Breaking Rule #4: Imagine the audience in their underwear
This is just ridiculous. Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin with this. Ludicrous.
Is the point to dehumanize our audience so we feel superior? To humiliate them? To infantilize them? Make them less threatening?
Why do we think of the audience as an adversary to begin with?
And how indeed do we hope to force ourselves to see something that isn’t even there? Should we ignore the dressed audience? Look away or over their heads? Squint? Sheesh.
What a waste of everyone’s time to focus energy on what isn’t there when we could be falling in love with our audience, including our audience, giving a gift to our audience, engaging, embracing, dancing, playing with our audience.
If we are scared, as most of us are, of speaking in public, there are many, many wonderful skills and techniques we can use to help us enjoy our time in the limelight. The basics are: