The process that leads you to speak like the best speakers in the world, speakers who possess the Skills, is this: you find a target in your audience and close your eyes. You give a whole thought to that person, and then you do the hardest part, you pause. He pauses before turning to the next person and speaks to the next person with his next thought.
Here’s a tip to get the whole process started right: whenever you get up to speak, before you get up from your chair to go to the front of the room, know which person you are going to start talking to. Get them to choose that person before they arrive. Otherwise, you’ll start off on the wrong foot – you’ll start looking for those “friendly faces.” Choose the person to whom you are going to deliver your opening line ahead of time and start your talk by looking at that person and letting them flow.
Let’s be clear: one thing you definitely don’t want to do is search and talk to just a few “friendly faces.” That might be advice that works well for the few faces, but what about all the other less friendly mugs? How do you suppose they feel when they realize that you are involving other people but not them? Do you think it could make them think of more than your message? Do you want some people to buy what you’re saying, or the whole group? Remember that your job is to look at everyone in the audience. Everyone in the room should leave the feeling that you took the time to personally involve them as individuals.
If you’ve attended someone’s speech or presentation with The Skills, you’ve no doubt noticed that they did. In fact, have you ever been to a big event with maybe hundreds of people and felt that throughout the program the speaker kept coming to you? That for some reason the speaker chose you personally for a special announcement, and repeatedly? This is perhaps the most powerful advantage you will have with The Skills, but it is also the easiest to acquire, because it happens on its own! A great advantage of The Skills is that they are infinitely scalable. I mean, the bigger the crowd, the better they’ll work for you, but you don’t work harder. You adopt exactly the same behaviors with twelve people as with twelve hundred!
Parallax Universe
The reason is this: thanks to the way our eyes are constructed, from distances as short as ten feet, a phenomenon known as parallax occurs, and for the same reason that we see train tracks converge in the distance, our eyes come to the other. The person’s eyes converge on ours even when they may be pointing from a few feet away. Speakers with The Skills always look directly at one person at a time. But from a short distance, and with increasing distance, the people sitting around the person the speaker is looking at believe that the speaker is looking directly at them. So let’s say, fifteen feet away, the four people around the person you are seeing will feel the benefits of being involved as individuals. From ten meters, twelve people around your target will swear you have caught their attention! Your circle of influence is getting bigger and bigger, but you are just doing exactly what you would do in a small conference room. I bleed directly at them, and inevitably we get at least one response of “Yes, but how did you know?”
Rock stars know how to create and maintain fans, and this skill is a great tool in your box. You focus all your attention on that person and nothing else. At the moment, your entire universe is made up of the one person to whom you are directing your only thought. And when you do that, for those three to nine seconds or so, your brain doesn’t have to recalculate threats all the time, trying to get you going. Everything fades away.
Advantage
Like when you work from a nice clean desk, or when you are only assigned one task, and that’s all you have to do, talking to only one person at a time creates a strong and pleasant point. focus. All your attention can be devoted only to this moment, so that nothing else of what is happening affects your brain. Focusing on a person creates an environment that helps you focus on a thought – the thought that you are transmitting to that person.
You can also control your pace. When you learn to pause, when you learn to say what you have to say and then stop talking for a moment, move on to the next person and only then do you start talking to them, does it help to create a smooth rhythm that the audience can follow. , and also one that doesn’t get you dirty.
One of the problems people have when they get up to talk is that with adrenaline in their veins, their metabolism is high. Consequently, your perception of time slows down. Therefore, he tends to speak much faster when in front of a group, when our juices are flowing high. And unfortunately, with his cognitive ability somewhat diminished, it is not impossible for his mouth to invade his brain. You know, you can get the words out so fast that your brain can’t replenish the tail fast enough. And so you end up finding yourself with nothing to say.
When you find yourself with nothing to say, it can be an anxiety-producing situation. Start firing up the whole fear juice thing again. The more you get excited, the longer it slows down. That’s one of the reasons most people don’t stop. In your slow motion state, you feel that your pauses are much longer than the length of the pauses your audience hears. But when you’ve been talking over and over and over and over and over and over and then all of a sudden you stop, the pause becomes very, shall we say, embarrassing. By working pauses in your speech from the beginning, you can set a pace that seems natural to the audience and will actually mask any time you can’t think of what to say.