- 30 May 2025
- |Uncategorized
It was going to be very straightforward.
In April, I was honoured to be invited to be the after dinner speaker at the Cumbria Community Foundation’s 25th Anniversary Dinner (the foundation is a fantastic organisation that does endless work to support good causes in the county – please go and Google them).
It was a simple brief:
1. Tell a bit of my own story as an entrepreneur
2. Discuss how my work with Alertacall has taken me into the homes of hundreds of people living in social housing, giving me a firsthand insight into disadvantaged communities
3. Conclude, to the predominantly well-to-do audience, that if they wanted to ignite a fire in their bellies to support a worthy cause, then the best thing was to get out of their comfort zones and visit people and places that are very different to what they are used to
I had done over 500 public speaking events before. I knew my subject matter. I had even rehearsed what I was going to say plenty of times that week in front of friends and family.
How then did it transpire that I ended up leaving the stage frazzled, confused, sweating and feeling like a total failure?
This is a story about how and why public speaking can go so wrong, what you can do to avoid it and the deeper lessons failure can reveal about yourself.
Confidence can only take you so far
Ask those who know me what kind of person I am and it probably won’t be long until they mention the fact that I do like to talk.
Words are not something that is in short supply to me.
I love a chat and will go out of my way to engage people in conversation wherever I am, even if they are complete strangers. In fact, over the years I have made good friends and fascinating acquaintances through my willingness to strike up a conversation anywhere and with anyone. You never know where it will lead you.
As a founder, leader and ‘salesman’ (even if just selling a vision, dream or different version of the future) I am also battle-hardened to the experience of standing up and speaking in front of a crowd, even when the audience in question may not be particularly interested – or occasionally even outright hostile.
This has given me a pretty thick skin and, to be honest, I actively enjoy the challenge. Any self-consciousness or obsessing over what people will think has long been washed away in countless presentations, keynote speeches, sales pitches and team meetings.
So, surely this gig for the Cumbria Community Foundation would go without a hitch? It would be a warm crowd, generous people, philanthropists, well wined and dined, receptive and supportive.
Did I feel nervous about it? To be honest, no. In fact I was actually looking forward to it.
The carriages start to derail
Disasters usually seem to come out of the blue. A bump in the car. A sudden illness. Unexpected news.
However, although the final tipping point which creates a disaster may manifest in a single moment, often it is the result of a slow build up of compounding, seemingly minor or unconnected incidents, which coalesce to create a calamity.
Cause and effect, often beyond our comprehension or control – but always something we can learn from.
Typically, the initial slight derailments in what will turn into a full on train wreck pass with little impact at all.
In my case, the first of these came in the form of a very bad night’s sleep.
This in itself was linked to a wider context, which perhaps I should have considered more carefully before committing to the speaking engagement at all.
March and April are always very busy months at Alertacall as we sign new contracts and install equipment at the turn of the financial year.
The day before the event had been particularly intense (trying to get an important deal across the line), leading to the kind of disrupted night of churning things over and over in my head which will be familiar to anyone who runs their own business.
However, despite this I arrived at the venue a little tired, a little yawny, but otherwise in pretty decent shape.
The next two incidents were things which, ironically, were actually extremely nice surprises.
Firstly, I arrived to find that each table at the dinner was adorned with a leaflet telling a potted version of the life and times of – who else? – James Batchelor. Photo and all. This created a sense of heightened expectation.
This only increased when a superb young entrepreneur I had been mentoring as part of the foundation’s Positive Enterprise scheme addressed the dinner and identified me a significant influence in getting his fledgling enterprise off the ground, with some applause.
Both gestures, of course, were beautiful and very touching, but also added a slight frisson of pressure to live up to the hype. I have to confess, a tiny speckle of tension and discomfort appeared.
The train crash begins
Dinner and dessert came and went along with a healthy dollop of conversation and a generous side salad of bonhomie and I was in good spirits as 9pm – the hour of my address – approached.
Or did it?
As the meal came to an end the audience were directed to go and get their coffee from various beverage stations throughout the venue. The problem was that it soon became apparent there were far more people than there was coffee and long queues formed.
