Every speaker has experienced it to some degree or another: you deliver what was supposed to be a funny, lighthearted line. But you get almost nothing back—no laughs, no nods, not even polite smiles.
During those moments of awkward disconnect, the very human response is to immediately assume that it’s just a bad crowd.
Stand-up comedian and actor Jerry Seinfeld offers a different perspective. Speaking about the audience, he says: “I want to make them like what I do. I don’t always succeed, but that’s my job. And never blame them, never. The worst possible situation—the deadest, most hostile crowd—I don’t care. It’s still my puzzle. That’s a professional attitude that I’d never ever compromise.”
Seinfeld understands this fundamental performance truth: the room is feedback, not fuel.
It’s not the audience’s responsibility to fuel your energy or drive your performance. (Of course, an enthusiastic audience can certainly enhance the experience—but it’s not a prerequisite for your success.)
In fact, as speakers, it’s dangerous to depend on the audience for your energy. And it’s even more dangerous to blame them when your performance doesn’t land as well as you’d hoped.
Your Responsibility as a Professional Speaker
When a speaker walks offstage and says, “It just wasn't a great audience tonight,” or “the audience seemed off,” they’re implying that the audience’s engagement is outside of their control.
Of course, you can’t control everything onstage. Sometimes you’re scheduled to speak right after lunch, when your tired audience is smack dab in the middle of the afternoon slump. There are poor seating arrangements, curiously designed stages, and unexpected mishaps.
But amidst it all, you do have the ability and, in fact, the responsibility to engage, entertain, inspire, motivate, teach, and move your audience. This doesn’t just happen the moment you step onstage. Crafting a speech and a performance that achieves all those things requires an intense amount of preparation.
Your core responsibility as a professional speaker is to fully design and execute a transformational experience for your audience. Your task is to shift their emotions and create memorable, insightful, and entertaining moments for them.
That can only be done when you take responsibility for the cause and effect of what you do onstage and how the audience engages with it, then analyze the translation between those two elements—instead of blaming the audience for any translation errors.
The audience’s only job is to show up (and follow the basic, unspoken social rules of being an audience member). They’re not there to perform, or bring their maximum energy, or entertain themselves.
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