Confessions of a Public Speaker (7 page)

The worst situation, even worse than being in a bad room, is being
in a big, bad empty room.
Speaking in a huge, boring, rectangular, dimly lit room that
seats 1,000 people is challenging enough, but with only 100 attendees
present, these rooms feel like black holes. Even if you’re screaming,
dancing, and juggling knives, it may not be possible to generate enough
energy to fill the space. I once saw U2 play at the Meadowlands in New
Jersey, which holds 60,000 people. By the end of the show, people were
streaming out to beat the traffic, and no matter what Bono did on stage,
the stadium was dead. There were still 20,000 dancing people there, but it
seemed like the lamest 20,000 people I’d ever seen.

A related personal disaster took place when I spoke at Microsoft’s
Tech-Ed conference in Dallas in 1998. I drew the short straw: I had the
largest room of the entire massive hotel conference center complex. The
ceilings were so high, and the back wall was so distant from the stage,
that I actually asked the tech crew if it was a converted aircraft hangar.
It must have been used for something other than training events. There was
no reason for this room to have the scale it did, other than to torture
public speakers. The crew looked up at the ceiling when I asked, and were
sort of surprised there was a ceiling there at all. They never thought to
look up, as they spend most of their time just trying to fix all the stuff
that breaks down at ground level. I should have told them about how stars
hover in the night sky—it would have blown their minds.

The room was set
with chairs for over 2,000 people. When I heard this, my ego
lit up: 2,000 people? To see me? Wow. I must be super cool. But as the
countdown timer ticked away—20 minutes, 10 minutes, 5—
and I’d spent all that time staring out at a sea of empty
seats, I was mortified. I didn’t want to go on. I’d never seen so many
empty chairs all in one place. Where did they keep them? There must have
been a huge storeroom just for these chairs. How utterly pathetic for
someone to have spent an afternoon arranging them all, only for those
chairs to sit empty and unloved. And how depressing that I was the person
who had failed to fill them.

With a minute to go, a few people were seated here and there. A
handful more walked in from the back exit, like little ants entering my
zip code–
sized room (you always get a few at the last minute). It was
nice to see them, but they quickly disappeared into the cave-like darkness
between the aisles. With 20 seconds to go, I noticed one guy up front,
finally aware of the tumbleweeds drifting past him, grab his things and
scurry toward the door. So much for him. Five seconds. The house lights
came up and with them came a wave of heat over my face and arms. The few
pairs of eyes in the room were now all on me. It was time to start.

What could I do? Was there anything that could be done? My body
chose to panic. Having panicked before, I knew the only trick was to
start, as fear comes from what you imagine might happen instead of what
actually is happening, and the longer you wait, the worse it gets. The
only way to kill this evil feedback loop is to just do it, so I forced
myself to begin. And I sucked. For an hour I sucked—an endless hour of
misery, speaking into the Grand Canyon of rooms, with each and every word
traveling slowly across a sea of empty chairs. I heard every word twice,
once when I said it, and two seconds later when it echoed against the back
wall, unimpeded by the sound-absorbing powers of an actual crowd. When I
finished, I sulked my way to a dark corner of the hotel bar, hid behind a
row of beers, and hoped not to be seen.

The solution to this, and to many other tough room
problems, rests on the density theory of public speaking, a
theory I discovered one day after repeating the Dallas experience in some
other city, with some other embarrassingly
small crowd in a ridiculously large room. I realized that
the crowd size is irrelevant—what matters is having a
dense
crowd. If ever you face a sparsely populated
audience, do whatever you have to do to get them to move together. You
want to create a packed crowd located as close as possible to the front
of the room. This goes against most speakers’ instincts,
which push them to just go on with the show
and pretend not to notice it feels like they’re speaking at
the Greyhound bus station at 3 a.m. on Christmas morning.

Those few people in the audience know as well as you do that the
room is empty, and if you act like you don’t notice, they’ll know you’re
full of shit before you get five minutes into your talk. Audiences, even
tough crowds, genuinely want to help you, but no one in the audience can
do anything about bad energy. Only two people in the room have that
control: the host and the speaker. The host, a person who likely knows
little about public speaking (much less the density theory), and who
probably has 25 other event problems more important than your empty room,
is unlikely to be of use. Hell, he chose to put you in the room of certain
death to begin with. So all hope rests in the hands of whoever has the
microphone, and that’s you (see
Figure 4-4
).

Figure 4-4. A small crowd in a big room. Your energy can never effectively
reach everyone because it will be eaten by all the dead space.

Forty-five people in a 2,000-person room is not a crowd, it’s the
equivalent devastation of a neutron bomb. This means the first move is to
forget the 2,000 seats. Forget the empty rows and dead spaces. Imagine a
smaller room inside the big one that seats about 50 people
(see
Figure 4-5
). Make
the room your own by asking the attendees to gather into that more
intimate space. If you leave them scattered in the
wasteland
of empty seats, they will feel like lonely losers. They will
feel embarrassed for having chosen to come see you instead of any of a
thousand other nonembarrassing things they could have done with their
hour. If you pack them together, at least they’ll know they’re not the
only losers who decided to come hear you. They are now losers with loser
friends, which—all things considered—is much better than being a loser
without any friends at all. They are, in fact, your losers, so you should
treat them well.

