I was mid-routine at a corporate event in Innsbruck. The room was large — too large for the number of people, which is always a bad sign — and somewhere around the four-minute mark of my opening piece, I felt the telltale softening. Not outright disengagement. Nothing so dramatic as people turning away or talking. Just a loosening. The quality of attention in the room went from focused to diffuse, like a camera slowly pulling out of focus.
My immediate instinct was to speed up. To inject energy. To push harder, talk faster, move more, be more. The logic seemed airtight: the audience is drifting, so I need to grab them back. The way to grab attention is to increase stimulus. More energy. More intensity. More of everything.
I followed that instinct. I picked up the pace. I raised my volume. I moved faster through the routine, trying to generate enough momentum to pull the room’s attention back toward me.
It did not work. If anything, it made things worse. The increased speed gave the routine a frantic quality that communicated the exact opposite of what I intended. Instead of “This is exciting, pay attention,” my energy was broadcasting “I am losing you and I know it.” The audience, consciously or not, read the desperation and pulled back further. By the time I reached the climax of the routine, maybe half the room was genuinely engaged. The other half was present but not invested.
After the show, I sat in my hotel room — hotels being the setting for most of my post-performance analysis, as they have been since the beginning — and thought about what had gone wrong. The material was strong. The technique was clean. The audience was not hostile. The problem was my response to the drift. I had done the natural thing, the instinctive thing, and the natural thing had been exactly wrong.
The Counterintuitive Gear Shift
Ken Weber describes a technique in Maximum Entertainment that directly contradicts every performer’s natural instinct: when you feel the audience slipping, slow down. Lower your volume. Drop your pitch. Move less. Speak more deliberately. Shift into a lower gear.
The metaphor is from driving. When a car loses traction — on ice, on gravel, on a wet road — the instinct is to accelerate. Push harder. The wheels are spinning, so give them more power. But anyone who has actually driven on ice knows this is the worst possible response. More power means more spinning. More spinning means less grip. The car goes nowhere.
The correct response is to shift into a lower gear. Less power. More torque. The wheels slow down, and paradoxically, they grip better. The car moves forward not because you are pushing harder but because you are pushing smarter. The reduced speed allows the tires to engage with the surface instead of sliding over it.
Performance works the same way. When the audience’s attention drifts, increasing your speed and energy is the equivalent of spinning your wheels on ice. You are moving faster but gripping less. The audience cannot catch up to the increased pace, so they disengage further. The higher energy reads as anxiety, not excitement. The faster speech becomes harder to follow, not more compelling. Everything you do to recover the room actually pushes it further away.
But when you slow down — when you lower your voice, reduce your movement, speak with deliberate weight — something remarkable happens. The change itself captures attention. The human brain is wired to notice changes in pattern. A sudden shift from fast to slow, from loud to quiet, from energetic to still, is neurologically arresting. The audience’s attention snaps back not because you have demanded it but because your behavior has changed, and the brain is compelled to investigate changes.
The Physics of Attention
I think about this in terms of density. When you speak quickly, each individual word carries less weight. The words blend together, each one pushing the next out of the way before it has fully landed. The audience hears a stream of sound and extracts meaning from it at whatever rate they can manage, but the individual words do not stick. They are too light. They pass through without leaving an impression.
When you slow down, each word becomes denser. There is space around it. The audience has time to receive it, process it, feel its weight. A sentence spoken slowly and deliberately in a quiet voice has more impact than the same sentence spoken quickly and loudly, because the slow delivery communicates importance. It says: “I am choosing these words carefully, and you should receive them carefully.”
This is not my theory. It is basic vocal communication, and it has been studied extensively. Ralphie May, in his stand-up comedy masterclass, talks about silence as one of the most powerful tools a performer has. He calls it “a great cheat” — a tool that does enormous work with zero effort. When you pause, the audience leans in. When you speak quietly after a pause, the audience strains to hear. When the audience is straining to hear, they are by definition paying attention. You have recaptured the room not by overwhelming their defenses but by creating a space they want to fill.
My Innsbruck Correction
A month after the Innsbruck disaster, I had a similar gig. Different company, different venue, but the same basic setup — corporate audience, post-dinner, a room that was slightly too large. I knew the conditions that had caused the drift, and I knew I might face the same challenge.
I did. About five minutes in, the same softening began. Attention loosening at the edges. A few people shifting in their seats. The familiar pre-drift signals.
This time, instead of accelerating, I downshifted. Mid-sentence, I slowed my pace by about half. I lowered my volume so that I was speaking just above conversational level. I stopped moving and stood still. I let a beat of silence hang in the room.
The effect was immediate. I could see heads turn back toward me. I could see bodies straighten. The room tightened. Not because I had said or done anything remarkable — I was in the middle of a setup, not a climax. But the sudden shift in my energy had disrupted the drift pattern. The audience’s brains, detecting a change, had re-engaged automatically.
I kept the lower gear for about thirty seconds. Slow speech. Deliberate pauses. Quiet intensity. I let the room resettle around me at the new pace. Then, gradually, I brought the energy back up — not to where it had been, but to a level that felt appropriate for the moment. The transition from slow to moderate felt like acceleration, even though I was still moving at a pace that would have felt sluggish five minutes earlier. Perception is relative, and the slow passage had recalibrated the audience’s baseline.
The rest of the show went beautifully. Not because the material was different from Innsbruck. Because my response to the drift was different. I had shifted down instead of up, and the room had come with me.
