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Early in the movie, The Fugitive, Officer Gerard catches up with
Dr. Kimball near the outlet of a high dam.
Gerard had been chasing Kimball not as a suspect in a
crime (the murder of Kimball’s wife), but as fugitive from
justice. With
seemingly no where to go, and Gerard’s gun trained on him,
Kimball still hesitates to surrender.
Looking Gerard straight in the eye, Kimball shouts, “I didn’t kill
my wife!”
Gerard, staring back at his captured prey, replies, “I don’t
care!”
Sometimes as a presenter you have to learn to accept that as long as
you are performing by the rules, you can’t necessarily care
about how you are being received by every member of the
audience.
In other words, one thing that should never be a source of discomfort
for you is an audience member’s response to your engagement at
any one time.
When you complete your thought with a listener, and you pause and move
to find your next target, there will be times when your new your
target has his head down or is otherwise not returning your
engagement. Although once the audience realizes that you
are actually engaging them as individuals, it's not likely to
happen often, but when that does happen to you, it's an example
of how you have to learn how to not care.
Seriously. The last thing you ever want to do is when you shift
from one person to the next and the next one is not looking at
you, is to give in to the temptation to quickly find another
target. She may be asleep. He may be on his
Blackberry.
You have to learn to some extent to simply not care. Here's where
the win/win comes in, because the rest of the audience wins when
you don't care and you simply continue on as you were. You
certainly don't want to shift your vision, see something you
don't like, and then quickly revert to aerosol eyes to find
somebody else. You have to really learn that there are all
kinds of reasons for an audience member to not be engaged with
you at that moment, and most of those reasons having nothing to
do with you or the quality of job you’re doing.
The side of caution
The problem is that part of the anxiety speakers feel is based on their
ongoing assessment of what the audience is thinking about them.
The brain is always going to make a worst case assessment,
because it needs to err on the side of caution. It's going
to think the worst, and determine that there's a threat.
In the absence of any totally proactive - oh, yes, you're great, I love
you - response, your brain will tend to think all sorts of bad
things. Your brain is looking for threats all the time, so
that's what it finds.
When you turn to somebody and his head's down, or he’s asleep,
you’re likely to say to yourself, “Oh,
no, what am I doing? I must be boring.” The reality is that the person's
head is down because she was out at The Roadhouse until 5:00 in
the morning. You know, she came back late, had a shower,
crawled into work, and now she’s sitting in the dark and she
falls asleep. There are all kinds of reasons why somebody
might not be giving you totally positive feedback.
If you turn to your target, regardless of the response you get, you
need to learn to just stick with that same person for the rest
of your thought, and not be shifting around quickly, looking for
another target. The win for you in this situation is that
for that particular engagement, you’re using that person to
reduce your visual over-stimulation by taking no more action
than you would have if she were returning your contact.
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