The Public Speaking Experience
Preparation and flexibility guarantee success, but no deodorant on earth stops the sweat from seeping
Speaking in public can be exciting and exhilarating, yet intimidating and downright debilitating at the same time. The challenge hits you long before you hit the stage.
To enter the Palace of Westminster, where the UK Houses of Parliament are, pardon the pun, housed, you line up outdoors and proceed down a sloped pavement to an area where identity and security checks are made. Assuming you successfully navigate those, you enter the palace, which reminds me more of an old cathedral, but that’s probably because I have been in more old cathedrals than old palaces. The lighting isn’t great except in the open halls where the BBC, ITV or SKY are interviewing unknown politicians about unknown policies and you’re blinded by the lights that the cameras need to make everything look natural.
There are plenty of uniformed people who can guide you to the appropriate spiral, stone staircase. In Westminster, they’re a little less worn than the ones in cathedrals that have been shaped by the shoes of visitors worshiping their god or history or both. When you emerge in the corridor that contains the hall you’ve been invited to and finally find the room with the number you’ve been told to find, it’s like entering a classroom from your childhood, except there are wooden tables and chairs instead of desks. The table tops are decked with dark leather and green felt. The chairs are as uncomfortable as you remember from your school days. It doesn’t matter what kind of antiperspirant you use, when the room fills up with politicians and professionals and your turn to contribute nears, sweat seeps from your armpits.
The European Parliament is a different story. The security checks are in place, but the building is brighter and newer. There is a lot of visible wood. It doesn’t make it feel like you’re in a cabin in the forest, but it does try to convey a natural, environmentally friendly feel. There are fewer uniformed people to assist you once you enter and, although there is signage, finding your way is not always easy in the open, sprawling atrium where not every escalator necessarily goes to the floor of your desire. In the main auditorium, it feels almost as steep as an IMAX theatre. The meeting rooms, both in the Parliament building and the EU Commission buildings, have large, rugby ball-shaped tables. The middle of the table is missing as if someone removed the laces from the ancient ball. At every place along the table, there is a microphone and a headset. The chairs for the prominent people are comfortable and aligned with the microphones and headsets. Behind those chairs are one or two or sometimes three rows of chairs. They’re less comfortable than the ones at the table, but still better than those in the Palace of Westminster. They are reserved for people of less prominence but in some cases more importance. They are the people who remind, correct, listen, and provide notes to the prominent people so they don’t forget their lines. The walls of the room are hidden behind glass boxes that kind of look like miniature VIP or press boxes in sports stadiums. The press is not often invited to these rooms and the glass boxes are reserved for the translators who decide what words you will hear if you don’t understand the language of the prominent person. Even if you’re a prominent person and get a seat at the table, when it comes time for you to speak, sweat seeps from your armpits.
In Washington DC’s, Harry S. Truman building, where the US State Department is located, they have an auditorium like the EU Parliament, but not as steep. The glass boxes are replaced by glass windows high up on the walls. They have meeting rooms like the EU Commission ones, some with and some without the glass boxes. The lighting is better than in the Palace of Westminster, but the colours and materials are grey and boring compared to the EU Parliament and Commission buildings. There is no leather or felt on the table tops. It is all about simplicity and function. It doesn’t feel historic or inviting. There is no wow factor in the building, but, if you’re on stage in the Dean Acheson auditorium or seated in the front row with the prominent people in the Loy Henderson conference room and it’s almost your turn to speak, sweat seeps from your armpits.
My first experience speaking in front of important people at an important conference was during the university post-graduate studies that I eventually dropped out of. The conference was attended by neuropsychologists, professors, students and experts. My mind tells me the room was packed with hundreds of these international brainiacs who would hear my presentation. In reality, there were about 20 people there. One of my mentors in university was a prominent professor who entertained us with stories of his research days in Germany where they would work 15 hours a day, go to the bar and drink for 7 hours and then sleep for 1 hour. If you asked about the missing hour in his calculation, he would say that was a secret between him and whoever he brought back to his dorm from the bar that night. In any case, he was a brilliant mentor and he was the one that had secured my spot on the speaker’s list at the conference. No matter if there were five, fifty or five hundred people in attendance that day, Professor P was the only person I cared about receiving a favourable, post-presentation comment from.
