Carrie C
Owner, Double C Professional Consulting Services | LION | Aspiring author
Care to share your most embarrassing, awkward, or unusual speaking experience?
Are you willing to share your most embarrasing, awkward, or unusual experience while speaking or delivering a presentation? What happened, and how did you get through it?
Regards,
Carrie
Good Answers (5)
Christopher "Chris" S
Senior Business Development and Leadership Professional
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I was serving as a missionary in Southern Wales (UK) and walked in to church one Sunday and took a seat with the congregation as I normally did. The prelude music was playing and people were reverently and quietly taking their seats. The Leader of the congregation stood and instead of making his way to the podium, walked right past it, into the audience, and straight to me. He leaned over and whipered in my ear, "my speakers did not show up today. The congregation is yours for 45 minutes."
I made my way to the front and took a seat as the opening hymn and prayer took place. I had no idea what I would say. The sacrament was administered and passed and it was time for me to speak. I still had no idea what I would say.
I stood at the podium and began to share with them some thoughts that I had been pondering in my scripture study and as I worked within their community. Before you know it, 45 minutes was up and I was greeted with some of the warmest compliments that I had ever received after speaking to a group.
To this day, I couldn't tell you what I said but I can tell you that the words that I spoke helped to change someone's life. About 4 months later, I was contacted by someone and told the story. It was wonderful, humbling, and gratifying. I only wish I could remember what I said. :)
Thanks for the question!
Jiří S
Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Max-Planck-Institute for Chemical Ecology
My most unusual speaking experience happened at a competition of student scientific projects in Bratislava, Slovakia. This was my third talk altogether, and the previous talks took place among just a few other people I knew well, such as a labmates. This was also the case for the first round of the competition where only students of chemistry spoke. However, what I did not know that the best speaker (which happened to be me) will have to talk in front of all the participants (more than 400) including all the professor and senior members of the Faculty of Natural Scientists of the Universitas Comenia. So without any preparation for such a situation, I was suddenly confronted with the vast (and broad) audience in the largest assembly hall of the faculty. The most difficult were the first minutes, but I tried to speak really slowly and loud, prolonged the introduction, skipped much of the complicated chemical stuff and went to the most important results. In the end, it was a great success and I was elected the best speaker of the entire competition which of course felt very pleasant. Since this „virgin“ experience, I have never had stage-fright again.
Links:
Parisa M
Director, LGL Products at Curriculum Associates, Inc. & Let's Go Learn, Inc.
A few years ago I was on a speaking tour which meant city/state hopping every other day. I had been on the road for six weeks when I stepped on the stage in Alabama. I was giving a motivational presentation to K-12 educators and administrators. Tired of being on the road and living out of a carryon suitcase, I started my presentation by telling everyone how happy and honored I was to be in front of such dedicate group of educators in the beautiful state of Mississippi! My presentation took off (in the wrong direction) from there! I continued by sharing some Mississippi related stories and used some examples of successful initiatives. It took a while before an older lady from the back of the room finally stood up and politely reminded me where I was! I don’t think there is a deep enough shade of red that could describe my face at that point…How did I recover?! I just laughed at myself, apologized, and told them that it was time for me to go back home…Everyone laughed (I like to think with me, rather than at me) then we took a short break and started again.
To avoid making this mistake again, I now write down the name of the city and state on a piece of paper which I tape down on the podium.
Bobby D
Principal - Construction Market Consultants, Inc.
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Back when 'The Internet' was CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy, I headed up a major initiative targeting the top 100 architectural firms in the country. We were an international provider of construction data; pre-planning, planning, bid, post bid, etc. and our relationships with architects was key in our success.
Having started here in Atlanta, we finally grew to have data coverage for the entire US and we wanted to deepen our relationships with the top 100 firms by giving them access to our data in a quid pro quo. (We charged hundreds of thousands of dollars for this data to anyone but architects.)
My team did a great job of getting an appointment to a top ten firm and we flew to their office in the middle of the country to present the data and explain our proposal.
We had another meeting that morning with another top firm and it could not have possibly gone better. Let’s go two for two!
We are in their conference room, had done our due diligence in that we had to have an analog phone line as in those days, to access our database, I had to log on to CompuServe to get an 'Internet connection and no matter what I, or my senior associate tried, we could not get it to work. Like the ‘Energizer Bunny’ we kept trying and trying and trying…
Now, the conference room was full of their top people, at least a dozen of their Senior Executive VP’s and Principals. They could see I was dying and they called in their IT department to help. I felt a little bit better when they could not get online either.
While this is going on, I am tap-dancing like crazy until I had about ten minutes left in my hour and I finally just had to say, "Well, let me tell you about our database."
It was horrible!
The 'mystery' was finally solved when one of their IT people called the IT Director, who was off that day, and we discovered that, because the Internet was brand new and there were more than a few people 'checking out things' during the day, they have programmed their phone system to not allow anyone to call any of the local access numbers for CompuServe, AOL or Prodigy.
That at least made my team look better and the story did have a happy ending as we were able to broker the data swap with this firm and keep our 100% success rate intact.
(Great question!)
Bobby
Santiago O
Realtor and Consultant for Hispanic Advertising & Marketing
Best Answers in: Personal Real Estate (2), Advertising (1), Small Business (1)
A few years ago I was the speaker at a Beverage Industry conference in Chicago. I was the only speaker at the whole conference to address marketing and advertising to Hispanics, so the room was packed with hundreds of high-paying attendees. I was introduced, went up on stage and by the 3rd slide of the hour-long presentation, all the AV equipment went out! We patiently waiting a few moments for the staff to fix it, but no fix was coming. I usually have no stagefright, but I felt the drop falling on my brow (of course the lights didn't go out).
I grabbed my notes, told everyone we were moving ahead while the "geeks" worked on their "complicated technological" equipment, and invited them to enjoy an old-fasioned speech. Silence. I then conducted an instant review of any acting/theatrical training I had ever had, and in a loud, confident voice, described the slides with lots of gestures and walking around the stage, acting out "person A" and then changing position to be "person B" and then explained the slides as I had already rehearsed. For an hour (they never did get it fixed).
No one left the room, and they still laughed at the appropriate moments. I was so into making sure they understood and felt everything that I had forgotten about my handicap, and evidently so did they. I received a huge applause and over 30 people came up to me afterwards to compliment me. What a relief! I took a long, cool shower soon afterwards.
