Don’t lose control of your public speaking
Posted on June 14, 2024 by Martin Hahn, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
This article discusses the importance of staying calm if something does not work in your public speaking session.
It is happening in almost every presentation I’ve sat through. It doesn’t matter the type. Small meetings in a conference room, webinars, or large presentations in a convention center; there is no discriminating. It can happen to everyone. Men may find themselves covered in sweat in seconds. Women have been known to panic, with their voice going up a couple octaves pleading for assistance.
What, you may be asking, could possibly create such havoc and instill such terror in a presentation? The controls! Whether it’s a mouse, keyboard, or clicker, whatever is used to control the audio visuals is open to break down in any presentation. For some inexplicable reason, the first few transitions in a presentation are clunky. And it doesn’t seem to matter how many practice runs are made.
There always seems to be a glitch.
When presenting on a webinar or video conference, you are at the mercy of the hosting service and internet provider, both yours and the attendees, for many audio and visual quality issues. Sometimes those issues are out of your hands. You, however, are always responsible for how you handle the glitches you may encounter. That you can control. My best advice is to practice, practice, practice. Know your material, transitions, and a/v technology so well you’ll be ready for anything, well, almost anything. You can never practice too much.
My team and I conduct a live webinar training every month and we still do a dry run of the presentation the day before the event. We give controls back and forth to all presenters. Everyone who may be controlling the presentation elements (slides, video, etc) has an opportunity to run through them, forward and backward. This routine doesn’t change if you are presenting to an in-person audience. You should always have a dry run. And the dry run must be done on the same equipment that will be used during the actual presentation. It doesn’t matter if you have your presentation nailed on your laptop if you are going to use a computer from the trade show. It could end up working completely different!
Even with all the practice, there still seems to be a hiccup or two at some point when transitioning within my presentation. When this happens, I try not to panic and I say nothing! Yes, I don’t say a word while I work desperately to correct the problem! I keep silent because I don’t want to bring attention to the glitch. Sometimes it’s a stuck slide or I’ve accidentally gone too far into the presentation or the video didn’t start up as expected.
Whatever the glitch is, I’m quiet while I work on fixing it. I hope the audience simply believes my silence to be a pregnant pause in my presentation. And, I figure, it probably feels longer to me than to them, so it can’t really be all that bad, right?!
Even if the silence is a little longer than expected, my feeling is that it is better than the presenter’s play-by-play that often accompanies presentation ascos, statements like, “the slide isn’t going forward.” “Hmm, I can’t seem to find the mouse.” “I don’t know why the clicker isn’t working; it worked before.” these comments bring more attention to the problem and make the presenters sound panicked and unpracticed rather than polished and professional.
I won’t lie, it’s not easy keeping quiet. My natural inclination is to provide an explanation on why the presentation isn’t owing smoothly. But when it does happen, I remind myself of four things:
1. The audience is (sadly) likely multitasking and isn’t giving me their undivided attention to notice
2. If the presentation is being recorded, it will make it easier to clean up and cover up the glitch if I’m calm, quiet, and quickly working through it.
3. Those who are paying attention should not be annoyed or bothered in any way with a little extra silence between slides; they can see what’s going on anyway
4. A pause is always good to grab the attention of anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, so I might actually get more people learning from the presentation!
When it’s time for you to give the next presentation and you encounter a glitch, remember the old adage, “Silence is Golden.” Don’t announce the issue; simply correct it, move on, and make it a great presentation!
