The first time you give a speech is exciting, unnerving, and inevitably filled with an awkward moment or two.  In the speaker’s mind, disaster lurks around every turn of your pages of notes, or every click of your slides.  Of course, the audience doesn’t know what it hasn’t seen before, so it won’t be anything like as aware of your gaffes as you are.  The trick is not to show your fear, as the surgeon said to the nurse, lest you unnerve the patient. 

I was in California this week giving a speech for the first time, and all my own words from Give Your Speech, Change the World, and Trust Me kept coming back to me.  It was highly annoying.  I had no excuses.  I had to structure the speech properly, I had to rehearse, I had to focus on the audience – or I wouldn’t even be taking my own advice. 

As it happened, inevitably some things did go wrong.  The group was larger than I expected, so the interactive moments I’d planned were more difficult to pull off than I thought they would be.  Chiefly, when I brought a couple of volunteers to the stage to demonstrate some ideas about body language, it took too long to give the volunteers their instructions, and the audience got a bit restive. 

Note to self:  Audience participation is high risk-high reward.  Structure it carefully!

And then I succumbed to my biggest weakness – I love taking questions and having a spirited give-and-take with the audience.  I lost track of the time and didn’t cover as much of my planned outline as I’d intended.  I was able to finish on time, thanks to the big countdown clock thoughtfully provided by the conference organizer, but I eliminated the last couple of points I was going to cover and jumped to the end.  Another time, I’d manage the questions better and cover more. 

Note to self:  you don’t have to answer every single question – your own agenda is important too.

The biggest difference between the new speech and others that I’ve given a number of times, however, is that I didn’t know how the audience was going to react.  With a familiar speech, you know where the audience is at all times and you can adjust on the fly accordingly if necessary.  With a new speech, you don’t know, and so it’s all one big adjustment on the fly.  As a result, it’s much more hit-or-miss than familiar speeches.  And as much as rehearsal helps, you still don’t have much of a sense of how an actual audience will react until you’re in front of one.

Note to self:  know your speech cold, and preferably rehearse it in front of a (friendly) actual audience, even if you have to hire one. 

How was your first time?  Do you have any stories of memorably good or bad first time speeches?