By Douglas Kruger
WHAT’S the strangest thing that’s happened to you while presenting? I’ve had some doozies.
I once broke the latch on a bathroom stall ten minutes prior to a major speaking slot. From the inside. It came off in my hand and I stood staring at it like the pin from a hand-grenade.
There’s something undignified about banging on a bathroom door and yelling “Let me out!”, when you’re the featured guest speaker. “Here today to address us on smart leadership techniques is this guy we just rescued from the loo…”
I’ve also hurled my clicker from the stage all the way to the back of the room. The lesson is not to become too animated when your palms are slick. The clicker carried out a beautiful slow-mo arc as it flew, then exploded in a rain of plastic and batteries. That was the end of slides for the day. For added irony, I am the author of a book titled, “How to Make Your Point Without PowerPoint”. And one of the audience members took great joy in reminding me of this fact.
A friend told me about his disaster. He says he still has nightmares…
It revolved around his best, tailored, light suit. To feel like a champion, one must look like a champion, and that particular suit helped to get the job done. Until he leaned against a wet bathroom counter while washing his hands. There are more opportune places to have a massive stain when you’re moments away from presenting. Cue Mr Bean and the blow-drier.
Sometimes you get the wrong audience. I was once asked to speak for a school, and prepared all my best school-leaving advice, only to discover that it was an audience of ten-year-olds. Never in my life have I had to do such mental gymnastics to come up with a new message.
Next time it happened, I was ready: “Is this a primary school or a high-school?” It was definitely a high-school. I arrived feeling confident, only to learn that I would be speaking to the staff, not the students. You can’t win.
Then there are the flat-out bizarre ones. I will never forget the man who swallowed a bee during a Toastmasters speech. You read that correctly. He was up on the stage before several hundred people. A bee flew into his mouth and he swallowed it. End of talk.
A new one befell me last weekend.
It was also for Toastmasters, the public speaking organisation. They’ve just turned 100 this year, and they do incredible work.
I represented South Africa in their world championships a few times before going on to become a full-time speaker, and so they asked me to do an online interview explaining what the association has meant to me. I was glad to do it. We worked out what time I’d need to be in front of my laptop in St Helier, and scheduled the meeting.
And I thought I’d thought of everything.
I had the place to myself, no kids, a glass of water lined up beside my microphone, all the windows shut to avoid ambient noise (sirens, seagulls, roving one-man bands), and I had the lighting arranged just so. My host oversees launched the Zoom recording and we began an amiable chat.
Five minutes in, my son’s six-year-old friend started knocking on the door. He wanted his little buddy to come out and play.
I couldn’t interrupt the live interview. But the problem was, he could hear me speaking through the door.
So he kept knocking. And knocking! AND KNOCKING! Six-year-olds can become surprisingly angry. And when they get their hearts set on something, they do not give up.
He faithfully maintained his drum solo for the full remainder of the 25-minute interview, as I sweated, but tried to look smilingly unaffected into the little camera. My microphone is unidirectional, so my interviewer couldn’t hear it. But it haunted me like Poe’s tell-tale heart. It was like trying to write an exam while someone whacks you on the head and says, “Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself!”
I couldn’t chew him out for it either. Firstly, because he’s six, and honestly, quite a lovely little dude. Secondly, because, although I was wearing a decent shirt and jacket, my lights get hot during interviews. So I may or may not have been wearing any trousers. Trade secret – tell no one.
Presenting can be fraught with peril. There’s also the story I can’t tell you. The one about the IT guy, and his flash drive, and the particularly colourful visuals he put up onto the screen behind me. I can tell you that that audience will never forget that presentation. The problem for me was that I was facing the other way. And so, I was the last person in the room to realise what was happening. My only clue was the collective gasp of several hundred audience members.
Suffice it to say that a series of tiny little thumbnails on a flash drive look like full-scale Paramount movies when projected onto a screen.
That’s the one I still have nightmares about.
The theory goes that public speaking represents our species’ single greatest fear. We’re apparently less scared of death than we are of standing up in front of an audience. For some unknowable reason, I chose to do it for a living, and I’m probably still young enough that the majority of my talks lie ahead of me. I’m vaguely curious as to what other horrors may await.
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Douglas Kruger is a “Hall of Fame” business speaker and the author of several books. He lives in St Helier, where he spends most of his time explaining to the neighbour’s kid that Mikey isn’t home from school yet.
