I have a secret fondness for magic acts – the professional ones.  Acts like Penn and Teller.  So I was thrilled a while back when I was in Vegas for a convention and had an evening to catch their act. 

Penn and Teller are two accomplished showmen:  Penn is the talkative one, and Teller is largely silent. Penn keeps up a running commentary designed to distract and bemuse the audience while they both perform the magic tricks.

I was astonished to see that, at this performance, the talkative one, Penn, had a bad case of “happy feet.”  He had so much energy that he was wandering all over the stage randomly while chattering away. The random movement of his feet was his method for discharging that adrenaline-induced energy we all experience in performance, whether magicians or actors or speakers.

The result was so distracting, though, that I found myself unable to attend to his patter or even the magic tricks with any reliability. Nonetheless, he managed to hold his audience reasonably well until an unpleasant trick that involved apparently putting a live rabbit through a wood chipper. He lost his audience then and never got it back, making it clear that the bond was weak throughout, partly because his motion was random and not purposeful, toward the audience and away from it.

How do you avoid the Penn problem?  Two ways.  First, get control over your motion, and make it purposeful – toward your audience and away from it when appropriate.  Those are the only motions the audience will be interested in.  Moving toward an audience builds trust.  Use it. 

Second, become conscious of your adrenaline and treat it as energy to be used rather than a problem.  Let it come out in your voice, in your gestures – in your charisma. 

‘Happy Feet’ detracts from the performance of many a public speaker.  Don’t let it be your problem.