What if you walked in curious instead of careful?
Why we freeze in high-stakes rooms — and one simple practice for getting out of your own head.
Have you ever heard of the psychological phenomenon called the Spotlight Effect? Researchers Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky named it in the late 1990s after a deceptively simple experiment: they had participants wear an embarrassing t-shirt into a room full of people, then asked them to estimate how many people noticed. The participants consistently overestimated — by a lot.
The conclusion: we are often convinced we are standing in a spotlight, all eyes on us. But the truth is that most of us are just staring at ourselves in a funhouse mirror, a little bit horrified by what we see.
I don’t think it’s conscious, or even our fault. In fact, it seems to be baked into the human experience. But regardless, there is a very real cost to living inside a fake spotlight — presence.
Self-consciousness naturally shuts down our curiosity and our natural capacity for attunement. It can cost us our ability to actually read the room we’re standing in.
I see this constantly with the leaders I coach — and in myself. We are not struggling because we lack skill. We become disconnected because we are so busy monitoring ourselves — our posture, our pacing, our word choice — that we stop being genuinely interested in the people in front of us. And people can feel it.
Your thought experiment for the week:
