Shifty eyes?

A few days ago I was coaching a dynamic young entrepreneur on a pitch to venture capitalists. He and his team had written a smashing speech, in which he used a series of rhetorical questions. "Do you do X every day? Do you wish you could do X faster and better? Have you thought about how improving X can expand the number of people you reach?" (I won't share the project here without permission, but, Dynamic Young Entrepreneur, if you're reading, I'd be happy to link to it!) As we worked together, I asked him to try picking out individuals in the audience to address each question to. What a difference that made!

We've established that moving your gaze around the room so that you connect with several people in the crowd is a good idea. We've also established the need to make direct, focused, sustained eye contact with one person for a few sentences, and then move on to another person, to convey a sense of personal connection.

The question is, when do you stop looking at one person and start looking at the next? In fact, breaking your gaze and turning in a different direction can be a great way to signal a change in focus or change in thought.

Like my entrepreneur, you could ask each of your rhetorical questions to a different individual in the audience. If you were suggesting ways to solve a problem, "We could do A. Or, we could do B. Or, we could try C," then you could look at a different member of your audience for each suggestion. This would help your audience to understand the difference between the items in the list.

Similarly, change your gaze when you want to transition from one thought to another. This could be as small as a sentence that shows an alternative: "However, we shouldn't go for D, because...." You'd break your gaze on "However" and change to focus on a new person.

It doesn't have to involve a contrary or difference. Any change in thought can be a good reason; beginning a new point, either a new major point (paragraph-sized or even sub-heading-sized) or minor point (sentence-sized). Shifting your gaze doesn't necessarily signal that two things are opposites; it just signals that the two things are distinct, discrete, or different. You have to use other techniques--words like "On the other hand" or "However" and changes in your voice and body position--to signal contraries or opposites.

You can use the need to connect with everyone in the room as useful "punctuation" for your speech! Now that you've learned the importance of looking at specific people, make sure you change focus from one person to another with intent and meaning.