The recording was from a corporate event in Linz, maybe forty people in a conference room. I had asked a colleague to film the set from the back so I could review it later. When I watched the footage that night in my hotel room, I was not watching my hands or listening to my patter. I was watching the audience. Specifically, I was watching where they were looking.
And I noticed something that made me rewind the video three times.
At one point in my routine, I turned away from the table to face a spectator standing to my right. It was a natural moment — I was addressing them directly, asking a question. My body turned fully toward the spectator, which meant my back was partially turned toward the table where my props sat.
In the recording, you could see the audience shift. Not dramatically, not like a wave at a football match, but perceptibly. Their eyes moved to the table. Several people leaned slightly forward. One woman in the front row tilted her head as if trying to get a better look at the objects I had just stepped away from.
I had turned away from the table. And by turning away, I had directed the audience’s attention toward it.
The Second Tool
Body language is the second of the eight attention tools, and it works differently from what most people assume. The common understanding is simple: the audience looks where your body faces. Point your chest at the spectator, the audience follows. Point your chest at the table, they look at the table.
That is true, but it is only half the story. The more interesting dynamic — the one that showed up so clearly in my Linz recording — is that turning away from something can be just as powerful as turning toward it. When your body language says “this is not important right now” by facing elsewhere, the audience becomes curious about the thing you have abandoned. It is as if your departure creates a vacuum of attention that the audience rushes in to fill.
Think about it from a primal perspective. If someone in your group suddenly turns away from an object, your brain registers a shift in their interest. But the object is still there. And now nobody is watching it. Which means there might be something there worth watching. The impulse to look at the unattended thing is almost involuntary.
This is not some exotic magic principle. It is basic human social behavior. When a friend at dinner suddenly turns away from the window, you look at the window. When a colleague in a meeting suddenly shifts their attention from the whiteboard to their phone, you glance at the whiteboard. We are wired to monitor what others are attending to, and we are wired to notice when their attention shifts.
The Strategy Consultant’s Body Language
Before I ever set foot on a stage as a performer, I had spent years in conference rooms and boardrooms as a strategy consultant. And I had learned, mostly through trial and error, that body language in professional settings is not decorative. It is functional.
When I wanted a client to focus on a specific slide in my presentation, I would stand next to it and face the room. My body said: this thing next to me is important. Look at it. When I wanted the client to stop focusing on the slide and start engaging with me directly, I would step away from the screen and face them squarely. My body said: the conversation has moved away from the data and toward the implications. Follow me.
I did not think of this as attention control at the time. I thought of it as good presentation practice. But looking back, I was deploying body language as a tool for directing group attention — the same tool that works identically on stage.
The difference is that in a boardroom, the stakes are business decisions. On stage, the stakes are the audience’s perception of reality. The mechanism is the same. The application is more precise and more consequential.
What Your Torso Is Broadcasting
Here is the practical principle I have drilled into my practice: your torso is a spotlight. Whatever your chest is facing is lit up. Whatever your back is facing is in shadow — but interestingly, not invisible. More like intriguingly in shadow.
During a routine, there are moments when I want the audience’s attention squarely on an object — a card, a prop, a spectator’s hands. At those moments, my chest faces the object. My body says: this is where the action is.
There are other moments when I want the audience’s attention on me — my face, my expression, my reaction. At those moments, my chest faces the audience. My body says: the story is here, on my face, in my words.
And there are moments — rarer, but powerful when they work — when I deliberately turn away from something to make the audience curious about it. My body says: I am done with this. And the audience, predictably, becomes more interested in it.
The key insight is that none of this is passive. Your body is always broadcasting a signal about what matters and what does not. The only question is whether you are broadcasting intentionally or accidentally.
The Recording That Embarrassed Me
That same Linz recording revealed a more embarrassing pattern. During several moments in my routine where I wanted the audience to look at my face — moments of scripted humor, moments of reaction, moments where the emotional content was in my expression rather than in the props — I was looking down at the table. My body was angled toward my props. My chest was aimed at the cards.
In those moments, my body language was contradicting my intention. I wanted them to see my face. My body was telling them to see my hands. And predictably, they were looking at my hands instead of my face, which meant the humor did not land as hard, the reactions did not register as clearly, and the emotional moments passed by without the audience fully receiving them.
