Conscious Awareness . . . the Broadband Connection
The quality and effectiveness of your communication in front of an audience is directly related to your level of conscious awareness. As you expand your conscious awareness, both you and the audience will notice a tremendous improvement in your ability to make an effective presentation.
This chapter explores four concepts of consciousness: defining it, expanding your understanding of time, conditioning of the mind, and maintaining a broadband connection or presence in front of the audience. I’ll warn you that I am a psychology kind of guy and I love hearing insights from others and then doing research on those insights in my own reality. Understanding why the mind creates time is a major insight into being able to have a broadband connection to the now. This explanation of time is psychological and if this stuff doesn’t excite you when we get to the section on time, just press the fast forward key and move on.
First, consciousness can be defined very simply: the state of being awake and aware of one’s surroundings. In comparing what is possible to the level of consciousness that IT professionals actually demonstrate, you could say they are in a state of quasi-sleep in front of the audience. I know this is hard to believe because it sure looks like they are present in front of the room, but this is not the case. You could say their physical bodies are present, but their conscious connection to their bodies and thus to present time is very limited. For example, one of the most effective presentation skills is the ability to stop speaking in front of the audience. And yet, it is rare to find an IT professional who has enough conscious control to create a pause in front of the audience. I often tease my students by saying, “The issue is not your speaking; the issue is that you just can’t shut up.”
One can describe consciousness by imagining the body as a vessel that can be filled up with water. The more water you place in the vessel, the more conscious you are of the body. The more conscious you are of your body, the more control you have. The more control you have, the more effective will be your communication that comes from your body.
IT professionals usually begin their public speaking with a very low level of conscious awareness and a very limited sense of presence in the space of a room. But why? First, because they haven’t reached consciousness and second, because most IT professionals focus all their attention on content and are not very conscious, if at all, of the space from which the content flows. I call being focused only on content as being in Data Land and not having a present-time connection to the audience.
Data Land is the database of knowledge you bring with you to the front of the room. This includes both the data exterior to yourself, such as the PowerPoint slides, and the data interior to yourself that you learn through education and experiences.
It often appears that the IT presenters’ goal is to take data from Data Land and dump it into the space of the room. The more data they can dump, the better. Recently, a VP of sales in Boston commented, “It seems like these system engineers are paid by the word.” In Dubai, another VP of sales described it like this: “These technical folks like to nuke the audience with their data.”
In my experience, IT presenters, at first, always dump large quantities of data into the space rather than focusing on the quality of the delivery. I believe the goal of presenting should be measured not by the quantity of data but rather by the effectiveness and clarity of the data transmitted.
A useful definition of communication is transmitting data from the sender (source router) to the receiver (destination router) with the intention that the receiver understands the data. Using this definition, it is easy to understand why presentations where communication is not taking place are so ineffective.
I know I’ve already said this, but it bears repeating: To be a successful communicator, you need to be present and connected to the audience. What do I mean by connected? Most IT professionals are familiar with the acronym OSI, which stands for Open Systems Interconnection, a seven-layer model describing how a packet of data gets transported from one point on the network to another point on the network. Layer 1 of the OSI model is the physical layer, for example, the agreed-upon standard of how the network device will be plugged into the wall or the cabling used. In presentations, the presenter should have a conscious physical connection to the space before transmitting the data. One physical connection would be the awareness of your feet on the floor and another could be locking eyes with a person in the audience. By consciously being aware of your feet and eyes, you are physically connected to the space.
However, when you watch IT professionals deliver their presentations, you can see that they have not achieved even a Layer 1 connection to the audience. They are focused on the data rather than on consciously maintaining a Layer 1 connection to the space. Consequently, they are not present, which leads to ineffectiveness and a waste of valuable corporate resources.
It is not financially prudent for corporations who are concerned about ROI (Return on Investment) to spend millions of dollars in developing corporate presentations and then have people who are disconnected from the physical space delivering those messages.
In order for effective communication to take place, presenters need to be physically anchored in present time. They cannot be inside their heads in Data Land. They need to have a conscious, present-time connection to the audience. I call this state of awareness the broadband connection to the audience.
The more conscious presenters are, the better the quality of their communication will be. The difficulty here is that presenters usually think they are conscious when in fact they are not. Almost all presenters are initially in various states of unconsciousness, which could be equated to having a 56k dial-up connection to the audience. The ability to download data to the audience through a 56k pipe is extremely limited compared to a broadband connection. Your throughput is curtailed, so your effectiveness is reduced. For members of the audience, once they have experienced a broadband presenter who is fully present, a 56k presenter is an embarrassment.
