Alex works at one of the world’s largest tech companies. His VP asked him to do a presentation report on sales growth for Q1 2024.
As a high performer, Alex takes this task to heart and puts in a tremendous effort to ensure the report is presented flawlessly.
He spends long hours working on the report, assembling data, analyzing trends, and preparing a visually appealing presentation. Alex is determined to do his best and surpass expectations.
As he came to the presentation room, he noticed that the top-level management was looking at him, expecting him to deliver his job excellently.
During his 1-hour presentation, when Alex was talking, he noticed that he slipped his tongue on one crucial line that should have been perfect because he had trained for this presentation hours before.
But this accident made Alex anxious about whether people would judge him as incapable of doing his job.
After the presentation, he locked himself in a bathroom to rerun the presentation repeatedly in his head, wishing he could have fixed the mistake if only he had trained for another hour.
Now, he’s disappointed in the bathroom, telling himself he’s not up to the challenge and should have been fired long ago.
This phenomenon is called the Spotlight Effect, where we tend to believe that everyone in the crowd is not only mentally rerunning our mess-up over and over but also thinking that we’re a terrible public speaker across the board.
And because of it, we assume they must also think we’re awful at everything else in life.
We’re laughably wrong.
The research found that most people aren’t all that judgmental and quickly forget single errors. But because we overblow the implications of every social move we make — because we believe that everyone cares so deeply about our every public action — it causes us anxiety and stress.
We believe we live in our prime-time television show with the spotlight always on us.
But the reality is this: we’re usually too blinded by our spotlight to stare at anyone else’s.
