When we’re trying to read a room, how do we decide whether we’re about to get a standing ovation or the hook? It’s about how we read the emotional expressions on the faces we see in the crowd. The way in which we look at the people in front of us, including where we direct our gaze as we scan the room, determines whether we believe the crowd is with us or against us. In situations like these, many of us find ourselves seeking encouragement from others looking back at us. We’re hoping for praise, or at least reassurance, to get us through the dry mouth and anxiety. And this is exactly when knowing how to frame the shot might keep us from dying in front of the crowd.
Chris Anderson was born in a remote village in Pakistan to missionary parents. He studied philosophy at Oxford, started a world news service in the Seychelles islands, and was an editor at two of the UK’s early computer magazines. But these are likely not the things we know Anderson for. Instead, we know Anderson because he started TED.
TED is a nonprofit organization dedicated to finding “ideas worth spreading.” Each year, TED holds a conference replete with luminaries from technology, entertainment, design, the arts, and the sciences. Speakers have a maximum of eighteen minutes to share their most innovative and engaging contributions to society, and the topics are wildly varied, from the science of orgasm to education reform. Many have taken Anderson up on his offer to present, and the resulting infotainment has made TED Talks viewed well over a billion times.
To create the 2013 TED event, Anderson and the TED selection team tried something they never had before. They traveled the globe, visiting six continents and listening to the most unique stories every city they stopped in had to offer. In a piece for the Harvard Business Review, Anderson reflected on that scouting expedition.
After listening to about three hundred stories, they found one that was particularly incredible. While in Kenya, Anderson met Richard Turere, a Maasai boy who also happened to be Kenya’s youngest patent holder. Since the age of six, he’d had the responsibility of protecting his family’s animals from nighttime lion attacks in their village, Kitengela, on the edge of the Nairobi National Park. The lions were cunning, and they weren’t deterred by the tactics that members of Turere’s tribe had taught Turere. The livestock continued to be killed—sometimes as many as nine cows a week—and sometimes the lions were, too.
Through trial and error, Turere learned that the lions kept their distance if he walked through the fields holding a torch. However, the fields were big and Turere was still quite small. To scale up his solution, he took apart his parents’ radios to teach himself the basics of electronics and engineering. He pieced together solar panels, a car battery, and a motorcycle’s turn signals to create a blinking light display. The visual illusion of movement in the fields at night stopped the lions from attacking. Villages across Kenya took his idea and started installing “Richard’s lion lights.”
Anderson thought this idea was worth sharing, so he invited Turere to tell his story at the TED2013 conference as one of the youngest speakers ever to take the main stage. Turere was thirteen years old by then, and his English was not very good. He’d be delivering his talk not where he lived in Kenya but in Long Beach, California, so he’d have to muster up the bravery to get on a plane for the first time. In practice sessions, his sentences came out in a jumbled, stilted manner, and with a live audience of 1,400 people it was likely to be no better.
The TED staff worked with Turere to help him frame his story and practice his delivery.
If you watch Turere’s talk, you can see that he was nervous, but he charmed the audience nonetheless (they gave him an instant standing ovation at the end). So, what was it that Anderson and the TED staff advised to help Turere deal with his nerves? Find five or six friendly-looking people in different parts of the audience, and look them in the eye as you speak.
The work of a group of researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Jonathan Shasteen, helps explain why the TED advice is so sound. The researchers used sophisticated technology that tracked the movements of people’s eyes without them knowing it as they scanned a crowd of faces. Sensors embedded within a computer monitor’s frame recorded where people directed their gaze. The researchers found that the way we scan a crowd can be partly responsible for our thinking that it is against us, and thus for the fear we have when we stand in front of others. As we scan faces, our eyes naturally land on angry faces faster than on happy ones. If left to our own devices, we gravitate toward signs of hostility and miss signs of inspiration. So, Anderson’s advice to frame up the face of a friend or six in the crowd is like a counteractive agent, helping us to align our overall impression of the group with what might actually be the truth.
Other research suggests that this strategy may be something that comes more naturally with age. Elderly people are more inclined than younger ones to regard their social environment in the way the TED staff taught Turere to before his TED debut. For older adults, this pattern of eye gaze contributes to their feeling a greater sense of emotional satisfaction. But even among people for whom it does not come as second nature, practicing framing up happiness when reading the crowd can bring about benefits. Children who make this style of looking a habit reap the benefits well into their adult years. Clinicians found that kids as young as age seven who experienced social anxiety but learned to look for smiles rather than frowns showed less severe symptoms weeks later. In fact, half of them no longer met the criteria for a diagnosis of anxiety—as compared to the baseline group, in which 92 percent of children still held the diagnosis. In a similar vein, college students who practiced directing their attention toward the smiling faces in a crowd during the week they were studying for their final exams reported feeling less stressed about how they would perform on the upcoming tests.
The same is true for salespeople. In one study, telemarketers practiced framing up friendly faces when scanning a crowd, and subsequently their phone sales—not in-person sales—skyrocketed, increasing by almost 70 percent. Before they practiced framing up the smiling faces in a crowd, telemarketers would, on average, have to contact thirteen people to make one sale. But after practicing, they made a sale after every seven contacts. How is that possible? Well, the researchers found that repeatedly practicing framing up the happy faces rather than the angry ones lowered the salespeople’s cortisol, the neuroendocrine marker for how much stress people’s bodies are registering. Practicing framing up the friendly faces instilled a calm confidence that contributed directly to their bottom line.
Framing Up Failures and Thinking About Them Differently
Research suggests that frames that help us see the world accurately work best when we believe there is a chance to learn and grow. Carol Dweck is a psychologist at Stanford University who studies motivation and achievement. She has found that the mindset people adopt as they are working toward their goals reliably predicts who is likely to succeed and who is likely to fail in the long run. According to fifty years of her own work, people who approach new experiences with a belief that valuable skills can be learned through effort and investment find inspiration in knowing where they really stand, even if that news might seem disappointing to some. These individuals hold what she calls a “growth mindset.” They see novel experiences as opportunities for improvement, which nurtures a healthy passion to learn. Finding out what you don’t know is just as important as—if not more important than—showing people what you do know. In this way, failures don’t define a person, but are instead part of a normal process of development.