The question we need to address is How do you become more conscious in front of the audience?
This completes the first concept; now let’s move to the second concept of consciousness, which is time.
Why is an understanding of time important? Because the effect of your speaking, the ability to manifest your intention and deliver your communication clearly across the space, increases when you are in present time.
Psychologically, human beings are conditioned to divide time into three parts: the past, the present, and the future. If it were possible to go through the day and label every thought that comes into your mind as either from the past, the future, or the present, what do you think you would discover? Eckhart Tolle asserts that the vast majority of your thoughts would be either from the past or from the future. Almost none of your thoughts arise out of being in present time. And yet, most people believe that when they are awake they are, by definition, in present time.
If you wonder about the accuracy of this assertion, do your own research. From time to time during the day, note your thoughts and ask yourself these questions: Where am I? Am I thinking about the future, the past, or the present? You will discover for the most part that you are not in present time. You are inside your head, thinking thoughts from the past or about the future.
If this is true, you are living but not being present to life.
The only time there is is present time, which in Zen circles is referred to as being in the now. The past and the future are psychological delusions fabricated by the mind.
Your goal as the presenter should be to develop your awareness so that you are able to deliver your communications consistently while maintaining a Layer 1 connection, which anchors you in present time.
This is very achievable. Right now, for example, stop reading this book and think of a sentence you want to communicate. Any sentence will do. Once you have that sentence in mind, lock your attention on a point in the space around you. Once you have locked on to that point, deliver the sentence while holding eye contact with that point. You only get to talk if you are holding eye contact with the point. At first, this may feel odd, but with practice it becomes comfortable and it is essential to maintaining a present-time connection to the space. When you give yourself a conscious command to lock onto a point before you talk, your communication comes out of a consciousness space and supports you being in present time.
As you develop your ability to be in present time, you discover that this moment of now is all there is. And, in this present moment of now, you have the opportunity to create a five-star communication experience for the audience. You will be able to wow the audience because they have seldom seen a high-quality, present-time performance. In this moment of now, there is no future and there is no past; all there is is the intention to create a communication that will have value and impact on the listening of the audience.
As you begin to explore being more in the now, you’ll discover that each moment contains a wonderful sense of love, joy, happiness, and mystery. Many of your worries and anxieties will diminish. Why? Because these are future-based mind creations and don’t exist in present time. Anxiety is being in your future thoughts and predicting that something terrible is going to happen. But, right now, in present time, nothing terrible is happening.
As shocking as it may sound, in order to be in present time and have a broadband connection to the now, you have to free yourself of the psychological grip the past and the future have on you.
The past and the future are psychological concepts; they don’t exist in the real world. They are created by a mind whose sole purpose is survival and the survival of anything it considers itself to be. For example, people often consider themselves to be their beliefs and will argue and want to defend these beliefs. They want their beliefs to survive.
I don’t want to imply that past and future are bad things because they do serve a useful purpose in managing your life situation. For example, telling a friend, “Let’s meet next week for lunch” is future-based and a very practical use of time. However, the psychological distinction that I am talking about is unconsciously resisting being present in this moment of now because surrendering to this moment is perceived a threat to the survival of your mind. Therefore, it contributes to your inability to maintain a conscious, present-time connection to the audience in front of you.
For me, these benefits are clearly in evidence because I have had the privilege to work with thousands of IT professionals over the last twenty-five years, staying present in front of audiences and not getting distracted by the data. What is so wonderful is that once you have experienced being in present time, you are transformed from an unconscious data dumper into an instrument capable of clearly projecting its energy into the space of the room. You now have woken up from Data Land, able to recognize things that were always present but that you have never been able to see before.
One of my favorite movies is The Matrix. The first time I saw it was when I was doing a training program in Singapore. I sat through the show and I said to myself, “This movie is fantastic.” I don’t know why. I just knew the movie was pointing to a profound truth in life. One of the scenes that I enjoyed the most was when Morpheus offered Neo the choice of taking the red pill or the blue pill. If Neo took the red pill, he would learn the truth about what the Matrix really was; if he took the blue pill he would wake up the next day remembering nothing of his meeting with Morpheus and just go back to his normal life.