I was faced with an audience – or rather a ‘not audience’, many of whom were milling around and not at all focused on an after dinner speech while others sat around waiting increasingly impatiently. 9pm became 9.15pm, 9.15pm became 9.30pm and by the time enough people had returned to their seats it was approaching 10pm.
An easy crowd had become a slightly tired one. People who had expected to be home in bed with their cocoa were instead eyeing the prospect of an 11pm finish.
Expectant indulgence had given way to a terse politeness, which was itself dangerously close to being subsumed by outright impatience. I even had people approach me and ask ‘when are you going to start your speech James, we are waiting!’ – something which was fundamentally out of my control.
I suspect if the room could have addressed me in one voice the sentiment would have been:
“Make your speech good and make it quick!”
And if you know me, ‘good’ I can probably pull off – but ‘quick’ is not often my modus operandi, and that’s largely because I do like to see where the talk will go, and interact with the audience.
I like me talks to be passionate, real, from the heart – and also, to some degree spontaneous, feeding off what’s happening in the room.
Oh my goodness, it’s a full on disaster! (Or at least that’s how it felt)
The problem was that, just like the attendees, and because of the time – I was also now way ‘past my best’.
No matter how familiar one may be with an out-of-the-comfort zone activity – be it public speaking, am dram, skydiving, exams, whatever – your body will prepare you to perform at a particular time by giving you a adrenaline, and sometimes lots of it.
Even skydivers with thousands of jumps under their belt, and for whom it seems normal – get this adrenaline increase, and elevated heart rate.
Being pumped with adrenaline is quite exciting and a bit edgy, but it is also very handy. It’s our body’s way of getting us ‘in the zone’.
However, adrenaline is a finite substance and after a short-lived hit of wired, excited ultrafocus, we can then experience a crash.
This can be OK if the thing you were preparing for never happens or is postponed for long enough to renew your adrenal supplies. However, if it is only partially delayed – say from 9pm to nearly 10pm – you can find yourself taking the stage for a speaking engagement in the middle of a trough rather than at your peak.
Combine this with the fact that my natural body clock tends to enter sleep mode at around 9.30pm and things were becoming far less than plain sailing in the good ship James Batchelor. In fact, they were very rocky indeed; namely slightly exhausted, a little nauseous and just a bit wobbly.
Despite this I took to the stage and began in what I felt was pretty reasonable form.
Until …
Nothing.
I wish I could describe to you exactly what happened but I can’t because it only comes back in scattered black and white images.
A few minutes into my speech someone came up behind me and physically whacked me over the head. Or, at least, that’s what it felt like. There was a huge bang. My ears rang, my skull pounded. I couldn’t see my assailant because there wasn’t one. Nor was there an after dinner speech anymore.
Any words I had planned to say had completely escaped me. The ability to address a crowd suddenly seemed a strangely detached concept, like the existence of anaesthetised limb.
I rode out the silence by making a joke about being such a computer geek that occasionally I needed to shut down and reboot. I took a nervous sip of water.
The audience shifted awkwardly.
Somehow, I regained a loose, ragged thread of my tattered narrative, tried to rally and then … WHAM!
The guy with the sledgehammer was back again! Battering all the words out of my brain to flutter around me mockingly, meaninglessly, like cartoon birds after someone has been knocked out cold.
Now some people were looking genuinely concerned. Others were simply grimly fascinated, interested to see quite how dramatic this performance could become.
I got through a few more sentences. I really can’t remember what I said, but hopefully some of the points I was trying to make about the power of mentorship, and getting outside your comfort zone landed.
Then I stumbled back to my table to what felt like a concerned applause. Friends sitting around me tried to convince me it had been OK.
Nice. But wrong. It was terrible.
No matter how truly grateful I felt towards them for their kind words, I felt failure. I had been asked to do a job and I had let myself down with something that fell far short of my own standards. And ultimately, it is our own standards that really matter.
Making sense of it all
Now, I am dwelling slightly on the sense of failure, not in a bid for sympathy or out of self-pity, but because facing up to my own true feelings is a vital part of what comes next.
Failure is inevitable in life. In fact, it is essential to improve and grow as an individual and, probably – as much as it might hurt at the time – an ultimately very healthy experience.
