3 Tips For When Public Speaking Doesn’t Go As Planned
Episode 461 | Author: Emilie Aries
How do you handle public speaking situations where something goes awry?
What’s the wildest thing that’s happened to you during a presentation or workshop? Whether you were listening or speaking, chances are you’ve experienced something not going according to plan. I had my own experience with this a few weeks ago when I gave the keynote speech at a conference in Newport Beach, California.
In the middle of my talk, we experienced a 4.3 magnitude earthquake. Yes, really. It prompted a slew of nervous laughter from my audience and an inadvertent f-bomb from me. It also makes great fodder today’s post, in which I’m sharing three tips for what to do when something goes awry when you’re public speaking, whether you’re in front of hundreds, standing before the conference table in your smallest boardroom, or framed in a Zoom screen.
Tip #1: Don’t ignore it
You’re a professional, the audience is here to hear from you, maybe you’re following a script—all these factors make it tempting to just carry on. This isn’t the right approach, though. While pretending the earthquake or the medical emergency or the power outage didn’t happen can feel like the less distracting option, the opposite is true. Ignoring the situation leaves everyone feeling unresolved and wondering if you’re even present in the room with them.
Interruptions, whether humorous or terrible, need to be acknowledged in order for a collective release. Everyone, you included, gets to take a beat, think about what happened, and then move on. At my keynote, I politely requested that the woman who was asking a question hold on a moment while we all took a beat.
Tip #2: Take the pulse of the room
Part of acknowledging what just happened is checking in to see how everyone is feeling. Reaching out to the other people in the room has a critical effect: it creates a moment of collective choice and opens the floor to voicing any concerns. Whether you’re speaking to three co-workers or a packed conference center, making this space is important.
After I requested the question-asker at my California event to pause, I asked the room, “Does everyone feel safe?
Tip #3: Empower your audience
This final point takes tip #2 one step further. In addition to seeing how everyone is feeling, give the audience an opportunity to share their thoughts on continuing with the presentation. Providing this opportunity for collective consensus-building gives the others in the room a say. What’s more, by empowering them, you’re empowering yourself. When they confirm that they want to continue—the most likely outcome after a relatively minor upset—you’re reminded that they are your allies in this endeavor; you have their endorsement to carry on speaking.
In my case, the audience of native Californians wasn’t terribly shaken up over the earthquake. It was me who was freaking out a bit internally. But with their support, I felt safe and supported to carry on.
Practice makes public speaking perfect
The way we react in these situations, the jokes we might make, and the calm we manage to exude, come from experience. I was proud of how I navigated that California keynote—it certainly highlighted the confidence I’ve cultivated over a decade plus of public speaking.
It’s a skill, which means you can train to get better at it. Speak Up, our eight-week assertive communication accelerator, is one program that will help you become a more confident communicator even when things go awry.
What are your experiences with public speaking disasters big and small? Join the conversation in the Courage Community on Facebook or our group on LinkedIn to share any horror stories or tricks you’ve picked up over the years.
Related Links From Today’s Episode:
Book me to speak at your company or conference
Speak Up: A Live Assertive Communication Course for Women in the Workplace
Build confidence in your speaking skills:
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EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 461. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the founder and CEO of Bossed Up and today I want to talk about keeping your cool when public speaking.
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And I want to start with a story from a recent keynoting experience that I had. But to be clear, this can relate to any public speaking experience. Whether you're on stage in front of a couple hundred people, like I was, or if you're just giving a presentation at work, virtually or in person, things happen. Things go awry all the time. And so I want to talk about today, how to be prepared.
So it was just a few weeks ago now. I was keynoting in the very beautiful Newport Beach, California, and about halfway through my keynote, there was a moment of like, crowd interaction. I just handed the mic to an audience member who was starting to ask her question when there was a very loud rumble that just ran through the whole conference room. And it was a big room. This was like an auditorium sized room.