Mastering the ability to stay in present time while delivering your communication to the audience is like taking the red pill. It opens up a world you have never experienced before.
Now, let’s delve deeper into our understanding of some of the issues that pull us away from present time.
One of the first things that pulls you away is that you live in a conditioned conceptual reality, which includes a psychological concept called the past.
Why does the mind create a past? According to Tolle, the past gives us our identity. It provides an understanding of who we consider ourselves to be. It gives us the knowledge of who we think we are. It gives us our life story. It gives us meaning. And we hold on to all these things because without them, what would we be?
Without a past, we would be nothing. No content. No database of knowledge. No database of thoughts. No database of beliefs. No religion. No nationality. No name. Just the empty space. Initially, this space may sound like a very bad place to be, but actually it could be viewed in a positive way.
For example, when you begin to detach from your need to know, you will by default move into the space of not knowing. In the space of not knowing, you are able to observe the things that occur in your life without automatically labeling and judging them.
You will no longer contaminate your understanding of the events that occur in your field of now because you are no longer filtering those events through your belief structures from the past. For example, for thousands of years, people thought the sun went around the earth. Now, if you came from not knowing, you would be open to the possibility that there may be other interpretations of the events that occur in your field of now. So, when Galileo agreed with Copernicus and said the earth goes around the sun, you wouldn’t disregard this assertion just because it didn’t agree with your conceptual conditioning. You would be open to the possibility that the earth goes around the sun rather than the sun going around the earth.
When you are able to put not knowing into practice, you have begun to disentangle the grip that the past has on your mind. You have shifted from content consciousness to space consciousness. You now live in present time and have a broadband connection to the moment of now. You have achieved a state of psychological freedom.
Being in the space of psychological freedom is where you want to be when presenting in front of an audience. You no longer get trapped or plugged in by what people say. You no longer take what people say to you personally. The need to resist disappears and your ability to flow and respond appropriately increases.
However, it is very difficult for the mind to let go of knowing because its purpose is survival. Therefore, renouncing one’s identity, letting go of all the things you consider yourself to be and letting go of your database of knowledge, would be viewed by the mind as a threat to its survival. The mind keeps a very firm grip on the things it considers itself to be.
To let go of knowing is like allowing a part of you to die. The mind does not want to die. And yet, it is through this very process of detachment that a new part of you is born, a new space of freedom is discovered, and a new ability to be present to life is acquired.
To the extent you consider yourself to be your database of knowledge and experiences, you live trapped in a prison of your mind, alone, isolated and separate from life. For most people, this state of awareness feels normal.
Unfortunately, in our limited understanding, we have misidentified who we are. Who we are is not an accumulated database of knowledge and experience. Who we are is the space that contains that accumulated database of knowledge.
Albert Einstein points to this idea in this quotation:
A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Now, let’s look at the mind-created concept called the future. The mind creates a future because it has been infected with a virus called more. This virus tells the mind that something in the future will make life more fulfilling than it is now. You operate your life as if salvation is not in the now but rather something you will receive in the future.
Unfortunately, this future is psychological in nature and doesn’t really exist. It is just a concept you have been conditioned to believe in. The only time that actually exists is now. As long as you hold to the belief of a future, your moments of joy and satisfaction will be fleeting.
The more virus sucks the life out of your present moment. You cannot embrace and feel complete in the present moment because the more virus says you must have more.
In Aldous Huxley’s novel Island, the people were content until a catalog order book appeared on the shore one day and they saw all the things they didn’t have. They were infected with the more virus and became discontented.
You too may see all the things you don’t have in this moment of now and be unhappy.
A lot of advertising plays into this more virus by showing you things you don’t have and then trying to convince you that pleasure and satisfaction will be yours when you buy these things. Advertisers are the modern-day drug peddlers of unhappiness while pretending to support you in having a better life.
The media messages you are exposed to imply that your life is empty and if you want to be fulfilled, all you have to do is buy this car, believe this religion, pull the one-armed bandit, win the lottery, drink this beer, visit this place, wear this perfume, take this pill, wear these clothes, etc. Only by doing these things can satisfaction be yours.
I suspect there are billions of people who believe this.
But I also know that the possibility of joy, pleasure, and satisfaction exist and have always existed, right now. You don’t need to drink a certain beer or drive a certain car to be truly happy and fulfilled in your life.
Train yourself through conscious awareness to let go of the future and surrender to this moment of now.
