Me: I’m heading to the office to teach class. Me 20 min later: Teaching class from my Sprinter because I got locked out of the office.
I tell my clients to rehearse the failure modes. This is exactly why.
Last night, I walked to my office, with plenty of time to get set up, settle into my space, and be on the class call 5 min early. But I found the office locked. No explanation. I now had 15 min to figure out a backup solution (my houseboat doesn’t have strong wifi… it’s a long story).
No problem. I jumped in my van, drove it somewhere with the strongest cell reception. Set up my desk, tethered my computer to my phone, blurred my background on Zoom, and was ready to teach class calmly.
That pivot didn’t happen because I was born unusually cool under pressure. It didn’t happen because I had written an exact plan of what to do if locked out of the office. It happened because I’ve practiced for moments that rhyme with this. I’ve rehearsed (and lived) failure modes.
Most speakers rehearse the best case. They run through their talk in a quiet room, with their slides working perfectly, at a comfortable pace, with no interruptions. They feel ready. And they are, but only for the version of the event that almost never happens.
Small technical and social failures are more common than any event producer wants to admit. A microphone that cuts out, a slide clicker that dies, a front-row attendee’s phone ringing while they fumble to find it. A locked office and 15 minutes to figure it out.
You’ve done nothing wrong, but you are officially thrown off your game.
Rehearsing the best case builds familiarity with your script. Rehearsing the failure modes builds resilience. You need both.
So what does rehearsing failure modes actually look like? We can’t rehearse for everything because there are infinite failure modes. But we can rehearse the stress and we can rehearse the common failure modes.
Here are some entry-level exercises to experiment with.
Play a random YouTube video on loud while you practice.
This sounds silly until you try it. Crowd noise, an interview, a cooking tutorial, it doesn’t matter. The point is to train your brain to stay on track when your environment is not cooperating. You will lose your place. You will get distracted. That’s the whole point. Find your way back. Do it enough times and finding your way back becomes automatic.
Rehearse without your slides.
Your slides are a crutch (I say this with love, because I have leaned on that crutch too). When the projector dies or the file won’t open, most speakers freeze because they have been navigating by their visuals. Know your talk well enough to give it in a dark room with nothing but your voice. The slides should support your story, not hold it together.
Rehearse without your speaker notes.
Same principle. If your notes disappear, can you still find your thread? Practice losing them on purpose. Start your talk, skip your notes entirely, and see where you land. You will discover which parts of your talk you own, and which parts you have been renting.
Practice picking up in the middle.
Most speakers rehearse from the top. Always from the top. So when something goes wrong at minute 6, they have no muscle memory for that moment. They want to start over. They can’t. Practice starting from random points in your talk. Have someone call out a section and jump straight into it. Get comfortable with the middle of your own story.
None of this is about being perfect. It’s about widening the range of conditions under which you can still do your job.
The goal of rehearsal isn’t to eliminate uncertainty. It’s to shrink the gap between what you expected and what’s actually happening. When that gap is small, you adapt quickly. When that gap is huge, you freeze.
When things go wrong on stage, something that happens physiologically. Adrenaline spikes. Your heart rate jumps. Your brain starts scanning for threats instead of ideas. This is just your nervous system doing its job. Just not the job you want it to do.
Rehearse under stress enough times and your nervous system starts to recognize the feeling. Not as danger. As a signal to act.
Calm under pressure isn’t a personality trait. It’s a trained response.
Last night, I taught a full class from a Sprinter van parked by the bay where the cell reception was decent. The class ran well.
Not because I’m unflappable. Because I had already met this type of stress before in life and in rehearsal.
You will get locked out of something. A room, a file, a plan. This isn’t a question of if but when it will happen. Will you have already practiced what comes next?