It’s Halloween – or almost, depending on when you’re reading this – in the US, and it’s a big deal here. I read somewhere that it has become a bigger holiday than Christmas for retailers – can that be true?
I got to thinking about the scariest moments public speakers have, naturally enough, and compiled this top 10 list for your perusal. This list is compiled from my own personal disasters and those of my clients. Let me know what your scary speaking moment is, and I’ll give a prize to the scariest one, decided by me, arbitrarily based on the hackles risen on the back of my neck.
10. You realize that you forgot a key piece of your argument 10 minutes back. You’re in the middle of your speech and suddenly you realize that you forgot a vital piece of the argument minutes ago. It’s too late to go back, yet the audience is going to be confused by your next leap of logic. You’re going to have to interject the forgotten bit, but it’s going to make you look disorganized. Scary!
9. Someone asks a question you can’t understand. I was talking to a multi-cultural audience once, and a very nice man asked a question that was both esoteric and in heavily accented English. I just couldn’t get it. I asked him to repeat the question twice, but after that, I had to make a guess, because it would have been awkward to keep asking. Painful!
8. The questioner won’t stop. Of course there are people who ask questions just to hear themselves talk. So, liking the sound, they keep going. You don’t want to be rude, but they’re hijacking the show. I ran into this recently where the questioner wanted my opinion on the storyline of a movie – so he told me the entire storyline. I aged 5 years during his recitation. Creepy!
7. The technology freezes. We’ve all been there on this one. The slideware suddenly freezes, and you’re revealed for the duffer that you are in trying to figure out why it has frozen. The secret solution for this one is to ask for help from the audience – especially if it’s an audience of engineers – because they’ll be nice and help you, and then it’s not your problem alone. But will you remember to do that under pressure? Terrifying!
6. No one shows up. What do you do when there’s no audience? I once took part in a fundraiser where we speakers were supposed to bring a half-dozen potential donors each. All of us assumed everyone else would do it, and so we didn’t. The result? About six people in a space designed for 150. Mortifying!
5. Your tech is incompatible with their tech. I learned this one the hard way, showing up once with technology that wouldn’t work with the super-sophisticated system the IT folks had in place. Now, I carry backups, alternatives, dongles, thumb drives, you name it. I’m ready for anything. Aaaaaargh!
4. A heckler starts in on you in the first few moments of your talk. This happened to me years ago, when I was still an academic, and someone from another philosophical camp attacked the premise of my talk. I was new to the game, and instantly derailed, spending the rest of the time on the defensive. I’ve since learned how to defuse hecklers, but it is a nightmare scenario nonetheless. Help me!
3. The lights go out. This one happened recently to a friend of mine. The talk was proceeding well, and then suddenly it all went dark. It’s frustrating, baffling, and alarming all at once. What do you do? Keep talking? Vamp, hoping the lights will go on in 60 seconds? Give up? The show must go on, but how? Nooooooooo!
2. The conference organizer changes the game on you at the last minute. This one happens more often than you’d believe. The organizer comes to you, saying, “We’re running 40 minutes behind because the CEO ran long. We need you to get your speech done in 20 minutes instead of 60. The lunch can’t wait.” Really?
1. The next speaker doesn’t show – so you’re on. The keynote speaker is delayed due to weather and you – for a host of reasons – are it. This happened to me once in Vegas. There was a minimal team from our company, the host, and I was the only one with the credentials to speak. I was told, “Keep ‘em amused for 90 minutes. There’s a chance the real speaker will have landed by then.” Nightmare!
What’s your scariest speaking moment, besides the first one of every speech?
I remember once arriving to speak at a charity event at an adventure park, and didn’t reckon on the speech being delivered outdoors. Just before I started a digger began work on a ditch just nearby and created a hell of a noise. Tested my resolve and ability to project.
My friend Ian Berry, a leadership guru in Australia told me he was announced at this important corporate gig, the big build-up while he was waiting behind the curtain, and when he walked through he realised he’d taken the wrong route and ended up in another room! I’m sure that was a scene in Spinal Tap.
Finally, on the topic of the lights going out, I read somewhere that during a recent Superbowl the lights failed and the game was temporarily suspended. While the engineers struggled to bring things back to life a marketing exec from Oreo the biscuit people (a sponsor) tweeted, “You can still dunk in the dark!” Suddenly loads of people around the stadium joined in. You pal Mr Meerman Scott would like that one Nick!
Great post, as always, and nice that someone of your standing is willing to share those disasters.
Thanks, Andy — I love the wrong room story — that is the stuff of nightmares. And the outdoors always brings special challenges. I remember as a speechwriter for the governor of Virginia we had a pair of nesting bald eagles in the state — a big deal. So we got a special act of the legislature to declare the area a miniature park, to keep them safe. I wrote a speech about the majesty and patriotism of bald eagles, and how exciting it was that we were going to have little eagle babies, and the Governor went up, with a ton of press, to deliver the speech. The Virginia director of the parks was there, and he was something of a naturalist. So the Governor launches into his speech, and lo and behold the eagles show up on cue. It was pure magic, the press snapping pictures like mad. At that point, the Park Director leaned over to the Governor and whispered in his ear — just loud enough to be caught on the mike — “Governor, I hate to tell you this, but those are two MALE bald eagles.” My whole speech about propagating the species turned out to be null and void. The press howled with laughter, the Governor actually blushed, and the moment turned out to be a magical one, but for a very different reason.
