Anyone who’s ever taught or presented to any size crowd knows that one of the biggest threats to losing your audience’s full attention is smaller than your thumb: a bee.
You could be at the climax of a hair-raising tale, the punchline of a side-splitting joke, or the message of a life-changing lesson. But that won’t matter. As soon as your audience catches a glimpse of the black and yellow blur or hears the buzz-thwack sound against the window, you’ve lost your crowd.
A valuable nugget I absorbed in graduate school years ago was from Rabbi Dr. Feurman, ob”m:
“When you can’t fight them, join them.”
Whether there’s a bumblebee circling the conference room, snowflakes flurrying outside the classroom, or an alert buzzing on all the phones in the auditorium: trying to maintain everyone’s attention is a futile battle. Instead of pulling their focus back to you, take a break from your spiel and get in on the distraction.
These days, when I’m giving a workshop and suddenly hear a visiting winged insect, it’s not me versus the crowd. It’s all of us against the bee.
We usually win.