And at first I thought it sounded like the HVAC system had just kicked on for the first time, which is weird, because it was very cool and climate controlled the entire time. And I literally did not know what had happened. But the entire room, meanwhile, had erupted into nervous laughter, which I thought is such an interesting response. All of a sudden, there's a whole chorus of laughter happening, and I'm the one on stage who's completely left out of the joke and doesn't know what the hell's going on.
And then it occurred to me that all of these Californians were much more familiar with what had just happened than I was as an out of stater from Colorado. It was an earthquake. Literally in the middle of my keynote. We had a 4.3 magnitude earthquake run right through us. And I genuinely did not know what was happening and didn't know how to make sense of it.
Meanwhile, this poor woman who's, like, holding my microphone, she just carries on. She just bravely continues to ask her question. And I was really faced with a choice from the main stage of, okay, what is the right thing to do here?
And so my first key piece of advice, whenever something crazy happens in the middle of a talk, in the middle of a presentation, in the middle of a meeting, even, don't ignore it, address it, because ignoring it while it feels like the less distracting thing to do is very much not. It leaves your audience hanging. It leaves everyone unresolved, in a way, and it leaves people wondering if you are with them in the room. If you're experiencing the same thing that they are, and if there needs to be this moment of collective consciousness raising or collective release, that needs to happen, by all means, let it happen. Like, let's address it proactively.
And so in that moment, I first paused politely, right? The goal here is to pause, to actually create some space to address this, and to do so with decorum, with conscientiousness of others in the room. So in that moment, I asked this woman, who was asking a question that I was very much not listening to by this point, to just please hold on one second. Um, we'll get to your question in just a moment.
And then step two is to take the pulse, truly taking the pulse of the room and saying from the stage, how are we feeling? Like, hold on a second. Do we feel safe? That was my first question, actually, my first question was, what the f*** was that? As one audience member lovingly recalled to me right after this, keynote, she was like, I loved that line. And I was like, oh, my god, did I really drop an f-bomb in the middle of this pseudo emergency? And yes is the answer. As a matter of fact, I said, “what the f*** was that?”, from the keynote stage. Luckily, this room full of women was very cool with my foul language. In that moment, I was like, I am not from here, y'all. Like, I am not used to what is happening right now. Please, someone confirm for me that was in fact, an earthquake. Which it was.
And so my next question was, do we feel safe continuing? And it's interesting, like, taking the pulse of the audience in the room does something really critical. It creates that collective agency, a collective choice moment for everyone to address what's going on and to voice any concerns, if they do have concerns, with continuing. And this is true for a three person meeting, as it is for a 300 person conference.
In fact, I saw one of my favorite comedians, Dimitri Martin, navigate this very kind of situation a few years ago. Actually, twice, weirdly, because he came back to Denver recently for a Netflix taping special that Brad and I got to see, and something similar happened again, which is so bizarre. But anyway, Dimitri Martin last year was in Denver and in the middle of his set, a comedy set, someone has a medical emergency. Like a full on medical emergency. They're shouting from the audience for the house lights to be up. And we get the whole house lights on and Dimitri stops from the stage, taken aback, as we all were, while the staff of the establishment address the situation. EMT’s arrive on site shortly thereafter and carry someone out who was having a very bad time.
Fortunately, we did find out that that person was okay after the fact, but it was really, really shocking and alarming as a situation for everybody involved. And Dimitri Martin was masterful in how he dealt with this, with the crowd. He said, look, like, how are we feeling about continuing? Does this feel appropriate? Do we feel safe?
And in that moment, he did what I think is the third key step to all of this, which is to empower your audience, give others in the room a say on how we proceed. And that's exactly what he did. He basically took a poll if everyone was okay with continuing. You know, this was a somber moment and, um, a scary moment. So he rightfully and understandably ratcheted down the tone of the room to address the emergency as it was happening and really get out of the way. He got off the stage for many minutes while the EMT’s did their thing, but when he returned, he left it up to us as the audience to decide whether or not to continue.
And I think he knew we were all going to clap and, you know, shout and be raucous and excited to continue. We had paid good money to be there to see him, but it didn't matter if that was a foregone conclusion in his mind, even if he knew he was going to proceed. The act of asking the audience is so critically important because it gives that opportunity for collective consensus building to happen. And it gives you cover as the speaker to continue with the endorsement and the social support of the rest of the room.