However, all the potential benefits that failure brings are wasted if you do not face its roots with honesty and the openness to absorb the lessons on offer.
Let’s start with the simple stuff
Just as seemingly minor events can compound and gain momentum to become a complete cock-up, a few small, judicious actions can have the opposite effect.
Here are some straightforward actions I could have taken:
Use prompt cards
Hitherto, all of my public speaking has been delivered with some preparation but without prompt cards. Until the event in question all of them had gone well and a feedback loop had been established. I didn’t use prompt cards, the results were good, therefore I became more and more convinced they were unnecessary.
After my experience with the Community Foundation, I will never engage in a speaking event without them again. This is a shift for me after 30 years of public speaking.
No matter how confident you may feel, you never know what may happen. That guy with the sledgehammer may be just around the corner. A prompt card or two just might help you regain your thread after a blow to the head.
If you deliver a lifetime’s worth of speeches without ever looking at them then that’s fabulous. But what harm does it do to have a few just in case?
Consider the timing
Cumbria Community Foundation is an organisation which I and Alertacall have supported for a long time and it was an absolute honour to be invited to address such a milestone event. I love them and at some point I want to do even more to support them.
However, perhaps I should have thought more carefully about when it took place, namely during April – by far the busiest and most hectic month at Alertacall when we finalise new supply agreements and install our services across the UK.
In April my stress bucket is pretty full. In fact, it is already slopping slightly over the edges. The capacity to absorb more stress is limited.
Is this the best time to commit to an important speech? Just maybe not.
Having said that, if I had my time again would I still agree? Probably. But I would perhaps be more aware of the need to put back ups in place (hello, prompt cards) and even be more clear about the need for the event schedule to run as smoothly as possible so I could perform at my best.
Ultimately, it is up to each individual to think ahead and ask themselves whether the timing of a talking gig is going to help them achieve the best outcome (both for themselves, the audience and whoever has invited them to do it).
Yep, but what was the real problem?
All of the above are sensible, probably essential, steps to take when preparing for public speaking.
They are handy tips for avoiding things going wrong.
However, deeper lessons may come from how you feel after a failure.
The crazy thing about my experience is that I can say honestly that I am not really bothered by what other people think of me, or might have thought of my talk that night.
Of course, I did feel an element of embarrassment. I also felt remorse for the fact I had failed to deliver the best performance I could – for an organisation I feel so positively about.
But neither of these feelings equalled the mental self-flagellation I inflicted over falling short of my own exacting standards.
Yet, I also knew that the internal anguish was disproportionate to the impact of the failure, embarrassing and disappointing as it was.
Are you really as confident as you think?
Show me a room of founders and I will show you a room of people who have either or both of the following characteristics:
They want to fulfil a deficit that they see in the world or they are trying to fill a deficit they feel inside themselves.
In many cases, the external validation which comes from starting and running a successful business is required to make up for something which is missing within themselves.
I know this because I am speaking from personal experience and, over the years, I have done a lot of work to try and overcome my own need for this validation and to become more at ease with myself.
It’s also something I have discovered as a common theme – talking to dozens, maybe hundreds, of other founders and entrepreneurs over the years, and discussing what ultimately drives them.
Probably, the most important lesson from my failed speech is that maybe I am not as confident – not as ‘totally sorted out in that respect’ – as I thought after all.
Sure, I may be able to walk into a room and talk to a crowd. But if my own sense of self-worth and self-respect is so easily rattled when it doesn’t go well then what does that say about me?
The depth of the slump I experienced afterwards has shown me that maybe there is more yet to be done.
If you are someone who feels the impact of failure just as keenly then maybe you should consider seeking some guidance as well, and it’s certainly an opportunity for self-reflection.
The ideal for all of us is that we should not build our lives based around external validation, and you know what – I think I have the hang of that to some extent, but what of the internal validation?
Public speaking and performing – can sometimes be unpredictable, life always is. Things can and will go wrong. But …
We all owe it to ourselves to do what we can to build the resilience to maintain perspective, learn lessons and give ourselves a break when it does. Good luck.