What To Do When S**T Happens During Your Presentation

You probably saw this video that went viral in 2017 when Professor Robert Kelly was conducting an interview with the BBC. It’s a great teaching moment for how to handle distractions that come up while you’re in the middle of a serious presentation.

On the whole, Kelly handled it with poise, although I wonder how it might have turned out if his wife had not scrambled in to corral the children and shepherd them out the door. He managed to keep his focus and get right back to what he was saying before he was interrupted.

So what could he have done better? If you’re in the middle of a serious presentation and something like that happens, it’s appropriate to apologize, but only once. More than one apology is superfluous and begins to call attention to itself. But the best thing to do when that happens is to recognize that you’ve just been handed a lucky opportunity to turn the situation to your advantage. If Kelly had made a joke about it, he would have shown himself the master of the situation. (Since he was talking about North Korea, maybe he could have joked about an invasion.)

When S**T happens—and it will—treat it as a gift. First, it humanizes you—in this case, who can’t relate to cute young kids? Even better, it elevates you. When you respond with grace and even flair to a distraction, your stock goes way up in the minds of your listeners. Everyone watching when you’re giving a presentation knows how difficult it can be, so they admire someone who smiles at adversity.  Finally, it’s memorable. I can practically guarantee that Kelly’s viewership shot up by several orders of magnitude from his normal audience, and probably no one reading this would have even heard of him.

In an interview afterwards, Kelly said “I thought I’d blown it in front of the whole  world.” No, Dr. Kelly, not only did you not blow it, but if you hadn’t done it, the whole world would not have seen it.