Something will go wrong.
I say this not to scare you, but to free you. Because the moment you accept that something will go sideways, you can stop spending energy trying to prevent the inevitable and start preparing for what actually matters: how you handle it when it does.
The tech will fail. You will lose your place. A rock band will be warming up in the room next door, or a dog barking, or a heckler, or you’ll tell a joke that lands with complete silence. You’ll spill your water. The teleprompter will go down. Something you didn’t plan for will happen, guaranteed, and the audience will be watching you.
Here's what I have learned from working with speakers at all levels, and from conversations with some of the most experienced communicators I know: the speakers who handle those moments best are NOT the most polished ones. They’re the ones who know how to stay present, stay calm, and stay connected when things stop going according to plan.
Minutes after this photo was snapped, I took a sip of water and ended up splashing water all over my face. Not a smooth move! Did I fall through the floor? No! I turned it into a comic moment by using the “Name It Technique.”
The Name It Technique
The simplest and most effective tool I teach for handling mishaps on stage is something I call the Name It technique.
When something goes wrong, name it. Out loud. To the audience. Right away.
"Oh, it looks like the slides are not cooperating today." "Wow, sounds like Mick Jagger is warming up next door." "I just spilled my water, which is very on brand for me."
That is it. Just name what happened.
It sounds almost too simple, but it works for three very reasons:
First, it helps you calm down. When you name what’s happening, you stop fighting reality and start working with it. The moment you say the thing out loud, some of the tension releases.
Second, it builds trust with your audience. They can already see or hear exactly what you can see or hear. Pretending otherwise creates distance. Acknowledging it together creates connection.
Third, and this is my favorite part, it can be genuinely funny. Humor is the fastest way to release tension in a room, and an honest, well-timed acknowledgment of a mishap is often all it takes to get a laugh and bring everyone back together.
Once you name it, something remarkable happens. You and the audience can figure out together what to do next. That kind of moment, handled with ease and a little grace, often brings a room closer than anything you had planned.
What Comedians Know About Recovery
In Episode 15 of Gigi Presents, I had the pleasure of talking with Gary Simons, a comedian who has performed at New York City's world famous Comedy Cellar and has opened for Mike Birbiglia, Roy Wood Jr., and Gary Gulman, among others.
I asked Gary what he does when a joke doesn’t land. Most of the time, he said, he simply moves on. Keep going, stay in the moment, don’t make it a bigger deal than it is. But when the silence is truly deafening, he’ll sometimes call it out directly. Something like: okay, that one didn’t work. We all heard it. Let’s keep going.
That is the Name It technique in action, from a professional comedian.
That is exactly what great speakers do when things go sideways on stage.
What News Anchors Know About Staying Calm
In Episode 16 of Gigi Presents, I sat down with Rielle Creighton, Emmy Award-winning anchor at Fox 12 Oregon, and her mother Trina Creighton, a broadcast journalist of 30 years who spent two decades as a professor of broadcast performance at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
These two women have forgotten more about staying composed under pressure than most of us will ever know.
Rielle talked about what happens when the teleprompter goes down mid-broadcast. It has happened to her more times than she can count, including this year. Her advice: you cannot be flustered. The audience at home should never know something is wrong.
She also described anchoring hours of unscripted breaking news coverage, talking for the better part of a day with no script, live on air, on a politically charged story, with a producer in her ear the entire time. What got her through it, she said, was knowing the material, trusting her preparation, and not allowing the chaos behind the scenes to show up on her face.
Trina added something that has stuck with me ever since. She talked about Walter Cronkite, widely considered one of the greatest broadcast journalists of all time, and a study that counted the number of mistakes he made in a typical newscast. The number was surprisingly high. But here’s the thing: Cronkite never sweated any of them. He just kept going. And most of the time, the audience never even noticed.
"People often don't notice that you make a mistake," Rielle said, "unless you act like you've made a mistake."
That is one of the most useful things any speaker can hear.
I watched Rielle demonstrate this in real life, at a fundraiser for Girls Inc. of the Pacific Northwest, where I first saw her speak. At one point she needed to find her place in her script, and she did it without rushing, without apology, without any visible panic. The room was silent, and she was so calm and so present that everyone just waited. It was, honestly, kind of mesmerizing. And then she carried on as if nothing had happened, because nothing had.
That is what calm looks like in practice. And it is a skill, not a personality trait.
The Audience Takes Its Cues From You
This is the throughline that connects everything above, from the Name It technique to Gary's approach to a joke that falls flat to Rielle anchoring hours of breaking news without a script.
When you’re calm, your audience is calm. When you’re flustered, your audience feels it. Our nervous systems are wired to read each other, and the person at the front of the room sets the emotional temperature for everyone else.
Think about it the way you would think about a good parent with a frightened child. If the parent panics, the child panics. If the parent stays steady, the child can settle. Your audience is the same. They’re looking to you to tell them how to feel about what is happening.
When you name a mishap with ease, or move past a flubbed line without drawing attention to it, or anchor hours of live television without letting the chaos in your earpiece show on your face, you’re doing something generous for your audience. You’re giving them permission to stay relaxed, to stay with you, to trust that everything is going to be okay.
Remember this: those moments, when something goes wrong and you handle it with grace and even a little humor, are often the moments audiences remember most. Not because you made a mistake, but because of who you were when you did.
One Last Thought
Every performance, every speech, every talk is just a rehearsal for the next one.
I say that to my clients all the time. Don’t treat this as the final exam. Treat it as practice. And when something goes sideways, as it will, treat that as practice too.
The more you do it, the better you get at improvisation. The better you get at the improv, the calmer you become. And the calmer you become, the more your audience trusts you.