How to Handle Blunders and Mistakes on Stage

There you are on stage - you're doing public speaking, training, or even a seminar, and you make a mistake.

You trip over something.

Or you spill your water.

Or you click the wrong button losing your place in your presentation.

Or your PowerPoint is somehow screwed up and looks very different than when you created it yesterday.

What should you do?

Okay, this public speaking training article comes to you from me having done 1,893 workshops, seminars, and public speaking engagements since 1982 - and I have made all the above mistakes and many, many more.

So I can tell you from experience exactly what to do if you "make a mistake" or things just don't go right. You have 2 simple options:

Strategy #1:

Ignore the mistake. This is a very good strategy for handling many kinds of public speaking blunders.

For example, if the "mistake" is something like your PowerPoint presentation looks wrong to you, remember that the audience has no idea how it was supposed to look. Making apologies or comments about how it looks different than when you created it last night just makes you look ruffled and nervous.

Or let's say you forget a portion of your talk, or you accidentally screwed up the sequence of your speech: why point it out when the audience A. doesn't know that's true and B. doesn't really care. In such cases, you're better off not saying anything and just ignoring it.

Strategy #2:

Point out the mistake and make fun of it or joke about it. If you spill your water, you could ignore that, and that's just fine. Or if you trip over a cord on the floor, you could ignore that too. But in this case the audience has for sure seen this "blunder" or mistake.

So make fun of it!

You spill your water and say, "Does anyone else want some water?" and everyone will laugh.

Or you trip over a cord and you say, "Okay, whoever put that there is fired!" or "That's the best trip I've taken in years!" and people will laugh.

Summary and Super-Important Bonus Tip:

If you make a mistake or blunder, the audience cares less about that than you do. You may need to get a number of public speaking engagements under your belt to fully realize this, but it's 100% true - in most cases the audience just does not care.

Here's the bonus tip:

You should never be afraid of mistakes and blunders because when you make a mistake it proves to the group that you are human, you're one of them. We all make mistakes. The biggest mistake you can make on stage is to try to be perfect, a legend, a hero. People don't want that, they want to hear from human beings, not perfect super-heroes! Knowing this, you might even want to plan a mistake or two in your presentation!