You are Going to Bomb
If you are speaking to groups of people, at some point you are going to bomb. No matter how good you are, sometimes there are situations out of your control that are going to cause you to mess up, not connect, and lose your audience’s attention. The goal of this article is to give you an understanding of why we bomb, why you shouldn’t worry about bombing, and how to move on after you bomb.
Why Speakers Bomb
There are all sorts of reasons why speakers bomb. Some of them, like not connecting properly with the audience or being boring are in your control. Other factors, such as the environment, announcements before your speech, or bad speakers before you are outside of your control. Sometimes you can handle those “other factors” that are not in your control, but sometimes no matter what you do, you will not be able to connect with the audience and you will bomb. It is an inevitable part of the life of a speaker to bomb, so you need to not worry about it and move on.
How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Many new speakers fear bombing. It is one of the major reasons that many people fear speaking. However, bombing can be helpful to you as a speaker, because it provides an amazing amount of feedback on your abilities. For example, if there was an amazingly bad speaker on before you that killed the mood, it tests your ability to get the crowd fired up and interested in your presentation. If you are unable to get them fired back up and you bomb, then you get feedback on what doesn’t work to get people back on track after a bad presentation.
You have to realize that 99.9% of the time, the audience doesn’t want you to fail. Sometimes there are just some things you cannot control, you are not having a good day, or something happens that causes you not to get connection with the audience, so you bomb. You can learn more from the failure, so you have to learn to accept the occasional bomb, make the changes to your presentation to prevent it in the future, and move on.
Moving on after You Bomb
The most important thing you can do after you bomb is to move on. Take the lessons that you learned from bombing and put the experience behind you. All speakers at some point have been in your shoes, have experienced the pain, and now it is time to pick up the pieces and get over it. The audience has gotten over the experience, now it is time for you to as well.
Learn from your mistakes, stop worrying about bombing and when you do, move on. You have many more speeches to give and you will make each one of them more memorable than the last.
These are definitely good points. Bombing is a form of failure, and as Henry Ford once said; failure is just the chance to start over in a better way.