The shoe count

The method is a count. You did one in chapter 1. Here's the full version, and it takes about a minute.

Before you go in, or as the beam comes on, make the headcount. Ask yourself how many people in this room have noticed you, or will notice the mark, and pick a number. Say it or write it. Don't skip this part, because the whole method rests on comparing your estimate to what you see, and if you don't fix the estimate first you'll adjust it afterwards and learn nothing.

Then look. Not a glance with your head down. Look at the room, slowly, one person at a time, and put each one in a column. Looking at me. Looking at something else. Phone, friend, screen, food, window, their own hands. Be honest in both directions. If someone is looking at you, count them. Then write the number in each column. Two numbers, a headcount and a shoe count, and the difference between them is the size of the audience that wasn't there.

Do it for a fortnight in different rooms. The café, the bus, the meeting, the gym, the queue. Keep the numbers somewhere, a note on the phone is fine. What I'd expect, from the research and from the shape of the thing, is that the headcount comes down on its own after a few days, because it's hard to keep estimating half the room when the count keeps saying one or none. That's the point. You're not arguing yourself out of the beam. You're measuring it until the estimate corrects.

Two things to know. The count will sometimes find someone looking. That's not the method failing. Someone looks at anyone who moves, and the question was never whether one person looks but whether the room does. And the count does something on its own, apart from the numbers, which is that for the minute you're doing it your attention is out on the room, where chapter 17 said it should be. You can't count shoes while monitoring your own arms. That minute is the beam turned off, and it's available in any room, for nothing.