The complaints started within the first half hour of the course:
“I don’t understand what this means”.
“This is too hard for us”.
“This doesn’t work for the presentations that I have to do.”
By the end of the day I was exhausted and dispirited.
At some point in your presenting career something similar may happen to you – your content simply doesn’t land for your audience, your technology breaks down or you don’t get the result you were hoping for.
Here are seven mental strategies to help you recover from a presentation disaster. You’re likely to resonate with some and not others. Choose what works for you.
1. Allow yourself some time to dwell on the disappointment
We live in a society that encourages us to “think positive” all the time. But uncomfortable emotions are a normal part of life. Accepting the disappointment will allow you to let it go more easily and move on. If in the past you’ve stewed about failure in a way that disrupts your life, then give yourself a time limit to experience the disappointment and then use the mental strategies below to help you move on.
2. Practice Self-compassion
We often talk to ourselves in very harsh ways. For example:
“Oh, you’re such a loser. You should have known that somebody was going to ask that question and you should have researched the answer. You came across like a total pillock.”
Can you imagine talking to your best friend like that. No. you’d be more likely to say to them:
“That was a very tricky question that audience member asked. You couldn’t have predicted that. And you did your best to answer it.”
Talk to yourself like you would talk to your best friend.
3. It doesn’t mean anything about you
It’s easy when it comes to a disastrous presentation to conclude that you are the disaster, that you’re incompetent and unworthy.
But this is not the case.
My husband Tony used to do some amateur acting and so had the experience of repeating the same play with the exact same script several days in a row. Some nights the audience expressed their enjoyment and appreciation loudly, some nights nothing. Exact same script, exact same performance. Different audience.
Coming back to your presentation, it could simply be the audience. But even if it was your content that was wrong, or your technology that broke down, your presentation disaster doesn’t mean anything about you as a person.
4. Put it into perspective
There are two ways of doing this:
- Imagine yourself 10 years from now. How will you feel then about this presentation? Will you even remember it?
- How disastrous is this presentation compared to other things in your life that have gone wrong or could go wrong? Your health or the health of a loved one? A breakdown of a relationship? Most disastrous presentations are not that bad.
5. Look for the silver lining
Whenever something goes wrong with a presentation, it’s an opportunity to work out why it went wrong, and to improve how you do things next time you present. For example, with my experience with the confused course participants I could look for how to make the material clearer and how to pre-empt participant concerns before they happened.
6. Who knows whether it’s good or bad
Humans are great at making meaning. As soon as an event happens, we’ll evaluate it and slap a label on it – good or bad.
You may have come across the classic story from the Chinese Taoist tradition about a farmer and his horse:
One day his horse runs away. And his neighbor comes over and says, to commiserate, “I’m so sorry about your horse.” And the farmer says “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?” The neighbor is confused because this is clearly terrible. The horse is the most valuable thing he owns.
But the horse comes back the next day and he brings with him 12 feral horses. The neighbor comes back over to celebrate, “Congratulations on your great fortune!” And the farmer replies again: “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”
And the next day the farmer’s son is taming one of the wild horses and he’s thrown and breaks his leg. The neighbor comes back over, “I’m so sorry about your son.” The farmer repeats: “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”
Sure enough, the next day the army comes through their village and is conscripting able-bodied young men to go and fight in war, but the son is spared because of his broken leg.
This story can go on forever, alternating between events which seem good, and those that seem bad.
In this spirit, you don’t know whether this disastrous presentation is good or bad. In fact…
7. Devastating failure often sets the stage for later success
I’ve been reading Tim Ferris’s latest book 
“What’s failure in your life that has set the stage for a later success?”
The answers to this question are mind blowing. Some of these people suffered devastating professional failures which contributed directly to stunning achievements.
Use these strategies next time you have a disappointing experience with a presentation. And let me know what strategies you’ve found useful to recover from a presentation disaster.
Great tips, Olivia. I really like the ones about self-compassion and perspective. So true. (And I’d not heard the horse story before – that’s a good way of looking at life!)
Thank you Craig
The story of man and horse not only suitable for presentation disaster but also it gives us a life lesson.Thank you Olivia for the support.
Absolutely Jeena, and most of the strategies in my post can be applied to our life challenges as well.
Please unsubscribe me. There is a legal obligation to provide this option- don’t see a link fir unsubscribe. Thanks
Clear link at bottom of email…?
Hi Finola, I have unsubscribed you. My emails are sent through a professional email provider that provides an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email, so not sure what happened there. Olivia
Russian greatest poet Alexander Pushkin wrote poetry about 200 years ago. Here are original and translated versions:
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? ???? – ??? ?????? ???????,
? ????? – ?????????? ????,
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How many blissful revelations
The spirit of enlightment hides!
And then experience born of lapses
And genius antinomy-wise
And chance, the heavenly inventor…
Thank you Marcel, that is quite beautiful.
Awesome tips. I feel much better. Thank you!
It seems Russian language too difficult for this site even to dispaly))
Will Smith posted motivational speech recently about role of a failure in our life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFf6rhcYkXw
Great message in that video.
Olivia thank you so much for boosting my courage on public speaking, I’m doing better now.
Yay Emmy! That’s great to hear. So pleased for you :-).
wow, thanks so much. I can’t wait to try again
“Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”.This did it for me, was feeling awful about my presentation. Thank you.
Hi Olivia. Hope you have a good day. I really appreciate this writing. I am undergraduate students and just now my groupmate presentation get a lot of critics from my lecturer thus, as a leader I feel sad to see them with their slides being ignored just like that. I totally blame myself because I was the one who divided what parts they should do and what they should write because they said they just will go with my planned. Although, they didn’t blame me and apologize for their mistakes in the writing and slides, I still feel it was my fault. It is not easy to cope with this feeling but somehow your writing help me to go through it. Thank you so much.
This was very helpful! I feel much better. Thanks.
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