Nobody Is Thinking About You — The Spotlight Effect

Here's the most liberating sentence in all psychology.

Nobody is thinking about you Well, hello there, my friend.

It's Jonathan Doyle.

Welcome again to the Daily Podcast.

Today, we're gonna talk about something called the spotlight effect.

Have you heard of that before?

It's, uh, it's great.

I've been teaching this.

I didn't even call it that.

I was just… I don't wanna sound, uh, okay, like I have an over-inflated

opinion of my own ability, but I was teaching this in a different form without

knowing the technical term for it.

I've been teaching this to my kids all the time.

I wanna share it with you.

It's so liberating.

It's so helpful.

Uh, there's a few little, uh, little delineations in it.

I've been using that word a lot lately.

We're gonna delineate a couple of key things.

But this concept of the spotlight effect, I'll just summarize it very quickly.

It's basically the idea that most of the time, almost nobody is thinking about you.

It is the best.

And the simple principle is that we go around limiting ourselves all the time

because we believe that people are looking at us, watching us, evaluating us, judging

us, and, and it's, can become overpowering and it constrains our behavior.

But the good news out of psychology is that most of the time, most of the

people are not thinking about you at all.

Isn't that good news?

That is such, such wonderfully liberating news because you just get to do you.

You just get to be who you are.

So let's go into this together.

A brief episode, but this is a powerful one.

This comes from some studies at Cornell University by Thomas Gilovich, who did

some extensive studies, and he mapped what we now call the spotlight effect.

And the basic principle that he uncovers is that we massively

overestimate how much people notice us.

So in the actual study that he did at Cornell, he got, uh, students to

wear a very embarrassing T-shirt, and then they had to wear it around.

And the study was basically getting the student wearing the shirt to try and

estimate how many people had noticed it.

And what it turned out to be when they would go back through a, you know,

they would have all these observers, and then they would interview all

the people that had been in the area, and it's a two-to-one ratio.

So the student wearing the shirt would double the estimate of

how many people had seen it.

They'd say, "How many people do you think stared at you or looked at you

or noticed you or were offended by your T-shirt?" And the person wearing

the shirt would double the amount.

And they would go through and f- you know, and sort of interview everybody

else, and huge numbers of people who'd been walking around and sort of the

shirt had been next to them or in front of them had no memory of it whatsoever.

So can you see the tension here is that the, the person wearing it is, is

doubling, at least doubling the amount that he thought or she thought people

were staring at them or noticing at them.

So the good news is that, uh, that when you mess up or if you get, say,

for example, one day you get a really bad haircut or you do an average

presentation at work, the good news is that it's going to be registered

by almost no one, and the rest of it are gonna forget it really fast.

So maybe you give a presentation, you think that's the worst

presentation I'll ever give.

Everybody's never gonna forget that.

In 20 years' time, there's gonna be commemorative coins printed

about this time that I stuffed up.

It's not gonna happen.

Most people aren't even gonna notice, and the ones that do notice

are gonna forget it really fast.

Why?

And this is the why.

This is the actual mechanism.

The mechanism is, and why we call it the spotlight effect, is that every person

is the lead actor in their own film, which makes you an extra in theirs.

Think about it.

People are going about their daily lives, and yes, we love other people,

we're concerned for others, we, we can have an outward disposition, but we're

all still living our individual lives, and this is the point, that we're all

kind of the actor, the main title role in our own movie drama, which makes

everybody else extras in our film, right?

So in my life, the lens through which I look out at the world is through my

sense of who I am in the world and my life and things I'm trying to do and

things that I have to do, and, you know, and I love people and care about people,

but all these other people, at least from where I look, I'm relating to them.

They're out there.

And so every person who's out there is living the same way, that

they're the main actor in their movie and I'm an extra in theirs.

So we kind of have this disposition as humans to focus more primarily on our

own experience of reality than assuming that everybody is so fixated with us

that all they can think about is the things that we're doing all the time.

And so this is where this gets useful for you.

What the spotlight effect is going to do is it's going to stop a lot of us from

doing things that we really want to do.

How?

It's the person who doesn't start the business.

Why?

Because they're afraid of failure.

Why?

Because if they start something that doesn't work, they're convinced

that everybody will notice.

Not everybody's going to notice.

That's such good news.

You know, I was coaching someone recently who's trying to start their first

business and, and we worked through the, the real sticking point, 'cause

we were constantly going, you know, "What do you wanna start?" And they're

stuck and, and it's because the, the deep fear that we all have, that what

if we start and it's the wrong thing and it fails and everyone's gonna look

at us and go, "Ha, see what they did?

They failed.

Look at them starting that business, ha." Where, where the truth is that

lots of businesses fail, but that's not a comment on you necessarily.

It's complex.

There's markets, there's all sorts of forces, and the fact is they fail all

the time, and they succeed all the time.

But it's not as if the whole world is sitting there going, "Quick, watch,

they're about to start a business.

Quick, everybody, put, put your tool, put your tools down.

Quick, everyone stare over there.

They're starting a business.

Let's watch them closely." That's not how it works.

