A lesson in adaptation! And reason 5786 why I’m not a fully scripted speaker…
Turned up for a speaking gig yesterday at a football stadium. I was looking forward to it. But there’s something strange about sports stadiums to me; my heart always sinks when I hear an event is at one, as they can be odd in my experience – thankfully this one was modern and not 1973 wood panelling like some are. It was newly refurbished and looked great.
They had a massive screen too, which looked amazing and was a bit like an outdoor scoreboard (which was kicking out a lot of heat!). So I plugged my HDMI into the wall, and the image came up, and it looked great. Really great. The speaker geek in me was very happy.
Then the venue person mentioned something – “You know about the delay, right?”.
I was confused.
The whole system had a 5-second delay on it! Every click of my clicker was delayed by 5 seconds! If you’re a high-energy speaker and fast talker who uses slides as punchlines and reveals – this felt like a minute for every click.
So, like always, I had a choice to make. Moan, get stressed, act like a diva, or just go with the flow, adapt and crack on. So I couldn’t use my tie clip mic ?; their mic kept cutting out and every click I made was delayed. But you know what? It was fine. It went well; the client was happy. Eventually I learnt to adapt my wording and timings and started clicking a bit early and also made light of the occasional awkward pause. Not my best talk but good enough; I was happy, and they were happy. We made it. I was able to help them. Job done.
Then on the drive back I also reflected on how bad it could have gone if I had used a full script and timed everything down to the second and to every click. My job as a professional speaker is to deliver content, yes, engage an audience, 100%, but also it is to be flexible too. It’s never about me, it’s about the audience – they didn’t care about the mic issues or clicker delay; they just wanted me to help them to Get Good at Life and Work, and it was my privilege to speak to them. I wonder if flexibility is the most underrated part of being a “professional“ anything, tbh!
