Sometimes in preparation for a pivotal lecture, it is easy to be plagued by new distractions. These distractions come disguised as questions that have no good answers. Examples are “What if the literary agent attends the most difficult of my presentation? “or “What if no one chooses to attend the session?” “What if someone interrupts my presentation, consumed with violent disagreement?” “What if they laugh at me?” These types of tormenting questions can be gut wrenching and interminable. If you’re not careful, these Lilliputian concerns can tie you down.
Years ago, in a moment of frustration, I decided to put these questions to the test. Specifically, before a presentation, I would make note of these self-afflicting questions. After the presentation was complete, I would take a moment to review whether the warning came true. In no case did the event that was predicted by these admonitions come to pass! In every example, the issue raised by each of the “what if” questions utterly failed in its prediction.
Of course, unplanned events do occur during presentations. Slide projector bulbs can and do go out. Hard drive performances become erratic. Media storage devices are incompatible with each other. Operating systems still crash. These unfortunate events do occur.[1] However, the key observation is that the predicted events do not. Thus, as a practical matter, these early monitories are not really warnings at all; they are merely distractions from what actually will occur.
By placing your focus on a false prediction that is most commonly the product of anxiety, you can be caught unprepared by the occurrence of an unpredicted event. In the face of these observations, I decided that it would not be sufficient for me to ignore the “What ifs?” Instead, I have gained assurance that what they warn of what will not occur. Since they have always been false, they can be treated as a “reverse radar,” not pointing toward the direction of danger, but instead pointing away from it. Thus, a pre-presentation “thought alarm”, attempting to warn (or frighten) me about the danger of a question that would be put to me about whether I had read an obscure manuscript years ago can be treated as an alarm about a question that will not occur. I can therefore discount it, and return my focus to more pressing and helpful considerations.
[1] At the beginning of a presentation that I gave at a major corporation, I scanned the audience and identified my college advisor from thirty years before in attendance! While this was not bad, it certainly was an unanticipated surprise. I had no idea that he was no longer in academics.
