What do you do when you’re in the middle of a presentation and the lights go out?

Do you stop? Do you sit down and wait for the lights to go back on? Or, do you keep going?

Answer: You keep going!

I was an orator in college and competed in intercollegiate speech competitions. Tournaments would usually take place over three days.

On this particular day, I was in the second half of a speaking tournament. This event involved two speakers - normally the events are for one speaker. Our speech was 10 minutes in Iength.

The etiquette was that the speaker would: 1) know all of the words to their speech 2) face the audience with a 3-ring binder in hand and 3) glance down at the binder and up at the audience as they moved through their talk.

We (my speech team partner and I) are in the front of a packed room of judges, spectators and fellow competitors. It’s about 4pm on a Saturday.

Entering the third minute of the speech, we hear a loud thud... and the next thing... ALL of the lights and A/C go out in the room and in the building!

We’re standing in front of the room and Dave, my speech partner whispers to me, “What do we do?”

It just so happens that our speech was funny and I figured that at least we could keep the audience laughing so I whispered to him...”Keep Going!”

We did.

We plowed through that speech, probably a bit more animated than normal because of the circumstances, still without any lights on in the room... and we kept going... and going.

As we’re approaching the 10th minute...guess what? The lights and electricity went back on!

We finished the speech. Everyone was laughing and smiling at our efforts. The audience started applauding, we got a few whistles, nods and several shouts of “good job.”

We wound up getting a 1-100 (first place with 100 points) in the round. By no means were we the best speech, but talk about gumption? We had tons of it.

So, this brings me to a point.

What do you do when you’re running a meeting, giving a speech or presentation and there’s a glitch?

Do you stop to fix the glitch, or do you keep going?

I say, keep going.

Preparation is key in any meeting or presentation. As long as you’re prepared, if there’s a glitch with the lights or the slides or with anything... take a pause, regroup and continue on.

Even if your words are not exactly what you had planned, your creativity, focus and tenacity will shine through. And, your audience will pull for you. Everyone wants to see you succeed so know that.

Stay steady, chart the course and with the lights on or off ...you will shine.