That’s easy to say, so why is this surrender such a challenge?
Through our conditioning, we have acquired images and beliefs of the way we want our life to be. And, as we look at our life, the forms we see and the thoughts we have don’t match the pictures inside our head and we feel dissatisfied. And, if we did happen to experience a moment of satisfaction, it soon melts away and the desire for more arises again.
Take some time to consider whether you resist saying yes to this moment of now because it doesn’t have all the things you want in it. It is missing things. Why is it missing things? Because you are infected with the more virus and something has convinced you that your life will be better when you have these missing things.
Examples of missing things could include good looks, a meaningful relationship, money, education, hair, a leaner body, a vacation house, health, children, a true purpose in life, peace in the world, a healthy environment, and less traffic.
So, as people look into their personal field of now, they are unable to accept this moment of now as being absolutely perfect because this moment is missing so many things. They believe that only when they have these missing things will they be happy.
In order to be cured of the more virus, they need to give up the psychological concept called the future. Well, how does one do that?
There is nothing in the future that will make this moment of now any better, although your mind tells you the opposite.
I work on the premise that the form this moment of now takes is the best it is ever going to get. And, if I am not satisfied with this moment of now, I notice that there is something that is not the way I want it to be. Then I quickly remember these words: “It is not going to get any better than it is right now. This is the best it can be.” Then I surrender and go with the flow.
I remember an incident in Raleigh, North Carolina, when I was returning my Avis rental car at the airport. As I drove up, I saw the shuttle bus waiting; I was a preferred customer, so I expected them to wait while I checked in. The clerk checking me in was a little slower than usual and I ended up running to the shuttle bus. But just as I got there, the bus pulled away. I waved so the driver would see me in the rearview mirror, but it didn’t make any difference; the bus just kept going. Needless to say, I had some not too nice thoughts about Avis going through my head. Then I noticed that I was resisting this moment of now, laughed, and just let the whole thing go. Thirty seconds later, the Avis person who cleans returned cars approached me with my case of DVD movies and the Bose headphones that I wear on the airplane—and which I had left behind in the car. Those things represented about $500 worth of products. I then realized that missing the bus was a good thing even though I had resisted it at the time. Had I made it to the bus, my DVDs and headphones might have been lost to me. Experiences like this reinforce my belief in living my life by saying yes to whatever form this moment of now takes.
Live your life as if you chose whatever event is occurring now. You chose the flat tire, you chose the relationship, you chose the traffic, you chose the environment, you chose your looks, you chose your weight, you chose your disease, you chose the Avis bus leaving you, and you chose whatever happens in the very next moment.
In this state of consciousness, you will notice that the future has less and less of an influence on you. To be fully present with the audience, the past and future have to disappear. When this happens, you are automatically absorbed into the present moment of now.
One of the important books in my life has been The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment by Thaddeus Golas. I read it back in the ’60s and his wisdom still rings true today. Here is a quote about loving exactly where you are:
LOVE YOURSELF
Whatever you are doing, love yourself for doing it. Whatever you are thinking, love yourself for thinking it. If you are not sure how it feels to be loving, love yourself for not being sure of how it feels. There is nothing on earth more important than the love that conscious beings feel toward each other, whether or not it is ever expressed. There is no point in worry or wonder about worse or better spiritual conditions, although that game is available. You will not be able to rise above your present vibration level to stay until you love the way you are now.
Once you can say yes to this moment of now, you will live in a state of happiness because happiness is a function of accepting what is. Another way of saying it comes from Werner Erhard, one of the greatest New Age teachers of our times, who said, “You don’t get to vote on the way it is, you already did.”
The mind may not like hearing this. The mind is going to argue and defend the need to have a future. The mind will say you need to have goals. You need to want things and you need to create a better future for your children and the planet. If you don’t, nothing will ever change.
However, this is not the truth. When you stop resisting this moment of now, its form changes. The very resistance you have to the form keeps that form in place. As the saying goes, “The things you resist tend to persist.”
When you no longer resist, you surrender and take a step back into a state of alert presence. You step out of a 56k dial-up connection and move into a broadband connection. Resources you didn’t even know existed suddenly manifest themselves all around you.
As Tolle suggests, you no longer need to react to the events; you are able to respond to those events. You are now mentally, emotionally, and physically balanced and stable. By saying yes to this moment of now, you are saying yes to life and when you say yes to life, then life will say yes to you. If you say no to life, then life will say no to you.
