I have another blog, www.revealedpresence.com, which features my exploration of photography. My intention for this blog is to share an image of revealed presence each day. Some days the image will come from something I’ve discovered that day, and on other days I will draw from my photographic archives.
I have discovered that whatever I deliberately focused my camera on – which could be the most mundane object – seems to acquire a quality of presence in the photographic image. I have begun to call this “revealed” presence – the ordinary becoming extraordinary simply by revealing it through my camera lens.
In my public speaking presence coaching work this has led to a new understanding that presence isn’t just something we “have”, but also something we “give”, by turning our attention from ourselves and focusing instead on our audience. We “reveal” their presence by attending to them, letting them know they are important to us, and they in turn ascribe presence to us.
November 30, 2009 at 10:26 am
Hey, cool post. My son and I were discussing this the other day, and he had some weird ideas! lol Are you going to extend this? I would love to learn more
November 30, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Thanks for your comments! I’m curious about your conversation with your son. What were his weird ideas?
So often when we are preparing to speak, it’s all about us. We focus on what we’re going to say, how well we’re going to do, how can we impress our audience. And, because we can begin to anticipate how we could easily mess up by just being human, this sets us up for high anxiety and fear.
If, instead, we change the direction of our focus, so that we make the needs of the people in our audience the center of our attention rather than how well we perform and begin to attend to how we can be of service to them, we actually bring them into the “conversation” energetically and so give them presence.
Audiences easily sense that this is happening and become much more engaged with the speaker. When this happens, there is a shared collective presence that begins to emerge that’s beyond either us as speakers or any single individual in the audience.