The "Invisible Wall" of Public Speaking
Speak with, not at, the audience. Also, the reason why no one is listening to you is because you don't want them to.
I.
When I was in undergrad, I had professors that were very hard to pay attention to. I would attend their lectures with the sincere intention to listen & learn. But invariably, I couldn’t keep listening to their boring trainwreck of a talk, and I would go do something else on my phone or laptop.
Then there were a rare few professors that were very hard not to pay attention to. I would attend their lectures mostly just to show my face, intending to get some pressing work done on my laptop for another course. But invariably, I would find myself unable to keep my attention away from his lecture, and whatever I tried to work on instead becomes a lost cause.
To me this demonstrated just how stark the difference is between bad and great speaking. Some speakers reject your attention no matter how much you want to give it, and others grab it no matter how much you want to keep it. So, I thought about it: what is it about speaking that can make or break your audience’s willingness to listen? My answer is on two dimensions: audience interactivity, and speaker confidence.
II.
Let’s consider public speaking (one-to-many) vs. conversation (one-to-one).
Whereas it’s natural for just about anybody to keep the attention of the other in a conversation, only few are able to make their public speaking “conversational”. Most speakers, even relatively good ones, are stuck with an “invisible wall” between them and the audience. The ability for a speaker to knock this wall down is the difference between the audience feeling spoken at, and spoken to.
In a conversation with someone, you wouldn’t imagine casually removing your phone from your pocket and ignoring them with your instagram feed. Well OK, maybe you’ve imagined it, but I’m sure you rarely actually do it. But why not? You can certainly say it’s against social norms and etiquettes. A more concrete point is that you need to continue the conversation after they stop speaking. So, obviously, you need to have paid attention to what they said in order to actually respond, otherwise you’ll be exposed as not having listened.
In public speaking on the other hand, there’s no default expectation for the audience members as individuals to respond to you. Even if you try to make things interactive by asking questions, the responsibility to answer those questions is diffused over the whole audience — someone else can just answer it. Making your lecture really interactive is challenging. One way to cheat is by “cold-calling” — that’s when you choose an audience member that hasn’t volunteered to answer your question. Even though you can’t cold-call everyone, it will put everyone on their toes, forcing them to pay attention lest they be exposed.
But I do consider this cheating; sure, it can create the desired effect, but in a very unnatural sort of way. It’s a “push” when we should be going for “pulls”. You want to charm the audience, not tyrannize them. So if we want to create magic in the lecture hall, we have to get more creative.1
In essence, you want to create an atmosphere where the audience wants to engage with you. Kindergarten teachers do this by awarding gold stars, but you have to be a bit more subtle with grown ups. Here are some ways I’ve seen this done:
Play on the audience’s need for validation (e.g. by giving attaboys). One method I’ve seen used to great effect is to simply ask an audience member for their name as a way to praise their answer.
For that matter, knowing names is very important. How can you have an intimate conversation with someone if you don’t know their name? Learn a few audience names and use them throughout your talk, in examples and such. Even engage with them in direct one-on-one conversation that benefits the lecture — this is like firing a cannon at that invisible wall. It also creates a wonderful FOMO in the rest of the audience, enticing them to participate so they can join the conversation.
Be someone the audience likes (easier said, I know). If they like you, they’ll want you to like them, and the way to do that is to engage with your talk.
III.
But audience interactivity is only one dimension. And it’s not even a necessary one; after all, this attention-disparity we started off by talking about applies equally to pre-recorded lectures, speeches, khutbas, etc., none of which are interactive.
Here’s my basic thesis: attention is a two-way street. If you give your audience your full attention, it will be hard for them not to give theirs. What does that look like? First and foremost, eye contact. Even though that’s the most cliche speaking advice, it’s criminally underrated. Eye contact doesn’t mean looking at your audience, or even at their faces. It means looking right into their eyes. And don’t give your audience dead eyes, they’ll give you dead eyes back. Give them a look of wonder, of passion, an intense look. And you’ll get those things back. Mirror this advice for your tone of voice, your body language, your volume, your emotions, etc. Give your audience all of you and you’ll get all of them.
Now that doesn’t sound too hard; after all, most of us can do this in a conversation. But it is hard. My amateur-psych opinion for why: you’re subconsciously shooting yourself in the foot, as a defense mechanism against epic failure.
Public speaking, no matter the variety, is ultimately a performance. Gail Godwin said teaching is 1/4 preparation and 3/4 theater. It’s a highly public act of demonstrating your value to people, and that can interact with our egos in strange ways (I wrote about this before here).
And here’s the key point: if your performance is going to suck, you don’t want people paying attention to it. When I say that some speakers reject the attention their listeners offer, I mean that literally. They (subconsciously) don’t want you to listen, because they’re not sufficiently satisfied with their anticipated level of performance. And so they (subconsciously and ironically) thwart their own talk, boring their audience into forgetting their not-good-enough product minutes after it’s over.
It’s not that crazy of an idea. After all, there are probably talks you’ve recorded that you wouldn’t post online or share with others. Because it’s not good enough, you don’t want eyes and ears on it. Is it so much of a reach that you would do the same thing during the talk itself? Discourage your very listeners from giving their attention to what you’re saying? This is why the wise lady said 1/4 preparation; so you’re sufficiently confident in your talk that you want the audience’s attention, and so you won’t sabotage yourself.
It seems a bit cynical to say that we do this to ourselves. That we build our own “invisible walls”. But this idea that we thwart ourselves to maintain our own self-image is an old one in psychology, and goes back to a 1978 study by Steven Berglas and Edward Jones. Scott Alexander comments:
They asked subjects to solve certain problems. The control group received simple problems, the experimental group impossible problems. The researchers then told all subjects they'd solved the problems successfully, leaving the controls confident in their own abilities and the experimental group privately aware they'd just made a very lucky guess.
Then they offered the subjects a choice of two drugs to test. One drug supposedly enhanced performance, the other supposedly handicapped it.Males in the lucky guesser group chose the performance-inhibiting drug significantly more than those in the control group1.
The researchers conjectured that the lucky guessers felt good about acing the first test. They anticipated failing the second whether they chose the helpful or the harmful drug. So they chose the harmful drug as an excuse: "Oh, I would have passed the test, only the drug was making me stupid." As the study points out, this is a win-win situation: if they fail, the drug excuses their failure, and if they succeed it's doubly impressive that they passed even with a handicap.
I believe that a lot of those things we do that serve to jettison away the audience’s attention — lack of eye contact, using filler words, trailing off the ends our sentences, not speaking loudly enough for people to hear us, and so on — can be explained by this fascinating psychology. Sure, the results of the psychologists aren’t much better than flipping a coin. But this is what I feel like is true, OK?
IV.
In summary, you get over the invisible wall of public speaking by engaging your audience to make it a conversation, and preventing yourself from self-imploding your own talk by getting over yourself. Allow your inspiration to fully shine through you, with full confidence that it will land in the audience’s hearts, and not blow up in your face. In the end, this isn’t something I can teach you. You just have to go out and do it enough times that you start to see the wall. Then you can begin to demolish it.
This isn’t to say cold-calling doesn’t have its use-cases; rather, it should not be relied on to motivate interaction. It can however work wonders to liven a dead room, or gain the respect of the audience by demonstrating boldness.