In my previous post I wrote about what it takes for a professional speaker to improve their optimism. You probably won’t like what you read, but it works.

Here’s a time when “life” happened to me and it threatened my optimistic look on life.

Truth be told, I don’t consider myself an optimist. I know Murphy’s Law. But I am not a pessimist either.

I am a realist who enjoys the challenges (sometimes!) that come my way regardless of my best efforts to avoid them.

I was presenting to a group in Manila not long ago. The organizers were great folk and had asked for copies of our presentations. And I obliged. Except for the part where I fiddled with my presentation up to the point of going on stage and did NOT sent the updated versions to the organizers.

The venue had a helper-bee standing by for any problems that might creep up. In my case she was a little college kid wanting to make use of her English ability in a volunteer capacity.

The only reason I knew she was there was because I asked her to bring me a bottle of water.

About a third of the way into my presentation my PC died. Black screen. Whoa!

I looked at her for literally a split second, long enough to say, “Can you bring up my copy I sent you?”

And I kept on talking, painting word pictures instead of pointing to points on the screen.

Seriously – less than 4 minutes later, she had the backup computer plugged in to the projector and my reserve slide presentation displaying. Out dated by a few revisions but plenty useful.

And I went on as if nothing had happened.

I don’t wish this experience on anyone, but the more this kind of thing happens and you get through it, the less fearful you are of future such events giving you, maybe even making you more optimistic.

Things do work out. But usually if you work them out.

In the feedback from the attendees somebody wrote: “How wonderful it was that the technical difficulties did not stop the presenter. Impressive.”