Finally, someone was clapping. It had felt like the room was staring at him icily for the last hour. It’s hard to get your point across when everyone’s just looking at you without any affection. He wasn’t certain that he’d bored them to the point that their eyes had glazed over and they’d stopped caring. In fact, he was fairly certain that this crowd did care, just not about him. At a few points he’d even lost his nerve a little, as he felt like every word wasn’t so much falling on deaf ears as fizzling out on the fire of their hatred.

You have to keep going. You have to bolster your confidence and try to win the hearts and minds. That’s the job and that’s the challenge. Sure, some audiences can be slow to crack. That’s where the satisfaction comes from. Some audiences, on the other hand, are won over from the start. Preaching to the converted is easy. With these audiences, you don’t work for it; you simply reach out and let them do the work. Then all you have to do is ride the waves of appreciation until your time is up. The easy crowds give you the confidence to tackle the harder ones.

After sweating hard for his allotted time, and trying every trick in his insidious little book, he’d finally heard the first clap. The building tension in the room had been palpable and now there was a change in the atmosphere. Perhaps this was the point where the audience would rise to their feet in spontaneous appreciation of everything he’d been trying to say. Perhaps this single clap would spark a wave of sudden understanding. Perhaps they would turn to his viewpoint in this instant.

The clap was followed by a pause. Then another clap. Then a pause. Then another clap again. This wasn’t an ovation. This was the slow-clap. He’d never had the slow-clap before. As the rest of the audience solemnly joined in, he pondered which was the quickest route off the stage and out of the building.