Defending yourself from ‘gotcha’ questions, and handling difficult audiences

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Answering questions during and after a speech is an important topic in public speaking. The July/August 2021 issue of Speaker magazine has an excellent article  by Kristin Arnold on pages 18 to 21 titled The ‘Gotcha’ Question. She identifies eight types: ambush, faulty premise, hypothetical, leading, left field (personal attack), loaded, negative, non (really a comment). Then she describes do’s and don’ts, which includes rephrasing questions. As shown above via a cartoon, you need some verbal judo for handling questions.

 

Toastmasters club meetings provide a supportive environment, and discourage disruptions. But at Level 4 in the Pathways program there is a project about Managing a Difficult Audience. It is required in the Presentation Mastery path, but is an optional elective in the other ten paths. For it you give the usual five-to-seven-minute speech followed by a question-and-answer period (for a total of ten-to-fifteen minutes) and try to manage disruptions in a role play. The project evaluation is about how you managed those disruptions rather than the speech itself. On June 9, 2021 I did a speech for this project titled You cannot believe everything you read in Toastmaster magazine. I based it on two of my blog posts: one from August 5 2020 titled When doing research, your attention span should be more than 10 seconds, and a second from August 14, 2020 titled Toastmaster magazine is spreading nonsense from John Bowe about how common the fear of public speaking is.

 

A post by Julie Kertesz at her Pathways Experience blog on December 15, 2018 titled Some Things Depend on Us & Managing Difficult Audiences briefly describes the five types of Disrupters you will encounter in a role play for this project. The project has detailed advice on handling them. I wrote and rehearsed my speech in a week, so I did not have time to memorize those details. What I did instead was to be nice but not back down. My previous experience as a professional engineer dealing with civil court trials and depositions gave me confidence for handling this project. Back on March 7, 2016 I blogged about Getting comfortable with testifying as a witness.