And so that's what I did from up on that stage in the middle of navigating an earthquake. These Californians, by the way, were literally laughing because a 4.3 earthquake to them is like no big deal. That's like a Tuesday afternoon. To me, I was much more freaked out personally, and I had to navigate my own emotional regulation personally while keeping my cool from the stage and making a collective choice.
When you're freaking out, when you are feeling stressed out. A lot of us have that fight, flight, or freeze response that makes us go inward. It makes us go inward and shut down, or it makes us go inward to run away and escape this horrible situation. The key here is to resist that intrinsic impulse to go inward and instead look outward to your audience as allies in this process, not as your judges who are judging you from the stage. People are rooting for you. People want you to succeed. That's what we forget when we're freaking out with nervousness as a public speaker, they want good things for you, just like you want good things for them, and you want good things for yourself in that moment.
So enlist their social support as allies in navigating and deciding how to navigate when, things go awry, a crisis, a medical emergency, whatever it might be. This agility, this sort of emotional agility that's associated with good emotional intelligence is also just, it comes with practice when it comes to public speaking. And so if we can be less ego focused, less self focused, less self conscious, from the stage or from the, you know, front of the room or front of the Zoom, as someone who's leading a meeting or presentation, it enables us to be truly present with our audience and to be collaborators with them in creating a memorable experience.
It also doesn't hurt to make a few jokes. My talk was on women's voices, assertive communication. So it was all about asserting yourself. And so we had a few jokes about, like, the power of women's voices, the earth shaking power. What did I have? I don't remember. It was better then, I swear, from the stage. But, you know, a little humor to break the tension doesn't hurt. There's a reason why we innately laughed in the face of an unexpected experience like an earthquake. Like, the whole room was laughing because that is a release of nervous energy.
So allowing for that playfulness, allowing for a joke to be made, if you've got one, from, you know, your back pocket, when you can, by all means make it, and then when you collectively decide to move on, move on. That's what we did. We got back to her question, and the show carried on and continued.
And so I was proud of myself in that moment for kind of riding that wave, so to speak, and very literally, I suppose, from a tectonic standpoint. But it really made me think about, wow, if I got through an earthquake in the middle of a keynote, I think I can handle anything as a public speaker and as someone who presents in, you know, small internal meetings or big external facing ones. That is the agility that I've trained for, that any one of us can get better at.
And if you want to learn a lot more on how to be a confident and concise and cogent communicator, even when things go awry, I would highly encourage you to check out our Speak Up program. I just launched our most recent cohort, so it's currently certainly just a waiting list that you can sign up for, depending on when we offer the course again. But Speak Up is our eight week long assertive communication accelerator for women who just want to feel confident in making their voice heard, both in big ways, like as a speaker and small day to day experiences of making your voice heard in the workplace.
As always, I'd love to hear more about your experiences and your reactions to today's Bossed Up tip. What public speaking tips and tricks and tactics have worked best for you?
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What has gone awry in your meetings and how have you handled it in the past? I'd love to keep the conversation going, as always, in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook and in the Bossed Up group on LinkedIn. Until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose, and together let's lift as we climb.
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Particularly if you have felt boxed in by your employer's non-compete agreements, which may be embedded in your overall employment contract. It might be a separate agreement that you've had to sign over the years. The good news here is that non-compete agreements in America are going away. This is a long overdue ruling, in my opinion, and I am just so excited at this new rule passed by the Federal Trade Commission to make non-competes unenforceable nationwide starting after August 21 of this year. The ruling is currently being challenged, so it's not a done deal yet, but it's looking very good.
So, first, let me back up and just explain what is a non-compete agreement and who does it really impact? The non-compete agreement originated to protect trade secrets. So this was particularly relevant for white collar workers who were operating in, like, consulting environments or service industry environments, professional services, as they call it, who were, let's say, developing a methodology for consulting, for training, for, I don't know, developing a leadership paradigm or framework.
