The Magic of Focus

I watched a speech a few weeks ago and something I saw crystalized a thought that has been bouncing around my head for some time.

The speaker was struggling through the opening section of her speech, about her parent’s English ability. As she strained to remember the words she had memorized, it was clear that her body was not cooperating with her. Her hands were locked together in a death grip in front of her chest. Her eyes frantically searched the room, looking at nobody. She spoke haltingly. Her face was a mask of tension and the tendons in her neck were as taut as guitar strings

I wasn’t at all sure if she was going to make it through her speech, but then she began to tell a story about the time her parents had accompanied her to America to meet the family with whom their daughter would be living for a homestay. As she told of her father’s efforts to communicate through a dictionary and her mother’s carefree attitude towards grammar, she completely changed.

Her voice became lively; her face, animated. Her body relaxed and opened to us, her hands began to move in broad, smooth, natural gestures and her eyes began to search, not for an escape route, but for faces to engage.

Suddenly she wasn’t giving a “speech”; she was reliving a wonderful memory. She wasn’t speaking about language proficiency; she was sharing her affection for her parents. The title of the speech may have been about English, but the unstated subject was very clearly love. And it was beautiful.

I watched her, amazed at the change, and saw that it had all resulted just from a simple shift of focus, from inward on herself, to outward on her audience. And in that moment, so many of my other thoughts and observations all came together into a single realization.

When we focus in on ourselves, our own thoughts, our fears and feelings and the words we have memorized, our bodies fight us. We can try to mechanically reduce or eliminate the bad habits we struggle with; try to force ourselves to relax, stand up straight and make eye contact, deliberately vary our style of speaking and emphasize key words and phrases, but that tension will always find clever, new ways to leak out of us.

But when we forget ourselves and focus out on our audience, on the gift we have brought for them and on their reactions to it, most of the bad habits that bedevil us are almost magically swept away. Our bodies begin to work with us; to reinforce and amplify our words. Our voices, faces and gestures become lively and animated. Our eyes begin to seek out other eyes to engage.

Simply shifting our focus from inward to outward makes all the difference in the world. The cause may be simple, but the effect is magical.