Most People Are Not Watching You as Closely as You Think

The imagined audience becomes very large

Greg Hohn uses Kitty Wants a Corner in Putting Improv to Work to explore self consciousness and the spotlight effect. On print pages 12 to 17, participants discover that the person in the middle feels watched while everyone else is mainly concentrating on their own attempt to exchange places.

That contrast is familiar at work. Before speaking, I may imagine that every person is assessing my phrasing. In reality, some are thinking about the deadline, their next contribution or whether the meeting will finish on time.

This does not mean nobody cares. It means the internal audience is often harsher and more attentive than the real one.

The room may notice your contribution. It is unlikely to analyse every imperfect second as closely as you do.

Small social risk is still real

Embarrassment is not solved by telling people that an exercise is safe. The feeling can be real even when the physical risk is low. A good facilitator acknowledges that and gives people choice.

The aim is to increase comfort with manageable uncertainty, not to make someone the joke. The exercise works because everyone cycles through the same situation and the group quickly sees that being briefly visible is survivable.

For mixed language groups, I would explain the strange sentence in advance and make sure the humour belongs to the shared situation, not to someone’s accent or hesitation.

Trying to control everything makes movement harder

Hohn also observes that the person in the middle may try to block every path. That effort can make the outside players more cautious and keep the person trapped for longer.

I recognise the same dynamic in facilitation and leadership. When I try to control every response, I make other people less willing to move. When I create enough space and trust the group, useful openings appear.

This does not mean abandoning structure. It means holding the purpose and the boundary while allowing other people to contribute to how the next moment happens.

Bring the insight back to meetings

After the exercise, I ask participants to identify one workplace moment where imagined judgement makes them smaller. It may be raising a risk, asking a basic question, disagreeing with a senior person or offering an idea before it is complete.

Then we reduce the risk to one next action. Speak within the first ten minutes. Ask one clarifying question. Name one uncertainty without apologising for it.

Confidence does not have to arrive first. A small action can create evidence that the room is less dangerous than the internal story suggested.