And it was geared towards preventing those employees who have that institutional knowledge, those trade secrets, from going away to their competitor, let's say, particularly in getting a job in a competitor who's nearby, to prevent them from taking those trade secrets with them. And they've become more widespread, particularly among the working class. I remember seeing an incredible New York Times Op-Doc, a really short video produced by the New York Times back in April of 2023 about people like hairstylists, whose entire careers and lives were ruined by non-compete agreements that felt like they handcuffed employees. Because one of the many people that was profiled for this particular mini doc had to, like, move states entirely to get a hairstylist job that wouldn't violate her non-compete agreement.
So these non-competes have gone, in my opinion, way beyond their intended use of protecting trade secrets to prevent healthy competition in our labor market, to prevent the whole concept of supply and demand from actually playing out, in favor of employers who want to have employees who feel trapped, who feel like they cannot switch jobs, who cannot work for their competitors, who cannot work in their industry, even in the geographic region.
So they've been, frankly, used in an exploitative manner, and they've expanded to impact nearly one in five US workers. So 18% of US workers are estimated to be covered by a non-compete agreement. That's 30 million people whose lives are about to get a lot freer, quite frankly, it doesn't mean they get to go work for their competitors, but at least they have a fighting chance of exploring their very options.
This is particularly relevant, by the way, in a non-unionized workplace, where the only real bargaining power you have, if your employer's exploiting you and you don't have a union to bargain collectively on your behalf, your only real power is to leave for another job. And non-compete agreements have historically prevented workers from doing so.
There's also some interesting demographic data that just became available through the survey of household economics and decision making. The shed study, that was a key study done by the Federal Reserve each year. And they've started conducting them only, like, a decade ago in 2013. But they added recently a question on non-compete agreements starting in their 2022 survey, there's some interesting demographic differences.
They found that men are somewhat more likely to have non-competes, not tremendously so, but slightly more likely to be under a non-compete agreement. Workers with four year college degrees are more likely to be in a non-compete agreement as well, although they're not exclusively the workers who are covered by them. And then industries vary widely in their use of non-competes.
Workers in professional services industries, the ones I mentioned at the top, constitute about 19%, Finance 18% of all workers with non-competes. And those are more likely to be impacted by non-compete agreements than workers in Construction, which can constitute 7%, Education, 7.8%, or Public Administration, which constitute 4.7% of workers with non-competes.
Non-compete agreements also tend to impact employees with higher family incomes. And so this has been sort of like a restriction historically placed on knowledge workers, on higher income workers. But what's particularly exploitative about how non-competes have expanded over the years in their use is that they've been used well beyond their intended purposes to lock in plenty of hairstylists and working class folks, too. Now, that's not to say that any of us should feel completely locked into an employment situation and unable to move on from your workplace situation.
But, you know, it's funny. One of my girlfriends here in Colorado is a doctor, a fertility doctor, who has a non-compete agreement that literally means that she's thinking about if she had to leave her employer, because, frankly, she feels very overworked and exploited and doesn't know how to draw the boundaries that she wants, because the workplace has really been designed around her martyring herself for her patients. And it's a really hard situation to just turn around overnight. She would literally have to uproot her family, sell her house, and move to another state, which is something she's strongly been considering in order to not violate her non-compete agreement. Does she like living in Colorado? Yes. Does she want to move? No. But given how her employment contract is set up, that is the kind of situation that keeps her in her place. Feeling without a voice, feeling without the ability to strongly negotiate, and feeling without the ability to really advocate for herself. Which, again, isn't what supply and demand was ever intended to be about.
So what does this actually mean for you if you have ever been or currently are under a non-compete agreement that will no longer be enforceable, 120 days after the passing of this rule. So the ruling already passed. The 120 day countdown is on. And technically, I did the math. It should be live, that rule should be enforceable by August 21 of this year. So let's say by September of 2024 your non-compete agreement is not enforceable.