Why This Works Psychologically
I have been thinking about the psychology behind the gear-shift technique, and I believe it works for three interconnected reasons.
First, novelty. The brain habituates to constant stimuli. If you have been speaking at a certain pace and volume for five minutes, the audience’s brain has adapted to that stimulus and partially tuned it out. Any change — faster, slower, louder, quieter — disrupts the habituation and forces the brain to re-evaluate. But crucially, slowing down is a more effective disruption than speeding up, because slowing down carries a subtext of importance while speeding up carries a subtext of anxiety.
Second, authority. A person who speaks slowly and quietly in a room full of people is projecting extreme confidence. The message, whether intended or not, is: “I do not need to compete for your attention. I am so confident in what I am saying that I will say it quietly, and you will listen because the content deserves it.” This is the dynamic of every powerful figure who speaks softly in meetings while everyone else talks over each other. The quiet voice is the powerful voice, because it presumes that the audience will do the work of listening.
Third, intimacy. When a performer drops their voice, the relationship between performer and audience shifts. It becomes more personal, more private. Instead of a public address, it begins to feel like a conversation — like the performer is sharing something specifically with you, the individual audience member. This creates a sense of inclusion and privilege that higher energy cannot achieve. You are being let in on something. You are being trusted with something quiet and important.
The Trap of Energy Matching
There is a common piece of performance advice that says: match the room’s energy. If the audience is high-energy, be high-energy. If they are subdued, be subdued. This advice is not wrong, exactly, but it contains a dangerous trap when applied to moments of drift.
When the audience’s energy drops, matching that drop means you drop too. You become lower-energy, less engaged, less present — and the audience drops further, and you match that drop, and a downward spiral begins. Energy matching in a drifting room is a recipe for a performer who fades out alongside their audience.
The gear-shift technique is not energy matching. It is energy redirecting. You are not dropping your energy — you are changing its form. The total investment you bring to the performance does not decrease. If anything, it increases. Slowing down and speaking quietly requires more intention, more control, more presence than speeding up and getting loud. You are converting kinetic energy into potential energy. The room feels the intensity beneath the surface, even though — especially because — the surface is calm.
This is a distinction I have come to appreciate deeply. There is a difference between a performer who is quiet because they have lost their nerve and a performer who is quiet because they are choosing to be quiet. The audience can feel the difference. One is weakness. The other is power. And the audience responds to power — even quiet power, maybe especially quiet power — by paying attention.
Applying This Beyond Crisis Management
Once I understood the gear-shift technique as a crisis management tool, I started exploring it as a structural choice. What if I built moments of deliberate slowness into my set from the beginning, before any drift occurred? What if I used the lower gear not as a rescue maneuver but as a deliberate element of pacing?
The results were striking. By alternating between passages of higher energy and passages of deliberate quiet, I created a rhythm that kept the audience’s attention naturally engaged. The high-energy passages were more impactful because they were preceded by quiet. The quiet passages were more powerful because they contrasted with the energy. Neither would have been as effective without the other.
This is the principle of contrast applied to pacing. A show that runs at the same energy level throughout — whether that level is high or low — becomes monotonous. The brain habituates to any constant stimulus. But a show that moves between gears, that breathes, that alternates between intensity and stillness, keeps the brain perpetually engaged because the pattern keeps changing.
I now build at least two deliberate gear-shift moments into every set. Usually one after the opening routine, when the initial excitement might naturally wane, and one just before the final piece, where a moment of quiet creates anticipation for the climax. These are not crisis responses. They are structural choices. And they have made my sets more engaging even on nights when the audience was fully attentive from the start.
The Hotel Room Lesson
In my hotel room practice sessions — which remain the core of my rehearsal life — I have started practicing the gear shift the same way I practice technique. I will run through a routine at normal pace, then deliberately drop to half speed at a specific point and practice the transition. The physical sensation of slowing down mid-performance is counterintuitive enough that it requires deliberate practice. Your body wants to maintain the pace it has established. Overriding that momentum is a skill, and like all skills, it improves with repetition.
I have also started practicing silence. Literal silence. I will reach a point in a routine where I would normally speak and instead hold the pause for a full five seconds, then ten, then fifteen. The discomfort of extended silence in a solo practice session is instructive. If I can learn to be comfortable with silence alone in a hotel room, I will be more comfortable with silence in front of an audience.
The goal is not to become a performer who whispers through every show. The goal is to have the gear shift available as a tool — reliable, practiced, ready to deploy when needed. When the room drifts, I want the slower gear to feel as natural as the faster one. When the moment calls for quiet intensity, I want to be able to provide it without the self-consciousness that comes from doing something unfamiliar.
The Paradox Worth Embracing
Less is more. Slow is fast. Quiet is loud. These sound like fortune cookie wisdom, and if they were offered without context, they would deserve the eye-roll they usually get. But in the specific context of commanding a room, they are not platitudes. They are mechanics. They describe how human attention actually works, as opposed to how we intuitively assume it works.
The performer who speeds up when losing the audience is operating on intuition. The performer who slows down is operating on understanding. And the gap between intuition and understanding, in this case, is the gap between a room that drifts away and a room that leans in.
I lost the audience in Innsbruck because I followed my instincts. I recovered them a month later because I followed the principle. Every performance since has been shaped by that lesson: when the wheels start spinning, do not push the accelerator. Shift down. Grip the road. And let the audience come to you.