Ghost Writer Exercise
When to use: Whenever you need to come across assertively and confidently while talking in group situations. The technique works in a group of up to 15 people.
Activity:
1. The next time you’re at a meeting, a social gathering or presenting to a group, imagine you have an invisible colleague working with you.
2. This person is sitting in the corner of the room watching your eye contact. The person has a chart with the name of everyone in the room listed on it. Your colleague’s job is simple: every time you look at someone while you’re speaking, he puts a tick against the person’s name to record your eye contact.
3. After the gathering, you sit down with your colleague to analyse the results. Ideally, they show that each person in the room has roughly the same number ticks against their name. In other words, they show that you gave each person an equal share of your eye contact while you were talking.
4. There are a number of benefits to this exercise:
You don’t forget to look at people.
You give each person an equal share of your attention.
You don’t stare at one person throughout (you may have been on the receiving end of this on occasions and wondered why the person speaking continually looked at you!)
You engage everyone in the group and send a clear message that you’re interested in them.
You look confident and in control.
Note – You can’t really use this technique for large groups of people. For larger audiences, try looking at them in small groups; segment the audience into pockets and pick one person out in each pocket as you’re speaking. This should help you to spread your focus across the whole audience so that no one feels left out.