You’re Not a Mind Reader

I grew up in a loving household full of people with opinions and perspectives and as a result I developed a gut reaction to speaking up because I always knew that whatever my opinion was it wasn’t quite right it wasn’t going to be part of the majority and I think my experience is very similar with many people’s experience of getting up in front of a room full of people and saying something and being concerned that what you are about to say isn’t going to land well with somebody in the room the thing is we can never know what people are thinking we can look at their faces and see if we can make some assessments we can plan as thoroughly in advance as we possibly can we can try to get into the minds of our audience but the bottom line is we can’t read their minds we can’t know 100% how we’re landing and we can’t know 100% in advance how we’re going to land so the best advice that I can give you is recognize that how they’re thinking about you isn’t as important as your intentions when you are presenting and your intentions need to be something that you can 100% control you can’t control how you’re going to land you can’t control how they’re going to respond to you but you can control how you are intending to show up for your audience what are you intending to do for them how are you intending to make a difference for them in this interaction if you can decide in advance that for example you are going in to provide some really valuable information that they are looking for then you can just show up and do that if you can show up with some ideas for how they can succeed in something that they’re working on especially if they have asked for your input then you can do that whenever you get in front of an audience ask yourself who are these folks what do they want what’s their definition of success out of a presentation that I’m delivering and then show up with an intention to provide that success then you can focus on being the person that provides what they’re looking for and you have complete control over that now there are going to be some presentation scenarios where you don’t know a lot about your audience but you can decide on who your target audience is so maybe it’s a big venue maybe there are a lot of people in the room and not everybody is going to be your target audience what you can do is design a message that is for the subset of the people in the room and you can just focus on that you are showing up to provide some value to some people that you are confident are in the room and for everybody else it’s not that you don’t care about them but the message isn’t necessarily for them so if they don’t respond to it the way that you intended maybe that’s the marker that your message wasn’t for them think about it like this and see how that affects how you feel as you get up in front of an audience and how you feel as you make your way towards that presentation think about it like this and see how that affects how you feel as you get up in front of an audience and how you feel as you make your way towards that presentation