 like they want to show their players tape and try to improve their performance right but they sort of turned it around in this in this training session for coaches and they taped the coaches so that they could see what they were doing that their players were then responding to and I just love that idea even if you can't tape yourself but thinking as if I was going to tape myself what ways am I impacting the situation what's up everybody and welcome to the show today we drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends what's interesting and confounding about it is we've all been in a situation where we've tripped or stumbled we feel flush and we feel like the world is watching us and we're so embarrassed and that like pang of embarrassment is on us but when we're going about our daily lives we don't feel that anyone is watching us so why in those moments of actual embarrassment do we feel this panic that everyone is watching us but then in our normal day-to-day we don't necessarily feel that way yeah this is another sort of fascinating pair of effects and in the end when you take them together it's such an optimistic story so the first that you're referring to where we just really think everyone's paying attention to the things that we're most embarrassed about was done by my colleague Tom Gillovich and he did has something called the spotlight effect and it's basically the idea that when we're you know having a bad hair day or when we're acutely self-conscious about what we're wearing maybe we're like trying a new style or something we think everybody's looking at us and he's actually tested this out using things like clothing he had people wear a Barry Manilow concert t-shirt you know now people are like well what's wrong with that that'd be like hip and cool and retro but back then they pre-tested it and it was really embarrassing and he asked people how many people in this room do you think noticed what you were wearing and then he asked the actual people in a room how many of you actually noticed what was on this other participant's t-shirt and people tended to overestimate the number of people who were paying attention to their embarrassing t-shirt right so the conclusion was that when we're sort of super self-conscious about something we feel like we're in the spotlight everyone's looking at that but the interesting thing that Erica Boothby's research adds in the invisibility cloak is that more often we're not acutely self-conscious right more often we're just going about our daily lives you know we're wearing our ordinary clothes we're taking our route to work and in those cases people are paying attention to you more than you might realize and in that way you can have this impact people are noticing whether you're wearing a mask when you walk into the supermarket you know people are noticing that shirt that you've had forever but they think it's really cute now they want to go and find it you know so there are all these ways in which we are impacting people in our ordinary lives but not usually not as much when we're super self-conscious about something I think there's also something to say about the level to which you're being seen as processed by other people I certainly I love people watching I live on practically on the strip of Vegas I walk the strip many times a week for fun to observe to watch people but yet there's not going to be very many people who stuck out in my mind if I had to come home and start writing who I've seen unless I'm making that mental note to process those sites yeah that's I mean that's probably true the interesting thing is that if you are one of those people and you're walking down the street right there's a whole bunch of people who are noticing you it's not just you you may not notice everybody or remember everybody but as you're sort of walking down the strip you're probably like ah you know I'm just blending into the crowd no one's really paying attention to me another place you know that I think is really relevant to another sort of context is for example in an audience or even in a meeting where someone's giving a presentation you kind of have that audience dynamic and you have the speaker or the entertainer dynamic and when you're in the audience and you're kind of looking up at someone on the stage or maybe they have a microphone or maybe they have their PowerPoint presentation you know it feels like they're the ones with all the power and influence in that room when in fact you know for any of us who have been in that position whether it's just standing up and presenting in a meeting you are acutely aware of everybody else in the room right so the audience feels invisible but you are a two you're sort of tuning in to every little facial expression and that person who's nodding along and so in fact that also means that the audience has this impact that we kind of shape the things we say to get them to nod a little bit more you know comedians will shape their bits to like get them to laugh a little bit more and so there's also this element of your people are paying more attention to you when you're in the audience as well than we tend to think and I think with zoom now we've actually been able to peer behind that looking glass more than ever before so speaking on stage definitely can see the audience but a lot of times they're dimmed and they feel like they can get away with eating or being on their phone or making a little bit of noise but now we're all looking at a video screen and we're starting to see ourselves get caught in zoom meetings of like oh I shouldn't be eating oh it's distracting now we're ever more aware as an audience member but we're not always thinking about how we're shaping the delivery of what's being shared and I know for Johnny and I and teaching our programs over the last 10 years we would call it our laboratory because there was