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.