Yikes, Nick, I have cold sweats now. How about the one that happened to David Meerman Scott where the talk was a day earlier than he thought it was? (Click the link for the full story. His fix didn’t involve a time machine nor a worm hole in the space-time fabric.)
Thanks for the reminder, Colin — that may be the winner. Do I give the prize to you or to David? Hmmmmm….
My moment took place at a conference two years ago. With almost 500 people in the room the lights went out and we were suddenly all under a tornado warning. Since it was safer inside than out I decided to keep going. Nobody left the room. My stage lighting was replaced by an audience member holding the LED light from his iPhone over my head. It was just enough so people could see me. And with no working mic I projected my voice big time so everyone could hear. We ended up having a blast. To this day it is still one of my all time favorite gigs.
Love it! Though, does it count if it turned out to be “one of (your) all time favorite gigs”? The Jury is Out.
Haha! Good point Nick – I think I just eliminated myself from the competition! :)
Nick:
How about losing the sound completely just as you begin?
In January 2008 I gave a technical talk in a corrosion symposium (NACE/SIEO) held at the Sun Valley Inn. There were presentations in one half of the large ballroom all day Thursday. The wireless microphone, sound system, the laptop computer, and digital projector all worked perfectly.
My talk was the second one on Friday morning. Our chairman handed me the microphone. Just as I was about to begin speaking, we all heard another voice take over the sound system. He began with, “Welcome to the annual refinery meeting!” My microphone acted like it was turned off, and the other speaker continued by reciting their safety record. Then he began discussing production statistics. Mixer controls on the lectern did not affect him.
Our chairman sent someone running down the hall for the audio-visual staff. They got our sound back in less than five minutes, but it seemed like forever to me. What went wrong?
The ballroom had been split by a movable wall to accommodate two different meetings. On Thursday no one was using the other half, so their wireless microphone had been switched off. The staff had forgotten to split the sound system into two independent parts. On Friday the other half of the room started their meeting later than we did. As soon as their wireless microphone was switched on it overrode ours, and fed the speakers for the entire room.
Richard
Awesome! And truly weird and terrifying. Thanks for sharing it.
I once spoke to an audience on a cruise ship and during my presentation, the Captain announced that we were in a hurricane and taking on water.
Instinctively, all the standard cruise ship jokes came in handy and kept everyone laughing and calm!
After 2 frightening days at sea, we safely made it back to home port!
Wonderful, Dale — truly scary. In fact, I’m feeling alarmed as I write this. Many thanks.
I once saw someone introduce another speaker but took 1/2 an hour to do it. It was a black tie affair and everyone was pretty cool with it to a point. But it got so bad that a 75 year old guy stood up and shouted, “introduce the speaker already.” But somehow she just kept going. In the meantime the actual speaker was getting drunk but that’s another story. Then after another 6 minutes of introduction the same guy stood up walked up to her faced her down and shouted, “introduce the f’ing speaker, … now!” She said, “I’m getting the impression you want me to introduce the speaker?” Are you kidding me, I thought? Anyway since then I’ve learned a lot about how to get introduced and in my public speaking courses I let other speakers know that when you get introduced, all they should do is get people on their feet and get their energy up. Nice post, thanks.
Love the story, thanks! And it’s a good point – the introduction should never outshine the speech itself.
Nick:
The scariest introduction I’ve heard about happened to a Female Science Professor and is at the end of this blog post:
http://science-professor.blogspot.com/2007/01/introduction-to-introductions.html
“The most interesting introduction I ever had was years ago (early in my career) when the introducer told the audience that I was perhaps best known for having killed my advisor. This information seemed to stun the audience, and it stunned me as well, in part because my advisor was alive, and is in fact still alive. The introducer was referring to the fact that one of my committee members, an angry and bitter old man who disagreed with me (and most other people on the planet) about just about everything, died soon after I gave a talk on the major findings of my preliminary research. He definitely became very enraged during my talk (and was not shy about showing his feelings), but his death 3 weeks later was from cancer. In any case, if given a choice, I prefer not to be accused of murder when being introduced for a talk, even if it does get the audience’s attention.”
A toned down version later appeared here:
http://chronicle.com/article/Speaking-of-Speaking/48790/
Richard
Richard — I love this story. Introducers get very strange ideas in their heads about what constitutes a good introduction, and this is perhaps the strangest. As you say, it certainly must have got the audience’s attention, but not in anything like the way you, the speaker, would want. Unless, perhaps, your speech was to a group of death row inmates?
Just as I was taking the stage, for a recent presentation, my contact dried up and popped out of my eyeball. Fortunately I still had one more eye and I knew the material. Within a minute or so the shock wore off and I mentally found my groove again.
At the time it was a challenge I could have done without. Now it’s kind of a funny story. In fact it prompted me to draw a cartoon http://www.smooththepath.net/2014/10/10/eventprofs-cartoon-strange-things-can-happen-speakers/.
Fun post. Thank you!
Thanks, Amanda, for the great anecdote. Now you join the ranks of the famous one-eyed presenters!
I started going through the list and believe I’ve experienced almost every point. # 2 changing the game stands out for me. Twenty minutes before giving a keynote address on my book, the organizer leans over, smiles and says, ”please don’t use the words ”politics or power” in your presentation.”
A challenging request given the subtitle is, “the power of positive workplace politics.” And, hard to hide what’s in print. Sitting at the head table exchanging small talk before my session, I filtered through many scenarios in my brain wondering how I was going to pull this one off. Right before I stepped on stage, the word ”influence” popped into my head.
Great post, Nick thanks!
Thanks, Jane — wonderful story, tough moment!