because I feel like it makes me look like an amateur stand up comedian and I want to be able to gesture. So I typically always request a LAV wireless mic if I don't bring my own. Again, sad to say, I used to always bring my own lav more wireless mics, but just found it makes travel so much more unpleasant having to lug a big box of equipment. So I didn't bring my own LAV wireless mic. I used the hotels and it broke. And then another one broke, and then another one broke and then another one broke. I lost count. After about a dozen microphone problems, we switched to handhelds because I needed that for part of the audience participation and that didn't work. I finally had to give up on micing. Audience members speaking. I just had to hear them speak and then I would restate what they said so that everyone else in the room would hear it. Now the greater challenge was that mid afternoon my microphone, it wouldn't just stop working, it would start and stop. So I would have to alternate between speaking in a conversational voice when the microphone and the speakers were working versus practically having to yell. I was projecting so loudly because I would just lose the audio. So much, much greater strain on the voice doing that. It does show the importance of getting good rest, drinking plenty of water, being in. Let's not kid ourselves. I'm not ready for the Olympics, but trying to be in the best physical shape you can be in because it does take lot of extra physical energy. The next thing that you think, oh, it can't get worse. The next thing that gets worse is loud, loud humming sounds. Loud sort of screeching humming sounds happen when I'm playing back the video of the people I've trained now at this point, and it didn't happen until after lunch and I had to work through lunch to get the video feed from my camera to project up on the screens. This finally happened at about 10 minutes till 2, with 2 being the start of the afternoon session. So that was highly nerve wracking. And the feedback was loud, distracting, but people could still hear themselves. So I had to make a judgment call. Do I still use that or do I just go into pure lecture mode and not have demonstration with video? I made the decision that as annoying as the feedback screeching sound was, it was still better for people to see themselves and hear themselves. So I kept that part on. Now it gets worse, folks. Around about 4:30, I have an hour and a half left. The technician just up and leaves. His replacement comes in. So I basically have to stop things. I give an assignment to the group so they don't know anything. There's a problem. I now have to give a tutorial to the technician who's replacement and debrief him on what we're trying to do, what we're trying to accomplish for the day it all happened. It wasn't my best training speech workshop ever, but I do think from the perspective of the audience, they got a lot out of it. The response, the feedback was tremendous. It was positive. Couple things I didn't do and I'm happy about that. I would recommend the same to you. I never once complained to the audience. Now I did write a very sternly written letter to the management and in fact requested to my client that they ask for 100% refund on the technology component of their bill. But I stayed completely positive, upbeat and just focused on what good things were happening in the day. I never ever hinted to the audience that anything was wrong. So they concluded. I think everyone was quite happy I was able to salvage it. Now a lot of the stuff was nothing to do with me or even bad luck on anything related to what I did. But it was sort of fitting. At the end of the day, I'm packing up, there's only one person left. I'm commiserating about the whole day, basically saying it can't get worse than this. As soon as I said that, my own video camera toppled over. Now, I didn't shatter, but it was a fitting end to the day. Here's the message, folks. There are going to be days when technically there are problems, when things just don't go well. And all you can do is, number one, be prepared. Know what you want to say, prepare to give your PowerPoint without the PowerPoint slides projecting. I cannot stress that enough. Beyond that, you've got to be adaptable, you've got to be flexible. You've got to keep working on it and not let people see you sweating. And whatever you do, don't complain. Just stay focused on creating the best possible experience for your audience and the technology. Whether it works or not, you'll still create the best experience you can for your audience. So thanks for listening to me. I hope this was helpful. We're taking a little bit of a break from our normal editorial focus of in depth interviews this week. I've been out of town for the last week. I'm only in town for a few hours and now I'm about to hop a train to Brussels. It's not a train, a plane to Brussels where I'll be doing some work with the United nations and out of pocket for the next week or so. So we're gonna have some more short form solo host audios for the next week and then we'll be back with our new format. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. Please leave comments. Please subscribe Please like and give reviews to the program.

Thanks for listening to Speaking with TJ Walker where the communication skills and practices of world class leaders are dissected.