Eye Contact--where to look?

Sometimes when you arrive at the podium--especially if you're nervous--you might not know where to look. But when you stand up in front of people to speak, remember that you're speaking to people; your message is meant to reach people. So the answer is easy. Where do you look? At the people you're talking to!

The first step toward using eye contact to connect with your audience and communicate your message is to look in their general direction--to disconnect from your notes, or the podium, or the PowerPoint monitor, or the blackboard--or your shoes, which often become really, really fascinating when you stand up to speak.

Now you're looking at the audience! Your head is up, and your eyes are forward. This is a big step in the right direction--but don't stop there! Now that you're looking at the audience, connect with them. Look directly at individuals within the crowd. Lock eyes with them. If you make sustained eye contact with individuals, your message will become so much stronger. You can talk directly to each person, as if you were having a conversation.

In a 2 minute speech for a group of 100, it's impossible to make meaningful eye contact everyone, so don't try. If you try, you start scanning the room and you don't make meaningful contact with everyone. Instead, pick out a few people from the crowd, and speak directly to them, as if the person you're speaking with is the only person in the room, and it is imperative that that person must understand exactly what you mean. If you connect with the woman in the green sweater there, and the man in the blue shirt there, then their immediate neighbors will feel like you're connecting with them, too. I call this "secondhand eye contact."

By connecting with selected people, you'll connect with their neighbors in a secondhand way, but you'll also improve your connection with the whole audience by communicating a sense of intimacy and establishing the potential for meaningful, sustained eye contact. You see, if I'm watching you have a direct, focused conversation with that woman in the green sweater, even if I'm not sitting next to her and getting your peripheral eye contact, I'm still getting the impression that you're connecting directly with that person, that you care about all of us here in the audience, and that you could connect with me that way too. Each of us listens more closely. Why? Because if you're talking to her now, then maybe you, that charismatic, brilliant person at the front of the room, might speak directly to me next!

You might be wondering: how do I make meaningful and sustained eye contact when I have to look at my notes to find out what I say next? You can! Watch for another post--we'll talk about that later this week. Watch out for two other posts besides that: how you can use eye contact both to impart your message to your audience and to gather information from them, and how you can use shifts in eye contact to emphasize points or to show a change in direction!