Coach Walsh always thought it was better to experience pucker-butt in practice, with crowd noise blasted over the speakers, rather than face it for the first time in a game.
Road warriors similarly should prepare themselves for the worst. Assume that you might catch a cold on the first day of a 10-day business trip. That you will have too little sleep. That your bad back will flare up on a crummy hotel bed. That you will have diarrhea, or its opposite. That your big speech will be scheduled for 3 a.m. in your local time zone. That the presentation room will be too warm. That the stage lights will give you flop sweats or a migraine. That your audience will be bored, even hostile.
How will you cope?
Accepting that these disasters might happen is half the battle. A prepared mind removes the panic out of any mishap. The other half of the battle is bringing the right weapons. As a 200,000-mile-per-year traveler, I never leave home without the following pills and potions. All are over-the-counter and safe at their recommended dosages.
You prepare an hour-long presentation. You arrive at your venue, get set up, and are ready to go on time, but the meeting starts ten minutes late. Then there is business up front, and the discussion goes on longer than planned. Now your talk, which you had planned for an hour, is going to be cut down to 35 minutes.
The first thing to remember when that this-isn’t-going-well panic sets in is that whatever you’re worried about probably isn’t that big of a deal. Seriously. Those few seconds where you struggled to find the right word or the time you accidentally clicked to the next slide early will likely be forgotten by your audience – if they noticed them at all.
Yet, practicing a presentation is the single biggest thing that can reduce anxiety, enhance confidence and maximize the likelihood that the audience will get value — all things that are highly desirable outcomes for any presenter.
Here are my tips for finding some elusive time to practice a presentation…
The other big mistake the speaker committed today was not properly acquainting himself with the equipment he was using for the presentation. One of the biggest distractions throughout the entire event was the speaker fumbling with the remote control. As he had trouble changing slides every single time, he was unable to maintain control of an idea from item to item.
An impossible onstage mishap took place in the play: a letter was to be dropped from the rafters onto the floor near the actor who was to read the letter. Instead, the letter fell through the slit at the edge of the closed trap door. The odds of that happening have to be about a gazillion to one! Someone from below the stage slipped the letter back up through the slit and the actor grabbed it with much relief! Lots of applause and laughter from the audience.
The teleprompter has gotten quite a bit of recent attention. After witnessing many faux pas over the past few days, here are five quick tips to make the teleprompter experience a bit more rewarding:
1) Always bring a physical copy of the text with you. There is nothing worse than discovering that the text you had thought was loaded into the teleprompter was not loaded, or was loaded incorrectly. In addition, always remember that as with any electronic device, a teleprompter, or teleprompter software, can fail to work properly.
When I came in Tuesday the dumb-ass group contact tells me that the room is setup wrong. WTF! I’ve got a diagram. I take my copies of the BEO’s outta my pocket and show her the diagram that was sent to us.
“Sorry, that looks like the diagram from the meeting we had at the Marriott downtown last month. My secretary made these arrangements, not me”, she said. “I need this room setup for crescent rounds”, was next.
I was attending a national conference of one of our professional associations within the past two years and was embarrassed when walking into a break out session to find a significant problem. The room’s secondary exit was blocked not only by a large screen but the cart holding the sound equipment also was blocking the doorway. I immediately pointed this out to one of the senior meeting planners and was informed that this set up was done by the venue. I was stunned by a meeting planner so willing to throw the venue under the bus for something that is clearly the responsibility of any meeting planner. So what’s the solution? It seems rather obvious but let me again reiterate that common sense is not common. Any meeting planner should always look at every room set up for issues like egress from a room in case of a fire or other problems where the primary entrance is blocked. Find the time to walk the meeting space after the venue sets up to ensure that not only is it set properly but that things like emergency exits are clear of obstacles.
Because audiences are often small, because no tickets are sold, because sometimes the stage is just the part of the conference room nearest the screen, because standing ovations are few and far between, it can be easy to forget that what you do is theater.
Part of what makes theater exciting is never knowing exactly what’s going to happen during any given performance. Sometime theater can be magic, sometimes not so much…
Audience members at a West End play starring Keira Knightley were left baffled when an onstage mishap interrupted a performance.
