Nick Morgan is the author of Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. He also writes an excellent blog with tips for effective speaking. One of his recent posts was about dealing with a negative audience.
Our natural inclination might be to start with the dissenters in the audience and try to win them over but that is the opposite of what he suggests. His first suggestion is to "talk to the positive people in the room."
"This is counter-intuitive, but important, because if you can establish a positive relationship with a few people in the room, that positive feeling will ripple across the crowd. We have these things called mirror neurons in our brains that give us essentially the same experience as we see the people around us having. So if we see someone reacting positively, we will too."
This same advice also applies to our own lives. Too often we focus on the negative aspects of our life and/or work and try to tackle the problems and weaknesses first. Instead, we should focus first on the positive elements of our lives and then the success and confidence we gain in those areas will ripple across the other parts of our lives as well.
If you use this strategy, you'll be surprised to find that, after starting with the positives, the negatives seem to disappear or at least become less problematic by the time you eventually get to them.
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