Can you remember what it's like to be at a live event? A concert? A sporting event? A conference?
I'm a small town boy raised in Africa - we read books at home, music wasn't a family thing. So I don't know much about music and I've only been to a few music events. I first went to Juluka in South Africa in my first year of university - that's where I first noticed the interaction between the musicians. Sometimes my family would go to the cinema or the drive in which were huge events compared to TV... but they hadn't prepared me for the magic of live events.
I watched the Rolling Stones in Germany (Keith Richards grinning behind a haze of tobacco smoke - tapping his head in the disparaging German way at Mick Jagger pogo-sticking himself around the stage) and last year I watched the soundtrack to my university days and my first attempts at adulthood: Fleetwood Mac live at Wembley stadium with an exultant Mick having as much fun as anyone in the audience. A client gave me front row tickets to Madonna in Hyde Park and I only went out of guilt - but wow - again, the energy.
Friends have taken me to other shows - Johnny F***ing Marr in Brixton, Morrissey at the O2 and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds in Edinburgh Castle - even if you don't like their music, watching them live makes it an experience.
Every live event jolted me by the atmosphere, the tribe, the power and the presence of these performers in real life. Anything else is secondary.
They were all off the scale. Amazing.
I was lucky to be John Shosky's guest at the Blues Alley Club in Georgetown to see Chris Thomas King. John is a serious speechwriter who understands and knows music. John had reserved us a front row table 2 metres from the musicians and I sat there mesmerised.
No conversation. One of my most "in the moment" experiences. Ever. I didn't speak to John or Denise. Taking pictures is banned - but photography never even occurred to me during the show. The riffing, the glances, the asides, the handovers, the one-off performance, the awareness that this won't-ever-be-played-quite-the-same, an almost religious experience... of course I bought his CD afterwards. Of course, I got it signed and posed for a picture. Worth it.
The same is true of stadiums hosting football, rugby, tennis. A friend says he's going to church when he watches his tribe play in their stadium. Online is a second choice.
The proof of the ROI of live events is proved by the increasingly expensive but still sold-out-within-minutes concert ticket prices which are often a fraction of what getting to and from an event costs. There isn't a Premier League football club in the UK which doesn't have waiting lists for season tickets because season tickets guarantee access to live events.
There have been a million articles written about how the conference call, the Zoom call is every bit as good as a live meeting. Which it is. Kind of. They're functional. They work. Sort of.
Meetings are a bit like presentations. They're not the same as pitches, and for me, there's a big difference between a pitch and presentation so there's a lot of things going for Zoom meetings.
The lack of commuting time, the efficiency, the staccato way you can get to the point.
I'd never really taken the time to think about it until this year, but I'm a part of the live events industry which is an incredible common purpose tribe. A small piece of a complex, beautiful, intense, frenetic, 100 mile an hour puzzle.
The unsung heroes of the events industry are event organisers - they usually wear jeans, T-shirts and trainers. Let me tell you about one event that I was involved in last year.
This event was held in a big shed with two large rooms. The events company had hired for event speaker coaching and while I was waiting for my CFO to arrive I watched them buzz around. They had moved in three days before the event and transformed this space into a massive event space with separate areas for food, drink, dance and, of course, the stage .
The orchestration of this type of event is immense.
They turned this shed visually, physically, audibly into a totally different space. With an atmosphere and an energy, populated not just with the speakers I coached, but also dance troops, musicians, ushers, camera operators, sound technicians, stage crew and a whole range of other busy trades - a thousand different levers choreographed by a tiny events team.
Events organisers can perform magic!
There's something quite incredible about the production side of these event teams. For them, nine to five doesn't exist. They get in there early and finish late, and only when the job's done. There's no face time - it's irrelevant. The productive output is everything. A CEO I have worked with for years was asked what COVID meant for business: "Presentee-ism is dead." For events teams it always was. You're either there for a reason and you're good at it - or you're not there.
I've been involved with a few of these. The biggest, with 190 odd speakers, was the United Nations, where I prepared the Sri Lankan Prime Minister for his speech to the General Assembly. A huge event made even more complicated because of the security issues and the politics of who needs to be close to whom and who doesn't want to be seen together.
Since 2014, I've been coaching speakers at TEDMED, the medical and scientific geeky arm of the famous TED Talks, which is a huge conference with around 850 attendees and the complexity and scale of preparing and coaching over 40 speakers.
