Confessions of a Public Speaker (22 page)

• Use your own gear.
  

• PC laptops are more popular, and I’m convinced they have fewer
  issues with projector compatibility. Problem is, they’re PCs.
  

• Demand a video check before your talk.
  

• The big question is when to abandon your laptop. Ten minutes
  is my cutoff point. If after 10, you’re still not sure what to do,
  go with Plan B.
  

• Plan B: know your core points (see
  Chapter 5
  ). Be able to write them down
  as a short bulleted list. Do a shorter, less formal version of your
  talk. Don’t constantly say, “If I had my slides” or “In my real
  presentation….” The audience doesn’t care about what they might have
  seen.
  

• Have a printout of your slides with you. Worst case, you can
  use this as your notes.
  

• Have a friend flip through your slides.
  

• Thank whoever caught it and make a note to fix the mistake.
  Then move on.
  

• Get there early. Fly in the night before. Do not assume the
  travel world works perfectly because it never does.
  

• At the first moment you think you might be late, call your
  hosts. They may be able to swap your time slot with another speaker.
  The sooner they know, the more options they have, and the less they
  will hate you.
  

• When you do arrive, no matter how late you are, take a moment
  to reset yourself. If you are frantic and panicked, you can’t
  possibly do a good job. It’s worth being an extra 30 seconds late to
  make sure that you’re calm for whatever time you have left to
  speak.
  

• Before you close, offer to stay late for anyone who has
  follow-up questions. It’s a good habit anyway, but this might
  mitigate people’s gripes about your
  late arrival.
  

• If you know you’re speaking the next day, don’t go out
  drinking the night before.
  

• Eat an apple a day.
  

• The big question is whether you should cancel. This depends
  heavily on how easy it is to reschedule. Talk with your hosts as
  soon as you feel sick and let them tell you what the options are.
  Given the choice
  of seeing a half-baked lecture from a sick person or
  rescheduling to see a good lecture from a healthy person, most of
  the audience would prefer the latter. But if it’s a one-shot deal,
  like at a conference or if they’ve all come just to hear you, they’d
  prefer the former.
  

• Always bring some aspirin with you. It won’t cure your flu or
  cold, but it will make you feel better for a couple of hours, just
  enough time to get through a presentation.
  

• If you build your presentation right, there should be a steady
  rhythm throughout the talk that informs you of your pace every step
  of the way (see
  Chapter 6
  ). This prevents you
  from discovering you have one minute left to cover half of your
  talk.
  

• Practice to use less time than you are given.
  

• Plan to have 20–30% of your time slot for Q&A. If you run
  over, you can eat some of that Q&A time.
  

• Use a remote control that has a timer.
  

• Ask your host
  to warn you when there are 15 minutes remaining, or
  whatever is one-third of your total time.
  

• Don’t get lost. If you can’t get through the material, put it
  aside and focus on your audience. If you have three sections left
  and only time for one, let the audience vote on which section it
  should be.
  

• Quality is always more important than quantity. Don’t cram or
  rush. Always be willing to abandon material so the material you have
  time for can be done well.
  

• Offer to provide the
  slides on your website for any material you did not
  get to.
  

• Offer to come back again to cover the remaining material and
  answer any follow-up questions people have.
  

• Put your slides in three places: on a flash drive you bring
  with you, on your own laptop, and on a website you can access from
  any web browser. Redundancy wins.
  

• For the paranoid, print out a copy as well. Sometimes analog
  beats digital—if the power goes out and you have a flashlight,
  you’ll be all set.
  

• The gutsy way to go is to admit it to the audience. Apologize.
  Beg their forgiveness and improvise a way to be useful to them
  anyway.
  

• The simple trick is to make a list of 10 questions at the
  start of your talk, pulled live from the audience, and answer each
  question in turn. What do they expect to learn? This may turn out to
  be much better material than what you had planned.
  

• You can let organizers know you don’t like being videotaped,
  or set other conditions, early on. Professional speakers often have
  info sheets they give prospective venues that list their
  requirements or things they won’t do.
  

• Politely explain why the condition works against your goals.
  If videotaping makes you nervous, regardless of why, explain that
  videotaping will reduce the satisfaction of people actually in the
  audience.
  

• Slide templates are stupid 95% of the time. They’re meant to
  improve slide quality, but they’re always based on PowerPoint
  templates, which are notoriously bad, bullet heavy, and ugly. A
  decent compromise is to use the title slide from their template but
  nothing else. Never let them auto-update your slides based on a
  template, as it always messes up layouts and complex slides in evil
  ways event organizers will rarely notice.
  

• Simply strike out the offending clauses, initial them, and
  return the contract, mentioning what you did. This is often
  perfectly acceptable.
  

• If they insist on video or audio recording, demand a Creative
  Commons license so you can reuse that recording yourself. This will
  allow them to do what they wish with the recording, but also gives
  you the right to post the video on your website or to YouTube, or to
  sell it. It’s quite fair to ask for this: you get a professional
  recording you can reuse, and they get the right to film you at
  all.
  

• Have the host or a friend in the audience look you over before
  you begin.
  

• Remove all nipple piercings well before your lecture
  begins.
  

• Always make a pass through the restroom before you go on and
  check yourself in the mirror. A good time is right before they want
  to put a microphone on you and after you’ve made sure your laptop
  and other tech gear are working properly. Check your teeth (spinach
  is evil) and your fly, and talk at the mirror and move around just
  to see if anything silly is going on.
  

• One plus to being early on the schedule is that the odds of
  spilling something on yourself go way down.
  

• If you notice something you can fix discreetly, hide behind
  the lectern to do it. The lectern covers many sins.
  

• Bring a sweater or extra shirt just in case something bad
  happens. A sweater can be put on over your shirt or wrapped around
  your waist, covering whatever it is you wish to hide.
  

• And of course, find a way not to care about superficial things
  you can’t change. Make a joke or tell a story of a worse experience,
  but above all, don’t let yourself be upstaged by a stain, a rip, or
  an open zipper.
  

• Have a sign-up sheet for your talk. Most conferences do this
  by default. You should always know how many are registered. Drop-off
  rates for lectures are high, usually around 50%. If 100 people sign
  up, you should expect 50 to attend.
  

• Do some research. How many people showed up to the last
  lecture that took place at this venue? Are there good reasons to
  assume your material will draw a larger crowd?
  

• Promote yourself. Two things have to happen to have a big
  crowd: interested people need to be made aware of your talk, and
  then they need incentive to come.
  

• Use the density theory. If you’re in a big room, get everyone
  together. If it’s really only five people, make a nice semicircle so
  a conversation is natural.
  

• Drop your prepared slide deck. Odds are slim that it will go
  over well with a small group. Switch to informal mode, and start the
  session by making a list of questions as described previously in
  You left your slide deck at home
  . Then answer
  them.
  

My
worst was also one of my first. I was asked to “attend” a
conference of “senior government officials” in Georgia (as in the
Republic of). I arrived late in the evening and was taken to a
government house to sleep. The driver woke me at 7 a.m., and we left at
7:30 to drive an hour or so to a government office. When I arrived, I
found about 50 top officials, from the president of the Supreme Court
(and most of the Court), to the leaders of the parliament, and about 20
representatives from the president’s office. I was seated at the head of
the table. No translator for me. The president of the Court began—two
sentences in English welcoming me, and then 20 minutes or so to the
audience in Georgian. He then turned to me and said in English, “Now,
we’d like you to give a one-hour talk comparing the German, French, and
American constitutions, with any special insight for Georgia.”

I know, you’ve had that dream. But this was for real.