so much audience interaction that shaped how we delivered the message we're looking for those light bulb moments as we deliver these concepts to know that our students our clients are actually getting something out of the program because no speaker wants to be on stage talking to a deadpan audience and and feel like they have no impact whatsoever we drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends yeah I love that and in the end so many of us who don't think that we're comedians are basically like comedians shaping our material right you're like you know comedians like throw out the bits and Seinfeld has these jokes about like you know I don't decide what's funny you guys are the ones who decide what's funny it's the same for you guys right it's like we don't decide what works you guys just tell us what works basically as we test it out yeah I love that it's been fun to see comedians in in big cities like Comedy Cellar in New York you can see these comedians testing out their material and a lot of it doesn't make it on the Netflix special that everyone watches because the audience doesn't react the audience doesn't give them what they're looking for that moment and that's what's so important to realize that even sitting in an audience passively listening we're shaping the message right before us yeah now when it comes to now understanding that there are all these times that we underestimate our influence what can we do practically to start to recognize our influence and overcome these limiting beliefs that we have about ourselves yeah so there are a few things and they kind of come from the place of why we underestimate our influence in a lot of these cases so one reason is that basically you know because we're human we're looking at the world through our own two eyes and that means that we see everything that's happening around us we see the people who are doing things that impact us we see the people who are doing things that are impacting one another but the big missing piece when we look out at the world is ourselves we don't see the things we're doing the facial expressions we're making that people are reacting to you know potentially the space we're taking up in a particular scene and so that's one reason we don't really see the way we are shaping the way other people are interacting with us and the impact that we have and so one sort of practical thing is to find ways to get out of your own head and try to sort of visualize a scene as a third party observer and so you can do that in a number of ways you can imagine like okay what if this was on a tv show and i was looking at it on a screen and i was one of the characters you know what if i was recounting this to a friend or a friend was watching this and giving me feedback i was talking to this person who works with coaches and i love us because coaches are so into tape like they want to show their players tape and try to improve their performance right but they sort of turned it around in this in this training session for coaches and they taped the coaches so that they could see what they were doing that their players were then responding to and i just love that idea even if you can't tape yourself but thinking as if i was going to tape myself what ways am i impacting the situation so that's one thing we're shaking our head because that's exactly what we've been doing with our clients so in in training and teaching small talk and conversation skills many of us don't realize how we are fully perceived the body language signals that we're sending and how it can change the tone of the conversation and we just finished a boot camp in las vegas this weekend and our clients had to go through the video work exercise and when you first go through it it's a little nerve-wracking because now you're like oh i'm going to see all the things that i'm doing wrong in actuality when we play the video back they see all the things that they were doing right in ways that they were having great body language and impacting the conversation a meaningful way seeing the other person light up and react to those gestures to smile the eye contact all the signals that we clue in on and what's fun is once you have a better representation of who you are and how you show up in the world a lot of that worry that concern that anxiety wanes and you can actually just focus on being in the moment present becoming a better listener yeah i i just love that so much and you know it also kind of works with this idea i like to get across which is that we have an idea of what influence is it's like standing up on the pulpit and making this grand speech and like trying to really convince someone of something but influences all these little things like the facial expressions you make the little offhand comments you know a laugh or a smile and the way that you interact with people in these very subtle informal ways those also impact people sometimes even more than those moments when you're really trying to influence them and so actually showing people video like that to show like look at all these little things you're doing that are impacting people i just i love that what's interesting about that is for those people there's there's a lot of folks who are uncomfortable with being in the spotlight so therefore they're going to try to do whatever they can to to keep from the spotlight being turned on them so maybe make themselves smaller by their body their their tonality gets quieter they're trying not to be seen but that has the direct opposite effect because because that is influencing that room and another direction is pushing people away rather than attracting people and for us it's to get our our clients and our listeners to understand that just because you're not the loudest person in the room doesn't mean that you're not affecting how others are thinking and feeling in those moments