So people don't start the business.

They don't speak up.

They don't, uh, you know, create the work, you know, do the

painting, start the process.

They don't do it, or they don't go to the gym.

Uh, you know, I notice this a lot with women in their… well, of all ages.

Often, if they haven't been to a gym, they didn't grow up training much, and

they decide they wanna go to the gym, they can be incredibly self-conscious.

And I remember when Karen was going back to the gym recently, and she

was like, you know, trying to-- She was expressing some of this.

And I, and I'm not invalidating that women can feel this, but I'm like, the

process I had to work through with her was like, "Honestly, no, no one's watching.

No one." Because you c- you know, I, I find the people that don't wanna go

back to a gym, they're kind of like, they have this idea that the minute

they walk in, it's gonna be like one of those old Western movies where the

piano stops and all the conversation stops and everybody in the gym just

turns around and stares at you.

"My gosh, there's someone in the gym we haven't seen before. Let's all pay

very close attention to them." No.

I said to Karen, I said, "Look, there's all sorts of people in the gym where

I train. You know, there's, there's a couple of absolute, you know, there's

some real bodybuilders. There's some women in their 60s and 70s, you know,

wearing old tracksuits who turn up and do their routine, and good on them."

But I said, "Either way, no one's paying much attention to anybody." And I said,

"Plus, these days, everyone's just got headphones in, staring at their phones

anyway." So can you see the power of this?

That we limit ourselves.

We don't start the gym membership, we don't start the business, we

don't go to the dance class because we're convinced that everyone's

staring at us, and they're not.

They're just plain not.

The research makes it clear.

So the judgment that we tend to brace for is mostly self-generated.

Now, I get it, there'll be some context where there is evaluation and judgment.

If you're going into an elite team or an elite military unit,

yeah, people are staring at you.

They're evaluating you.

Why?

Because that's the very particular environment that's

calibrated for evaluation.

But that's not most of our life.

Like, you don't start a new job and everybody in the place just stares at you.

I mean, they might be interested in you for the first half hour, but then,

you know, there's something else to do.

Next Zoom call, please.

So is this freeing for you to suddenly realize that most of the world is not

stressed worrying, watching you at all?

So you go back to… You know, we always try and base this

in some an- ancient wisdom.

So Marcus Aurelius is a really good example back in,

uh, second century AD. So,

you know, he's the Roman Emperor, uh, Roman, Roman Emperor at a time when the

empire was kind of close to its peak.

I mean, Augustus, you know, Aurelius comes a little bit later, but the

Roman Empire was still the global hegemon and so immensely powerful, and

he's the most watched man in the most watched position in the known world.

But he constantly, in his book, The Meditations, keeps writing about

stop caring about what others thinks.

In my notes here, it says, "He marvels at the absurdity that each of us loves

ourselves more than anyone else, yet values a stranger's opinion of us above

our own judgment." So again, in my notes I've written, "If the man with

an empire watching him could see the spotlight was imaginary, so can you".

So Marcus Aurelius in the second century AD, the most powerful man in the world, is

noticing that we already place more weight on strangers' judgment of us than we do

upon our own care and love for ourselves.

So my friends, for me at least, this is good news.

It doesn't mean you have to, you know, go out wearing bright pink sunglasses.

I mean, you can if you want, and even if you do, most people are gonna be

like, you know… And even if they do judge you, d- do you think they're

gonna spend the next two days doing it?

Like, do you think they're gonna lie awake at night going, "Oh, I saw that

person today with those pink glasses. What were they thinking?" And even if they

did, it's not gonna affect you, is it?

Like it's not like, y- you know, you don't know them.

They, you know… I don't discount that people say hurtful things,

but it's usually the ones closest to us that can hurt us the most.

The opinion of strangers is, like, really irrelevant.

What's that other old saying?

If you, if you live for people's approval, you'll die by their condemnation.

So for me, as a speaker, my, my criteria is, is really not the audience.

It's, it's my preparation.

My criteria is did I, you know, really give the best that I could possibly give

each time for this particular moment?

And I know that, and when, when you're doing this kind of

work, you're calibrated to it.

You know.

You just know if you've prepped.

You know.

You know if you've done the rehearsals.

You know if you're across the content.

So I, I don't tend to worry, you know, did the audience like it?

I trust that they will because I've done the work.

So I don't really put any thought on what people are thinking about

me when I walk out on stage.

I'm just like, am I, am I gonna execute in congruence with my capacity

and ability and bring the best that I can to serve these people?

So it's so liberating when you stop worrying about what

other people think about you.

So there it is.

Just go through the rest of your day or the rest of your evening, you know,

trusting that most people are not paying attention, which gives you the freedom

to be who you are in the world and to get better and better at being that.

All right.

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Find me on Instagram, JDoyleSpeaks, on YouTube, JonathanDoyleSpeaks,

and on the website at JDoyle… or jonathandoyle.co, .CO.

If you wanna book me for speaking work or coaching, you can find it all there.

All right.

Let's have our closing thought for the day.

You ready?

The spotlight that you're performing for is switched off, so go and do your thing