When Speaking Blunders Happen

What do you do when you've committed a huge blunder and you're giving a presentation, a PowerPoint, a talk, for starters? You have to make a quick assessment. Is it noticeable to anyone else? Sometimes you can make a blunder and realize it's not what I wanted to do. But no one else has noticed, at least not yet. I want you to be real. I want you to be an authentic human being. But I don't want you to just let it all hang out and cry and whine and complain about yourself. Because if you whine or complain about a mistake, chances are that might be the only thing anyone remembers. I well remember a training that took place that I conducted more than a decade ago. An executive on a military base was giving a presentation, a PowerPoint. Everything was going well, but at one point, his slide deck froze. He tried to advance, didn't advance. Try it again, didn't advance. Try it a third time. It didn't advance. Finally, in a peak of frustration, he slammed shut the laptop, laughed, and continued afterwards. Everyone said, oh, that was a great, great presentation. I loved when you slammed that computer down and kept on going. But when I asked people, what messages do you remember from that presentation? Nobody could remember anything. And it was because the most memorable moment of that whole presentation was that act of frustration slamming the laptop down. The sort of. The agony of it, it just became really memorable. And that's not what you want. You want the memorable parts of your presentation to be on what you are saying. So let me give you another example. And folks, I'm violating one of my own principles when I do this, because I always tell people, don't tell a story that makes yourself out to be the hero. But this is the first one that comes to mind. In this case, I handled it well. I was giving a presentation to a training, to a group about how to use PowerPoint successfully. Ten people in the room. I'm going through the slides, I'm talking, I'm demonstrating, and all of a sudden, the computer goes down, the screen goes down, there's no image. I'm still talking. People are looking at me. They're not focusing. So no one's aware there's any problem. I now, in my own mind, I'm trying to do an assessment of what went wrong. Bulb computer, electricity. And as I continue to talk about the subject at hand and looking around, I suddenly concluded I saw the problem. I had failed to plug in my laptop, so it was running on natural battery. The battery died, so the laptop powered down. So therefore, even though the projector was working, the light was working. There was nothing to project. So what I did is I walked around the room a little bit wider than normal. I then tossed a question to someone in the front of the room. I was at the back of the room, and while no one was looking, I bent down, plugged in the laptop. It powered up, continued talking, and I was ready to go into the next slide. No one noticed until the end of the day when I talked about how to deal with problems. And I brought that up as an example. So in that case, I got through it okay. You don't have to be perfect with your mistakes. If a ceiling caves in and has knocked you on the head, certainly you can acknowledge that. But if it's something small, something little, just keep going. If you make a factual mistake, don't beat yourself up. Give the correct number. If you went out of order, you forgot something. Don't tell anyone. We're not going to know. There's no audience in the world smart enough to read your mind or to read your outline unless you've given it to them. So for the smaller blunders, don't tell anyone. Act like you think everything is going extremely well. You couldn't be happier. This way, the audience feels comfortable with you. They feel comfortable for you, and they can focus on your ideas. And your most memorable moments can be what you put a spotlight on, not just your own emotional reaction to a problem.