There is, however, one small caveat. If you are currently an executive, which the FTC defines as someone who is making over about $151,000 a year and, quote, serving in a policy making position, then the non-compete you've already signed continues to be enforceable. If you go and get a new position, even at that level of seniority, $151K plus in a policymaking position of authority, they cannot create new non-compete agreements for those executives, moving forward.
Interestingly, if you are currently under a non-compete agreement, your employer is required to inform you that they do not plan to enforce that non-compete agreement within 120 days of the rule passing. I'd be very curious to see how few employers actually they're going to come through and be in compliance on that. So please let me know if you get that email from your employer. I'm sure HR folks just love keeping up with the constantly shifting nature of labor employment laws, [LAUGHTER] but here's another update for y'all.
So my last point I want to make here is in defense of employers. I'm an employer myself, after all. I feel like Irene and I, as an example, have developed quite a few methodologies at Bossed Up in terms of how we go about creating custom leadership development curriculum, our approach, our outlines. I really love, frankly, the systems and structures we've developed to be consistently excellent in my opinion and my humble opinion, in everything that we do. So it would be a bummer if Irene were to go off and get another job and take all those trade secrets with her.
And so, just to be clear. I'm not saying that your intellectual property is now a free for all because there are plenty of other legal mechanisms for protecting your employer's property without boxing in your employees and making them feel like they don't have choices, and they have to stay as an employee for you because they are coerced into doing so. And the simple answers boil down to a NDA agreement, a non-disclosure agreement that prohibits you from spilling the beans, from just downloading your hard drive from your work computer before you go off to work for a competitor.
Non-disclosure agreements cover a lot of those bases, and similarly, trade secrets laws that prohibit trade secrets from walking out the door when an employee does also protect employers who want to protect their trade secrets. So things like patents, NDAs, trade secrets laws, there are already many mechanisms in place in the law to protect employers intellectual property, that does not require exploiting your workers and making them feel like they have no options on the free market, because that is not what supply and demand is all about or has ever been all about.
If you want to retain your top talent as an employer, maybe start with better wages and better working conditions. I don't know, compete for them on the open labor market. Why don't you try that instead?
Now, I want to keep this podcast brief, but I just have to give one last shout out to Lina Khan, who is the chairwoman of the FTC right now, who has taken a huge role in activating, from my vantage point, the FTC and all that it was ever intended and designed to do as an agency for our Federal Government. So if you really believe, like I do, in the impact of innovative leadership, if you're the kind of person like me who believes one innovative, inspiring leader can change an entire organization, look no further than Lina Khan, okay?
She is breaking up monopolies, suing giant companies like tech companies that are the Metas and the Amazons of the world to actually enforce the antitrust laws that have been on the books in our country since the Great Depression, or following, I should say, the Great Depression. She's enforcing antitrust laws, strengthening the enforcement of consumer protections. And you can look no further than this really incredible interview she did very recently with Jon Stewart, who came back to host the Daily show once a week, and he ended her interview by saying, would you just stay forever? It's definitely worth a watch to get a sense of what an inspiring leader she is.
So this is, we have her to thank. We have Lina to thank in many ways. Now, to be clear, it wasn't just her there was a vote taken. The majority ruled that non-compete agreements should become non-enforceable. But I'm a big believer in Lina Khan's leadership as being a part of this. Maybe I should ask her to be on the pod to talk more about this.
Anywho, if you're now ready to break free from formerly feeling boxed in into your employment situation, I recommend you getting your job search assets together now so that you are ready to make your next best move come August and September, when these non-competes will no longer be enforceable.
So head to bossedup.org/gethired for my on demand job search course to help you navigate the modern job search and really set yourself up to get the next best job offer you can. As always, I want to hear what you have to say about today's episode, so keep the conversation going in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook or in the Bossed Up group on LinkedIn. I can't wait to hear what you think of all this. Do non-compete agreements impact you or the people you love? Tell me all about it. What does this ruling mean to you? Are you an employer? Do you think this is going to make hiring more difficult?
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Tell me that too. I'm interested in, you know, I'm always interested in seeing the many sides to every issue. So let's keep a conversation going and until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose and together let's lift as we climb.
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