I admire teachers such as Eckhart who are able to state things so simply and yet so profoundly. They increase clarity by dispelling the fog of mental delusion.
Psychologically, the idea of surrender goes against the purpose of the mind, which is survival, and the survival of anything it considers itself to be. Most people’s attitude is “I’ll be damned if I am going to surrender, because I am right.” But if you play that game, the price you’ll pay is giving up your love, health, happiness, and full self-expression. And that is a heavy cost to pay.
Krishnamurti, a sage, once asked his students, “Do you really want to know how I am able to stay in a state of bliss and happiness?” And, of course, all the students eagerly said, “Yes, please tell us.” Krishnamurti replied, “I live my life from the point of view that I don’t mind whatever happens.” That is not the way most of us live our lives. Most of us mind what happens all the time.
Saying yes to whatever occurs in your field of now will give you a broadband connection to life and increase the probability of being happy and fulfilled.
In conclusion, you can increase your consciousness by observing the incredible power the concepts of past and future have over your ability to stay present. Reducing their influence allows you to increase the effectiveness and clarity of your communication.
Now, let’s consider the third distinction in consciousness, how the mind gets conditioned in the first place. Why is this important? Because with understanding, you have a chance to reduce the hammerlock the mind has over you.
Once you realize that this unconscious conditioning process determines how you interpret the world, you can now react appropriately to the constant stream of events that show up in your field of now.
We live in a conditioned conceptualized reality. The conditioning starts in the first moments of life. You are born into an environment, a language, a family, a country, a religion, an educational system, a world. In that environment, you learn what things are by instruction or experience. The conditioning process occurs at an unconscious level and is so subtle you are not aware it is happening. For the most part, you agree with what you are told and then operate as if it were real. This conditioning defines your world and defines who you consider yourself to be.
Unfortunately, once you know who you are and what is true, the mind’s job is to make sure those things survive, even though they may actually be false. The mind will not tolerate thoughts that are not congruent with what it believes to be true. It will consider those thoughts wrong.
You now have to serve a life sentence in a mind-created prison with no hope of parole. You are trapped by the limitations and delusions of your own mental constructs. The sad joke is that you think you are free. You are not. Every time an event occurs in your field of now, you automatically and unconsciously interpret and label that event based on your conditioning. You don’t even notice that you put a defining label on an event, a label determined by the set of beliefs to which you are predisposed.
For example, years ago, people believed that the earth was flat. You could see with your own eyes that the earth was flat and if you sailed beyond the horizon, your ship would fall off the edge of the earth. When Galileo and Copernicus said the earth was round and that the sun was the center of the solar system, they were perceived as threats to the survival of the social institutions that held that the sun circled the earth. These institutions were so threatened by opposing ideas that killing unbelievers was not uncommon. Even today, we read that people are sometimes killed because thoughts in their database of knowledge are different from the thoughts in another person’s database of knowledge.
You have been brainwashed from the time you were born until the present moment. The process is so effective that you don’t even know you have been brainwashed. You are trapped in a prison created by your mind. You have aligned your identity with the contents of your mind, which you didn’t have a choice in acquiring in the first place.
While speaking in front of an audience, it is important to realize that you are using your conditioned database of thoughts as the filter through which you interpret the world. Why is this insight important? In order to be a master communicator, you have to be a master listener. You have to be able to listen to the other person’s communication without judging and comparing it with your database of knowledge.
Let’s talk more about your database of knowledge. A constant stream of thought based on your education and experiences forms the database or content of your mind. In psychological parlance, you can refer to this as the I, the me, or the ego.
In order to escape, or more accurately, to detach, from the prison of your mind, let’s create the possibility that who you are is not your database of thoughts. Who you are is not an ego and me or an I. Who you are is the space that contains those things. In your space, you have a body, but who you are is not your body. In your space, you have emotions, but who you are is not your emotions. In your space, you have thoughts, but who you are is not your thoughts.
You are the observer of those body sensations, emotions, and thoughts. What does this mean? Imagine that when a thought comes into your mind, you are lying on a green hillside on a warm summer day, watching clouds pass by overhead. You are not the cloud. You are just watching the cloud. You are not the emotions or body sensations. You are just watching them arise in consciousness and pass by. Your body sensations, thoughts, and emotions are simply events that are occurring and dissolving in your field of now.
