Can COVID Cause House Blindness?

There are thousands of reported cases of house blindness directly attributable to the pandemic. If you, as a professional or business owner, suffer from house blindness, it can cost you dearly.

Here’s what I mean by house blindness: not seeing an obvious mess in your living or work space because, by virtue of familiarity, your brain has blanked it out. This may be excusable in a teenager’s bedroom, but not so much in a professional office where a slumping mountain of dog-eared tabloids schlepping off a wobbly plastic table onto a stained carpet is the first and last thing you see, and all you think about while you’re cooling your heels. You can never “un-see” that. The taint will never be expunged.

Now that COVID has forced us all to do business online, we need to be more attentive to “virtual house blindness”. Some examples:

☹ Bad lighting. If you do a zoom call in front of an open window in a darkish room, your viewers will only see a ghostly silhouette. Similarly, if you rely entirely on fluorescent or LED bright, you will probably look like a grey-green alien. Sitting in a dark room with only the light of your computer monitor will recall those silly summer camp “flashlight-under-the-chin” tricks.

☹ Bad backgrounds. Yes, your viewers can actually see what’s behind you, including flaccid birthday balloons, dead flowers, and a stuffed buzzard.

☹ Green-screen glitches. While Zoom and other delivery systems allow you to use green-screen or automated backgrounds, you do so at your own risk. As cute as it may be to broadcast from the Grand Canyon, you just look silly with streaks of sparks emanating from your head, hands and shoulders. Master these things off-line before you try them online.

☹ Web sites and social media sites which are three years out of date or which feature sketchy pictures from last year’s office party do not speak of professional competence.

Just as with house blindness in the real world, your online guests can and will see the embarrassing stuff you are no longer able to see. And when they see goofy things, they stop paying attention to your serious message.

Fortunately, dealing with house blindness is pretty straightforward. In the real world, just walk into your kitchen and pretend it’s your first time in a stranger’s home. Force yourself to note ten things that are askew. You will surely find them.

In the same fashion, keep a scratchpad on your desk exclusively to critique your online persona– lighting, voice, background, and the like. For example, I quickly discovered that I cough and I twitch too much, and that reading from notes on the desk looks creepy and disrespectful.

Another trick is to cc yourself on e-mails so you will know what they look like to a recipient. Similarly, when you do a Zoom session, record it and watch the replay so you can see what others see.

Don’t be virtually house blind!

Want to chat about your e-presence? Give me a no-obligation call.