Stagehands at the Comedy Theatre had to pull down the safety curtain after a chair was crushed as a pillar descended for a new scene in The Children’s Hour on Monday.
. . . .
“Ten or 15 minutes later there was still no announcement but then the curtain went up, there was a different chair and the column had been put back.”
. . . .
A spokeswoman for the play said the chair had been moved slightly off its marked position as cast members exited.
She said: “The nature of live theatre means that occasionally unexpected things happen on stage and need to be sorted as quickly as possible to ensure the smooth running of a show.”
Words to live by.
Getting knocked slightly off your mark (figuratively as well as literally) might get you crushed. Be prepared to get sorted as quickly as possible.
I guess we’re all really lucky that Keira wasn’t sitting in the chair at the time.
The box Kinkos shipped directly to the venue in Orlando just made it to the hotel in time. Good thing that. No one would know how to get from the elevators to the breakfast buffet without directional signage. You pop it open and slide the signs out of the plastic bag. Looking good, plenty big, tastefully designed, mounted on nice heavy foamcore, easel-ready. You lock up and head to the lobby bar for a quick drink before crashing, feeling confident that everything will be good to go in the morning.
You descend bright and early and begin making sure the speaker ready room is set up, etc, etc. Time to put out those wonderful signs…
Which are now really badly warped!
The short ends stick up in the air three or four inches. In a panic you start pushing down on the ends but it begins to feel like the foamcore is about to crack in the middle. Not good. They are so bent they fall forward right off the easels. You’re doomed.
Depending on the particular circumstances, it’s very possible that shipping mounted signage into a warmer, more humid climate can cause it to warp and bend to the point it becomes useless. It has something to do with differences in the way the foamcore and the paper the signage was printed on before it was mounted to the foamcore react to the weather.
If you can, try to get your signs shipped down and opened to the air early enough to see if warping is going to be a problem. You can carefully weigh then down as they acclimate to the being in the tropics. I’ve been told the best bet is to carefully and preemptively slide the signs under your mattress overnight.
Sometimes, you’re working in an old venue. Real old. Rooms that have seen hundreds if not thousands of meetings, speeches, dances, rallies, fund raisers, etc. Old things can be well worn. Worn in ways that aren’t obvious.
For instance, there was a chain hotel in Bethesda that we used to use a lot that was old but seemed to be aging well. It looked like the ballroom had been renovated at some point. Newish carpeting, reasonably fresh wallpaper and paint. High tech climate control that kept things too cold digitally. The works. However, the electrical outlet must have been overlooked.
We didn’t need a high-voltage power drop. We only had a our laptops, a switch and a couple projectors so we just plugged into the regular wall sockets. Or at least we thought we did.
This socket had been plugged into thousand of times over the years and there just wasn’t enough friction in there to ensure that what was plugged in would remain plugged in. The weight of the cable pulled the plug half way out of the wall as soon as I let go of it. It wouldn’t stick.
This, of course, could be very bad for our stuff.
We ended up securely taping the cord to the wall just below outlet. No biggie.
Always, always have a roll of gaffer’s tape with you when you’re working.
I’m not familiar with the specific procedures in Hartsville, but I’ve critiqued enough of these things over the years to be sure that everything I just described to you was planned in advance. No one was standing around on the fire ground muttering, “I wonder who we should call.”
The plan wasn’t drawn up on the spot, it was put in place a while ago and the kinks were probably worked out with training exercises. That’s how it works in public safety and how it can work for you.
Perhaps none of them had their coffee that morning? Watch the awkwardness reach a crescendo then spiral out of control into talk of “long, stabby things†and “whacking [someone] off from a distance.â€
I would present them with a dazzling synthesis of diagrams, graphs, followed by a live demonstration of my software projected from my laptop. My preparation had been meticulous: It had to be: A year’s hard work was at stake, so I’d prepared it to perfection. I stood up and took them all in, with a gaze of sublime confidence.
Then the laptop expired.
– – – –
My desperation gave me a manic energy. If you’ve ever demonstrated a windows application entirely by mime, gesture and florid description, you’ll understand the scale of the challenge, but then I had nothing to lose.
forbes.com — Road Warrior Secrets
Having backups is a very good idea. Losing track of said backup, not so much:
Wally Bock’s Three Star Leadership Blog —