I was well-prepared. I had a script. PowerPoint wasn’t invented, but I think I had overhead slides. I’m not sure what I talked about, but it was probably something to do with cats, their brains and the neuro- or physio- or psychological development or damage or change caused by experiments the university conducted. I concentrated. I read my script. I showed my overheads (if I had them) in the right order. Everything went to plan. I continued conscientiously until I was finished. I concluded. I thought I heard clapping, it could have been my pounding heart. I returned to my seat beside the professor. Sweat was seeping from my armpits and I turned to my mentor and asked if he thought my presentation had gone well.
“I have no idea,” he said. “After the first few seconds, nobody was listening to what you said. We were all just counting how many times you kicked the wall behind you. I think we all lost count before you were done.”
I looked toward the stage. The white wall behind the microphone was blackened with clear shoe prints. It wouldn’t take a CSI expert to determine whether the prints would match my shoes. I was not only a victim of nervous sweating, I had a tick that caused my foot to involuntarily kick back and seek support from the comforting, concrete wall I was standing in front of.
Fast forward a few years. The company I worked for was holding its annual business conference for all General Managers and corporate staff. I was corporate staff, but not based in corporate HQ and not important enough to be invited. A last-minute decision was made to include me on the Amsterdam agenda. I was informed the evening before that I could fly from Oslo to Amsterdam the next morning and back in the afternoon. (No conference dinner for me.) I grabbed some overhead slides, flew down on the ticket that was waiting for me at the airport. No one was in the conference area when I arrived, but I was ready when the conference resumed after the luxurious lunch everyone was enjoying when I arrived. (No lunch for me). I stepped onto the stage in front of everyone who was anyone in the company. The room was packed. This time I remember it for a fact: all the General Managers and all the HQ-based corporate staff from receptionist to secretary to sales directors. Everyone was there. All 55 of them. (The company hadn’t really started growing too fast at this point.)
My presentation was well-received, and I learned an important lesson about the importance of lecterns. You might think they are meant to hold your notes, your laptop or tablet, or both. There’s usually no room for both notes and a laptop. Lecterns are for protection. The good ones are solid. You can grab them with both hands and hold on so one sees that you’re shaking. I held on. I spoke. Every minute or two, I would sneak out from behind my protective pylon and switch slides on the overhead before retreating behind my cover. Sweat still seeped from my pits, but it was comforting to hold on to the lectern.
Another thing I learned that day was that people who travel a lot are great at timing. When the event ended, my boss, who was flying back to Oslo on the same flight as me, said he would drive me to the airport. About the time I would have gone from the airport bar to the gate, we left the hotel and headed the wrong way out of town. Not because he didn’t know where the airport was, but because he and the CEO wanted to look at a potential site for a hotel project. We eventually arrived at the airport after the check-in counters were closed. Only hand luggage accompanied me on my day trip, but my boss had been on the road all week, so he had a suitcase. He convinced someone to check it in for him even though the counter was closed.
As soon as we cleared security, I saw “gate closing” beside our flight number. I started sprinting, but heard a voice call out from behind:
“Where are you going? Aren’t you going to get your tax-free quota?” In those days it was almost a criminal offence in Norway to enter the country from abroad without your duty-free allowance of alcohol and tobacco, even for teetotallers and non-smokers. He made his purchases. Had I been wearing a long coat, it might have been caught in the door they slammed shut a second after I stepped onto the plane.
My boss’s timing was impressive, but I still like to be at the gate well before boarding begins and it’s been years since I bought anything at an airport duty-free shop.
In 2005, at a corporate conference in Berlin, I was again honoured with a spot on the agenda. 45 minutes. My time slot was at the end of the day, just before the conference cocktail party. The speakers ahead of me, probably marketing people proclaiming sales successes or developers showing photoshopped renderings of luxurious property projects that may or may not have ever opened, went over their allotted time by more than the average Oscar winner. There was no music to tell them time was up and no one cut the sound from their microphones.
