ABC News Budget Cuts and The Rise of Citizen Journalists TJ Walker comments of recent news from ABC.
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Nothing sends chills up the spine of a presenter more than the prospect of giving a presentation and then being asked a question that he or she can’t answer. Ugh! The humiliation! The shame! I’ll have to resign my position, leave the industry, move to North Korea and become a subsistence farmer!
Hold on. Don’t jump off the cliff just yet. Anytime I give a presentation to a large audience, I’ll often ask, who hear can personally remember a time in the last month where you or someone you saw give a presentation failed to answer a question correctly and it was horribly embarrassing and everyone knew it. Sure enough, at least 10 percent of the hands go up. So yes, this is a legitimate concern. But then I’ll ask the same audience another question: “How many of you remember in the last month seeing someone give a presentation and it was so boring you didn’t remember a thing the presenter said 5 minutes after the speech was over?”
This time, 10 percent of the hands don’t go up in the air. Now, 100% of the hands in the room go up. So if we are going to worry about potential problems we might as well play the odds and worry about having an interesting presentation in the first place, not the relatively small odds that we can answer a question smoothly.
When asked a question you don’t know the answer to, consider the following guidelines:
Act completely poised, calm and confident at all times. (Even when you’re not).
Act genuinely happy to receive the question (especially when you’re not).
If the question is one that is easily obtainable, say sales figures last quarter broken out by product line for South America, say “Sally, I will have Jaime send you those sales figures within one hour from now.” Stop. Smile. Don’t act embarrassed. And act like this is the most obvious and rational way for information like this to be shared. Don’t act like you feel incredibly stupid for not knowing the answer now.
Want more tips from TJ Walker & Jess Todtfeld on answering questions?
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