Even a great speaker will never capture all the audience all of the time. Fully agree that telling them not to listen is by far the biggest mistake a speaker can make ... poor fella sound like his business endures in spite of his leadership rather than because of it.

This post reminded me also of one you made a month or so back where you used the illustration of a motel operator who used his "15 minutes of fame" in an interview to tell the world how many room-invasion burglaries his motel had suffered ... talk about a turn off.

A week or so ago one of our nearby mountain resort towns was threatened by a forest fire. The smoke and firefighting activity forced the police to close the two roads in and out of town. Next day the firefighters had a handle on the blaze, roads were re-opened and a TV crew spent the afternoon in town. The owner of a local coffee shop got her "15 minutes of fame", complete with views of her shop, close-ups of her signage and an intro by the cities most popular news anchor, enjoying his afternoon in the sunshine doing hands-on interviews. (in other words publicity she couldn't have bought for several thousand dollars). Did the coffee shop owner talk about how wonderful the firefighters were and how she was going to offer free coffee to all out of town visitors driving out the next day, or some kind of positive spin about how everything was back to normal.

Nope, she took the opportunity to retell how horrible it had all been and how troublesome it had been that the roads were closed and a few other totally negative turn off statements about the remoteness of the town and how scary it was to drive out there. If she stays in business, it will be in spite of her attitude, not because of it.