When it was clear things were well behind schedule, the MC came to me and asked if I could shorten my presentation a bit. I agreed to speak swiftly. Later he came and asked if I could do my bit in 30 minutes instead of 45. No problem, I said, wondering if I should cut slides from the presentation, or flip through them so they seemed like moving pictures rather than individual slides. While I was contemplating this, the MC passed by one more time and said:
“He’s almost finished. You’ll have 20 minutes.”
I ended my presentation bang on time.
Sweat seeped from my armpits but there were many compliments at cocktail hour. Some people were perhaps just thankful to get to happy hour on time, but it’s doubtful any of them could remember the numbers behind the sales successes or the destinations of the potential projects either. I took it as a win.
On my wedding day, I wrote my speech on a hotel notepad from the hotel. It was short and sweet, and although today it might seem like hastily unprepared scribbles in the scrapbook, the words on the scraps of paper were the result of two years of love, hope, and dreams coming to fruition. They wouldn’t have come out the same if I hadn’t written them down. As I read them to my bride, sweat seeped from my armpits.
In March 2016, our annual company business conference was in Copenhagen. The company had grown and there were over a thousand invitees. Even so, most people in the corporate and regional offices were not invited. The company was still reeling after one of our hotels had been hit in a tragic terrorist attack just four months earlier. My presentation was viewed as an important confidence builder. It was put together well in advance. Professionals were brought in to do the visuals so it was slick and polished. All I needed to do was prepare the script. A couple of days before the presentation, we were given small, branded cue cards for our script notes. I planned to copy my notes onto the cards the morning of the day I was scheduled to speak so I could include any breaking news.
The day the conference opened, terrorists attacked the airport and a metro station in Brussels. We had three hotels and our EMEA headquarters in Brussels. Crisis management was activated, and one of my colleagues was dispatched back to Brussels to support our people there and to get first-hand information that could be relayed back to us in Copenhagen. The importance of my contribution to the conference grew. We needed to show that we were a strong, resilient company and that we could manage through the most difficult of times and overcome the most challenging circumstances.
Needless to say, my script wasn’t on the fancy cue cards as the time approached for my presentation. It was also impossible to change the slides that were already loaded into the AV system. I was able to print off the slide notes I had prepared. I scribbled some adjustments onto the plain white, A4-sized papers. When it was time for the block of main stage presentations I was included in, I was the last of three speakers. The two others on stage looked dapper in their designer suits, with their clearly printed cue cards at the ready. The papers in my jacket pocket were bulging, with one corner visibly sticking out as if it was surveying the audience from behind my lapel. The people in front of me stuck to their scripts and, of course, went over their time limits. When it was my turn to speak, sweat was seeping from my armpits.
As I entered the stage, I thought:
“This is a sombre time, I’m speaking about a sombre subject and I know that parts of my presentation will bring back bad memories in an emotional way for some of the people in attendance.”
It was quiet and dark. The air seemed thick. I tried to invisibly take a few deep breaths to steady and ready myself.
I reminded the audience that we had been through a rough couple of days and apologized for the fact that I hadn’t gotten my notes onto the cue cards like the others had. I joked that I had to disagree with the famous Wharton Professor Adam Grant who’d said procrastination was a good thing. I pulled the large wad of printer papers from my pocket and said that rather than try to use them, I would just wing it.
It was one of the best-received presentations I’d ever given, not because I had “winged it”, but because I could use all the preparation as a foundation to be flexible.
Preparation and flexibility are the keys to successful presentations. Preparation gives you a foundation and flexibility allows you to get your key messages across, even if half your allotted time is taken from you or other things, like a terrorist attack for instance, get in your way. With preparation and flexibility, no matter how much time is left when you get on stage, there’s always time for your elevator pitch. If you also have a lectern to hold on to, consider that a bonus!
Written with the clarity of hindsight, the accuracy of a faded memory, and countless creative liberties, 87 Stories is a journal of how my gap year lasted four decades, made me an emigrant, an immigrant and gave me a life I never dreamed of.
In addition to my love for writing, I’m also a professor, an educator, and a consultant. I’ve been told that my specialty is saving bacon.
Need a storyteller to motivate your team. You can hire me! Unlike many storytellers for hire, I guarantee that I only tell my own stories…
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