Figure 4-5. A properly arranged small crowd in a big room. You can do good
work here despite the empty space.

The tricky part is getting people to move. We are a lazy species. I
know once I’m seated I’m not very interested in getting up just to sit
down again. But the fact is, all of us do what people in authority tell us
to do, especially in lecture halls. We have spent our lives listening to
people at the front of crowded rooms telling us to stand up, sit down,
sing songs, close our eyes, play “Simon Says,” repeat national anthems,
and a thousand other stupid things we’d never agree to do if we weren’t
being dictated to by someone with a microphone. It doesn’t matter where
you are or how scared the crowd suspects you might be, if you have the
mike
and explain the situation with a smile, when you ask them
nicely to stand up and move forward, they will. Make it a game. Offer a
prize to the person who gets up first. Ask the
audience members if they need more exercise today, and when
they all raise their hands (people who go to lectures and conferences
always crave exercise), tell them you have just the thing for them to do.
You might eat a few minutes of your time, but it’s worth it if you have a
long session. And whoever speaks to the same crowd after you will be
grateful.

The few that don’t oblige should be left in the back of the room
anyway. There’s no law stating that you must treat everyone in the
audience the same. Give preferential treatment to the people who respond
to your requests. By making them move, you’ve done a few other beneficial
things. They’ve now invested something in you, and you will have their
attention for at least the next two minutes. You spoke the truth about the
uncomfortable nature of the room, and people will respect your honesty and
willingness to take action to fix it. And for your sake, you’ve identified
the leaders and fans: they’re the ones who got up first. These are the
people most interested in you and what you have to say. If there are any
allies in the crowd—the people first to applaud or ask a question—you now
know who they are.

Most importantly, the density theory amplifies your energy. We’re
social creatures. If five people—or even dogs, raccoons, or other social
animals—get together, they start to behave in shared ways. They make
decisions together, they move together, and most importantly, they become
a kind of short-term community. With a tightly packed crowd, if I make one
person laugh, nod his head, or smile, the people directly adjacent will
notice and be slightly more prone to do it themselves. TV sitcoms have
laugh tracks for this reason: we respond to what the crowd around us is
doing. Even simply having the woman next to you listening with her full
attention changes the atmosphere for the better, versus sitting next to an
annoying dude checking his email who doesn’t look up once. The
size of the room or the crowd becomes irrelevant as long as
the people there are together in a tight pack, experiencing and sharing
the same thing at the same time.

There are many similar adjustments a speaker can make to a room.
Turn up the lights if it feels like you’re in a cave. Ask for a wireless
microphone or bring your own if you hate being tied to the lectern. If you
spot someone stuck behind a pole or standing in the back, offer him a seat
near the front that he might not have noticed was empty. Always travel
with a remote for your laptop so you can move to a better spot if the
lectern was placed in some stupid back corner of the stage. Ask the crowd
if they’re too cold or too warm, and then, on the mike, ask the organizers
to do something about it (even if they can’t, you look great by being the
only speaker to give a care about how the audience is feeling). There are
always little things you can do—that don’t require the construction of
your own private lecture theater—to improve how the room feels. When you
have the microphone, it’s your room—do whatever you’d like to enhance the
audience’s experience.

Failing to own your turf is the big mistake that can create a tough
crowd. If I show up five minutes before I start speaking, I have no idea
what the vibe is like. Every audience is different for a thousand reasons,
from what the traffic was like that morning to what sports team won or
lost the night before to what community politics are happening. If I just
show up right before my talk, I can’t sort out how much of it has to do
with me as opposed to general hatred for the world at large. Taking
responsibility for the crowd means showing up to the room early enough to
at least hear the previous speaker. Sometimes you’ll hear a joke or
comment in the previous talk that you can pick up on, or know to avoid,
given that it’s been used before. If the speaker was awesome but only got
cold stares from the crowd, you know something is up that’s larger than
you or the other speaker. But if he does well and gets great energy and
strong applause, yet you go down in flames, you know it’s not the
audience—it’s you.

Speaking in foreign countries makes this all too clear. You have no
idea what a tough crowd is until you’ve spoken in Sweden, Japan, or scores
of other countries where laughing, joking, and yelling out support during
a presentation are cultural taboos. And unless you speak the local
language, you’re being translated, which means the audience doesn’t know
what you said—or what the translator decided you said—until about 10
seconds after you’ve said it. When I spoke in Moscow, live translated just
like at the United Nations, the audience was awesome, but I didn’t know
why they were laughing until the translator explained it through my
earpiece. For long, horrible moments, I was afraid they were laughing at
or heckling me, rather than supporting what I’d said. After speaking
through live translation a few times, presenting to a rowdy crowd is a
breeze if they speak your native language.