Having the ability to distinguish between things in space and space itself can be a huge leap forward. Why? Because you would be free from the stranglehold the conditioning of your mind has on your perception and, thus, on your interpretation of reality. You would be able to break free from the prison of your mind and live with a greater sense of freedom. This level of consciousness would increase your effectiveness in everything you do, including your ability to deliver outstanding IT presentations in front of audiences.
So far, in this chapter on consciousness, I have defined consciousness, discussed time and the conditioning of the mind. The final area I want to explore is a practical tool you can actually use to create space when making a presentation and maintain a conscious, present-time, broadband connection to the audience.
Simply put, you can increase your consciousness by doing something that requires consciousness. The tool to do this should not be noticed or offend the listening audience. That tool is called Point of Focus.
Point of Focus is the ability to lock on a point in the room. Once you are locked on to a point, you then deliver your communication packet. You talk only when you are consciously connected to a point in the space.
Point of Focus is much like shooting a rifle. You get ready, you aim, and then you fire. You only fire after you have gotten ready and aimed. The same is true in presenting. You fire your communication packets across the space only after you have acquired a target. Acquiring the target requires that you give yourself a conscious command. This command automatically brings you to a higher state of consciousness in the space. Therefore, your communication will come from a higher state of conscious awareness.
There are thousands of points in any room and this tool works with any of them. However, the most powerful points are the eyes of the audience. Lock on and form a Virtual Private Network (VPN)-like connection with one person in the room. Whether there are ten people, fifty people, or two hundred people, you choose the eyes you want, lock on, and fire your communication packet across the space. By practicing the Point of Focus technique, you’ll soon discover you are no longer talking to a group of people. You are talking to one person at a time.
Every time communication packets come out of your mouth, you must be locked on to the eyes of someone in the audience and your feet must be firmly grounded on the floor. You have then established a solid Layer 1 connection to the space before pulling the trigger on your communication packet.
It is said that eyes are the windows of the soul; because of this, people are sometimes uncomfortable with eye contact. But in public speaking, I find just the opposite to be true. I observe that people enjoy making eye contact with the presenter. The intent of the Point of Focus technique is not to threaten anyone but rather to involve the audience in the conversation. The purpose of the tool is to give the speaker an anchoring point in the space, which will keep him or her conscious and present.
You’ll find a complete, in-depth discussion of the benefits of the Point of Focus tool in chapter one, “Wireless Packet Delivery.” What I want to say here about Point of Focus is that it is the most effective tool I have found to bring the IT presenter out of Data Land and into the space of presence in front of the audience. It is a fantastic tool of consciousness.
Many presenters don’t have control of their bodies or the flow of their thoughts into the room. Point of Focus will give them that control. It will also allow them to regulate the pace of their delivery and, most important, to create what I call space packets (or in IT terminology, interframe gaps). IT professionals are so concentrated on data that they often don’t have space in their delivery. And yet, space is the heart and soul of being a master of public speaking. The ability to create space packets in your presentations will be the major distinction between you and all the other IT professionals.
When you create space, or pauses, you are able to disconnect from Data Land. You still have your data. You still deliver your data, but you are not addicted to it. If there is anything you are addicted to, it will be creating space.
You will be looking for opportunities to squeeze as much space as possible into your delivery and you will notice that your presentations become more successful. The length of the space packet or pause will vary depending on the significance of the communication packet. The greater the significance, the longer the pause because it will allow the audience to absorb and process the data.
Tips in Using the Point of Focus Tool
• Do not use a lot of words. Slim down your sentence into small parts. Give three to ten words to one person. Do not deliver two or three sentences at a time to one person.
• After you deliver your chunk of data, hold the eye contact for no longer than a second to make sure you have hit the target.
• Hold the eye contact longer after you have spoken only if you have asked a question and are waiting for a response.
• Don’t talk in between the eye contacts. Only talk when you are connected to someone’s eyes.
• Make sure you connect to the eyes of as many people as possible. It is a great way of holding people’s attention.
This chapter addressed how to increase your consciousness to establish a broadband, present-time connection to the audience. We looked at three areas of consciousness: (1) defining consciousness, (2) how the mental concepts of past and future take you away from being fully present in the moment, (3) how the mind is conditioned over time and blocks you from being fully conscious, and (4) how the Point of Focus tool allows you to maintain a conscious connection to the audience.