Before the conference, the tiny single digit TEDMED team have curated, organised and choreographed the content, the delivery, the timing and all of the hundred other logistical, human and connected things to do with those speakers, before getting them on stage in front of nearly a thousand people and all-seeing cameras, live streaming the event to over a hundred countries. But on site - the production team produce the audio, visual and physical magic - the backdrops, the lighting, the famous red dot, the precisely placed informal lounge-like seating, the massive cameras, the microphones, the squadron of audio visual geeks watching blue screens in the wings....
Earlier this year and pre-COVID, I was booked to help the chief executive of a FTSE 20 company speak to three and a half thousand people live and thousands more virtually. 3500 people in the room - think about the logistics behind organising that!
But all this costs money - so why do companies pay for events organisers, for huge venues and then transport hundreds or thousands of people there who then need accommodation, food, refreshments and entertainment? Because live events work. And live events work better than any other medium. Because when they are done well, there is no need for anyone to ask delegates to put their phones away - because they are already engrossed in the moment, in the experience. Which is why, 20 years later, I can remember details of the Juluka conference and Keith Richard's smirk - without a handy photo to remind me.
Some things just aren't the same when they're online. Seriously... when did you last tell somebody about this fantastic Zoom conference that you had or this tremendous speech that you heard on Teams?
When was the last time you waxed lyrical about a conference call?
I spoke at three events this year - one was supposed to have 250 people present, and the other was supposed to have 300 people present. They were changed to online conferences, so I gave my two presentations via Zoom to a total of 2500 people.
The third was a eulogy delivered by Zoom but that's a different category.
So yes, it is cheaper and easier to get speakers for Zoom conferences, and you can reach significantly more people, but is the impact the same? All CEOs of global companies use a hybrid of live and online internal communications - but the live events and the "meet the boss" opportunities that live events present make these so powerful.
There are so many great things about live events that we're missing out on. It's sad that we're having a year without live sporting events, live business events, live conferences.
I'm an introvert. I'm not a fan of lots of people for a sustained length of time, but I still get a massive buzz out of a live event.
Three things strike me as a presentation, speaker and storytelling coach about live events.
It's all about Headspace
A long, long time ago, I was a tennis coach, and I was coached by Ian Barclay, who was John McEnroe's tennis coach when he won Wimbledon (he was his coach from when he was a kid all the way to Wimbledon) - and he said that when you're coaching a kid, it's 95% skill training and 5% head.
It's only when the skill of the person progresses, when you're reaching a Wimbledon sort of level, this ratio switches to 5% skills and 95% head.
It's the same for speakers at that level. These are not people giving their first speech. These are accomplished presenters.
Accomplished people in their field and giving a talk on a big live stage to a big live audience. Plus these days, of course, a televised audience.
I've worked for have been leading politicians, elite sportspeople, CEOs of global companies and the TEDMED stage has hosted leading academics plus the U.S. Surgeon General and the first female U.S. Army Surgeon General.
These are serious people giving serious talks to a critical audience, a critical and knowledgeable audience. But it's all about what happens in their heads. And all heads are different and different people need different things. Some of my clients say my blunt feedback is instantly useable, some need pushing in coaching and reassuring on the day, some need pushing right up to they go in stage, some need to be isolated from people and distractions before going live, some need a final rehearsal, some need a walk in the wind. One CEO's PA company simply said: - "He's calm when you're there."
Part of what I do is help people get into the right headspace because headspace is everything in live events.
Dealing with Nerves
The second, pretty obvious thing, is that these people are nervous. I don't mean scared.
Everybody who cares about their performance has nerves before a live event.
You don't do what these people do and get up on a stage in front of that many people if you don't care about what you're speaking about - these people have skin in the game.
It's tough and it's hard. For some, part of their career could be based on the success of this talk, but also the importance of what they're speaking about is integral to their motivation. And although many of them are incredibly accomplished, it's simply that important to them. Choking on stage is a real fear.
Delivery is Everything
The third thing is that there's nowhere to hide at those events, which is partly why people often need help harnessing and repurposing their nerves.
It doesn't matter if your rehearsal went well. It doesn't matter if you spent months preparing. Unless you deliver on the day with the impact to achieve the purpose - it doesn't matter how hard you tried or whether you gave it your best shot. Kindergarten is closed.
Do you want to be talked about? To be remembered?
Do you want to change behaviour? To trigger action?
Do you want to make people feel. To create a tribe?
Invest in live events and a professional events team.
If you've got a live event coming up, and you want to 'knock it out of the park', call me. Maybe I can help you get what you want, with words.