Creative Safety Meeting Openings – Safety Speaker John Drebinger

Several years ago when I was the safety speaker at a corporate safety leaders’ meeting making my presentation, “A Safety Mindset For Effective Leaders.” I experienced the most unique introduction I had ever received. As is my custom, I had arrived early for the meeting and was sitting in the room listening to the presentations before mine. The group took a short break and I set my materials in the front of the room and returned to my seat.

After the break, the meetings leader made a few announcements and then said it was time for our safety motivational speaker. He said, “It turns out that several members in our audience know a lot about our speaker.” I quickly looked around for familiar faces and didn’t see any. He then called out and said, “Bob, what do you know about our guest?” Bob stood up and said that the grandfather of our guest is in the Baseball Hall of Fame as a sportswriter. Next, Jerry stood up and said that our guest has been involved in scouting for years and is an Eagle Scout. Someone else stood up and commented the speaker has two children and has been married for 35 years (that was five years ago). One more person told the group the guest had surfed in Southern California, enjoyed backpacking and had climbed Mt. Whitney at an elevation of 14,496 ft. in one day with his dad and a fellow scout.

All the while this is going on, I am wondering who these people were and how did they all know these details. It was terrific the leader had involved over eight people in the introduction project. They had a great time doing it and it was a real neat experience for me.

The way they did it was they took my bio from my website and typed the information on several 3” by 5” cards. They then gave the cards to people the day before so they could read them over and give the information out as if they just happened to know it.