First published 24 October 2022 on Your Best Year Starts Here with Nigel Risner.
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I asked Nigel for the question he gets asked most about his work. First he said how he got started (we've covered that one in other episodes), then whether he gets nervous on stage.
He only gets nervous when he hasn't prepped properly, or when someone else is running his slides. That happened in South Africa. He's saying "next slide, please", nothing's moving, and he's stood there glad the audience can't read his mind. He's had worse with screens, mind. The power went off at Celtic Manor with around 400 people in the room, so he did a closed-eye exercise in the dark. Another time he leant on what he thought was a thick screen and went straight out the back of it. A friend of his has the perfect line for that moment, "I'll now take questions from the floor", and Nigel is very clear it's not his line.
Mine was an evening talk in the function room of a golf course, on a night with some big sporting thing on. I was already worried people would stay home and watch it. Halfway through, the screens behind me switched to the sport, because someone somewhere else in the building had picked up a remote. The host wanted to get my slides back. I just wanted it off. They turned it off, I finished without slides, and I reckon it went better for it.
Nigel once spoke to the police in a massive room on a very hot day with no screens at all, just his four animal hats, and the feedback was brilliant. He also told the story of how he started. He'd helped loads of people buy businesses, and what he really wanted was to help them run them.
That got me onto a bit of my own origin story I've always known was there but never talked about. I'm saving it for next week. Nigel's version of this in coaching is asking odd questions in a first session, banana or sausage, and the answer turns out to be part of why the client keeps doing the same thing. He reckons old diaries and notes show the same triggers coming round every three or six years. My challenge before the next episode was to look for the thing that keeps showing up in your life, and whether you're using it in a good way even if the experience itself wasn't.
What stayed with me
- Do the prep and most of the nerves go with it.
- Slides are there to back you up. If they die, carry on without them.
- Tell people they'll get the slides afterwards, so nobody's worrying about copying them down.
- Go back through old diaries and notes and look for what keeps coming round every few years.
- Ask what in your own story still decides how you show up today.
I think sometimes we have to trust ourselves that we know enough about our subject that really the slides is just a bonus.
Nigel Risner
They're not there to be a script. They're not there to be the focus. They're there to add to the thing that you deliver and that you do.
Neil Martin