When I rewatched those moments, I understood something that had confused me for months. I had been getting adequate reactions to material that I knew was stronger than adequate. The problem was not the material. The problem was that my body was directing attention to the wrong place during the moments that mattered most.
This is a devastatingly common error, and it is invisible to you while you are performing. You cannot feel where your torso is pointing with any reliability while you are focused on execution. You need the recording. You need the outside eye. And you need to know what to look for.
The Drill
Here is how I now practice body language as an attention tool. It is not elegant, but it works.
I set up my phone as a camera and run through a routine. But instead of performing the routine normally, I narrate my body orientation out loud. “Chest to audience. Chest to table. Chest to spectator. Turning away from the deck. Facing the audience.” I literally call out my own body’s direction during every beat.
This feels absurd the first dozen times. It also reveals misalignments with stunning clarity. You realize immediately that during the most important moments of your routine — the reveals, the reactions, the laughs — your body is often pointed at the wrong thing. Not because you are doing it wrong on purpose, but because you have never thought about it as a variable to control.
After mapping the misalignments, I correct them one at a time. I pick the single most important moment in the routine where my body was pointed wrong, I fix it, and I drill the correction until it is automatic. Then I move to the next one. This is slow work. It takes weeks to fully remap a single routine. But the improvement is dramatic and permanent.
Alignment and Contradiction
The real power of body language as an attention tool comes from its relationship with the other tools — particularly eye contact and patter. When your eyes, your body, and your words all point in the same direction, the audience has no choice but to follow. The signal is unanimous. The direction is clear. The audience moves as a unit.
When any of the three contradicts the others, the audience’s attention fragments. If you say “look at this card” but your eyes are on the spectator and your body is angled toward the audience, you have created three competing signals. The audience does not know where to go. Some follow the verbal instruction. Some follow your eyes. Some follow your body. The moment loses focus, and with it, impact.
This is why alignment matters more than any individual tool. A mediocre performer with aligned tools will outperform a talented performer with contradictory tools. It is not about doing any one thing brilliantly. It is about ensuring that everything you do points in the same direction at the same time.
The exception, as I discovered in that Linz recording, is deliberate contradiction. There are moments when you want the audience to be curious about something you have apparently abandoned. In those moments, you intentionally misalign your body with the point of interest, using the contradiction to create a specific psychological effect — curiosity toward the unattended object. But this only works when it is intentional. Accidental contradiction just creates confusion.
The Universal Application
I mentioned that I discovered the power of body orientation in boardrooms before I discovered it on stage. This is not a coincidence. The principle is universal.
Teachers use body orientation to direct classroom attention. Salespeople use it to guide customers through a store. Trial lawyers use it to direct jury attention to specific witnesses, exhibits, or moments. Public speakers use it to shift audience focus between slides, anecdotes, and calls to action.
What makes this tool especially useful for performers — and for anyone who works with live audiences — is that it operates below conscious awareness. Nobody in that Linz audience thought to themselves, “his chest is facing away from the table, so I am now going to look at the table.” They just looked. The response is reflexive, which means it is reliable. And because it is reliable, it is practicable.
You do not need to hope that the audience will follow your body orientation. You can count on it. You just need to make sure your body is oriented correctly during the moments that matter.
What I Learned from My Back
The most counterintuitive lesson from that Linz recording was that my back was doing as much work as my front. Every time I turned away from something, I was making a statement about what was important. And every time that statement was unintentional, I was sending the audience somewhere I did not want them to go.
Now I think about my back as much as I think about my face. Where is my back pointed? What am I turning away from? Is that turn deliberate or accidental? Am I creating productive curiosity or wasteful distraction?
These are not questions that belong to the “clean shirt” school of presentation advice. They are not questions that the sermonizing school would ever think to ask. They are technical questions about a specific tool of attention control, and they have specific, actionable answers.
Your body is broadcasting every second you are in front of an audience. Every angle, every turn, every shift in orientation is a signal. The question is not whether you are sending these signals. You are. The question is whether you are sending them on purpose.