In The Spotlight

At the first taping of the new Marc Wootton Project at the BBC on Friday, he introduced some inspired new comedy characters, including a gloriously ghastly American called Candy, who makes Jackie Stallone look positively normal. My favourite, though, was the marvellously insipid Peter, who’s so convinced he’s becoming a vampire that he keeps a video blog of his supposed transformation and attaches wheelies to his trainers to perfect his Dracula-like glide. Watching him attempt suicide by garlic was a moment of comedic genius.

That brings me neatly to the subject of this week’s I Am Fab – just getting the outfit right isn’t enough. Despite Peter’s purchase of the requisite cape and bowtie – and his conviction that his hair is receding into a widow’s peak – looking like a vampire doesn’t necessarily make him one. The outfit definitely helps, but if you don’t have the skills or the inner confidence, you’re not going to convince anyone else, however appropriately-dressed you might be.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for confidence is the fear of how we’re being perceived or judged by other people. The reason that public speaking is the number one phobia for most of us is that it taps directly into this fear of exposing ourselves and being humiliated by the harsh judgements of others. Yet that fear is based on the largely false assumption that people are paying attention to us and would actually remember our faux pas.

Research from Cornell University would beg to differ. A few years ago they did a trial where a student would enter a room wearing an ‘embarrassing’ T-shirt – featuring Barry Manilow, a face unlikely to improve your street cred – and was asked to estimate how many people had noticed the shirt. The self-conscious Manilow shirt-wearers assumed a figure of about half the room, but the actual number who’d paid attention to the sartorial shocker was under a quarter. In later experiments, the same researchers found that people’s fears lead them to exaggerate the number of people who had actually noticed them by up to six times. This wild exaggeration of external perception is known as the ‘Spotlight Effect’.

Tom Gilovitch, one of the Cornell psychologists who identified the Spotlight Effect, has found the same misperceptions in a number of situations, including group discussions, where people routinely overestimated the impact of their gaffes or clever comments. He notes, “The fact is that others do not notice us as much as we think they do.”

The benefit to us in terms of confidence is that the truth will set you free – if you know that hardly anyone’s watching, you don’t need to be so self-conscious. It’s liberating to know that you’re not being closely observed and that the perceptions others have of you are probably nowhere near as harsh as you’re assumed them to be. In fact, not only are most people not judging you, they’re probably not even paying attention at all.

Gilovitch put this to the test in another study with students who were asked to make a three-minute speech with five minutes to prepare. One group was given vague reassurance that it would all be OK and the other was given research findings noting that speakers “feel that their nervousness is transparent, but in reality their feelings are not so apparent to observers. If you become nervous, you’ll probably be the only one to know”. Unsurprisingly, the second group was significantly more lucid and less nervous, as rated by outside judges.

So now you know that hardly anyone is paying attention to your nervousness, self-consciousness or faux pas, what could you be doing that you’ve put off out of fear? Is there something you’ve always wished you could do, but were afraid of making a fool of yourself? Can you be a bit bolder in the way you express yourself? Where can you challenge yourself to speak up? What’s the wild idea lurking in your secret heart? This week, rest in the comfort of knowing that there’s absolutely no point in being nervous or inhibited about taking a stand or being yourself – the odds are no-one’s watching anyway.

Remember this rule from in Roger Rosenblatt’s Book of Ageing:

"Rule #2 - Nobody is thinking about you.

Yes, I know, you are certain that your friends are becoming your enemies; that your grocer, garbageman, clergyman, sister-in-law, and your dog are all of the opinion that you have put on weight, that you have lost your touch, that you have lost your mind; furthermore, you are convinced that everyone spends two-thirds of every day commenting on your disintegration, denigrating your work, plotting your assassination. I promise you: Nobody is thinking about you. They are thinking about themselves—just like you."

Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column by using the link in the Favourite Sites section on the right or by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. To contact me, email coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk.All material © 2007 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 20 Aug 07)