"Think of your eyes as if they have laser beams or spotlights in them," Taylor Swift advised singers when she appeared on The Voice. Eye contact, she told them, was an important way she connected with audience members, even in huge stadiums.
It's an important way you can connect with your audiences, too, even if your primary performance venue is the company conference room. Individualized eye contact, the kind that stays on one member of your audience for a bit, then moves to the next, is the approach we recommend—because of how it makes your audience feel.
It's worth noting that individualized eye contact can be good for you, as the speaker, too. So if you're feeling shy about looking them in the eye, consider these other benefits:
1. Eye contact can help you find the right tone for your voice.
When we worry our voice is too large for the room or we feel we don't quite sound like our natural selves, individualized eye contact can be the path to getting in the right zone.
By speaking to audience members one by one, instead of as a generic group, we tend to be more conversational, to get the volume right-sized.
Maybe that's because seeing our audience as a variety of separate people is a good reminder that while we're speaking to a group, they're each listening to us as the individuals they are, not as one giant ear.
2. Eye contact can help you get past your nerves and look more confident.
Nervous speakers often have a tendency to avoid eye contact. It might be the kid in us: If we pull the blanket over our heads and can't see the scary monster, it will go away—or at least not see us.
Looking audience members in the eye, though, can be a nice remedy for speaking jitters. We recommend you start with the friendly faces. Look at those people who are smiling at you, nodding, encouraging you. Let that build your confidence. Then move to the people who might not be quite as supportive once you're feeling settled.
Individualized eye contact is also one of the markers of a confident speaker, so lean into that when you're feeling shaky. When speakers use delivery techniques associated with confidence, audiences aren't aware the presenter feels nervous. As those nervous presenters move along, they tend to feel an inward confidence that matches their outward appearance.
3. Eye contact can make a scripted talk sound natural.
If you're working from notes and don't want to sound like you're reading, eye contact can help you achieve that goal in a way you might not expect.
We suggest you format your notes so you can:
- Look down and grab the phrase you want to say
- Look up and deliver that entire phrase through the last word before
- Looking down again to grab your next phrase.
You're striving to hold eye contact through that last key word before breaking it in a place that's natural to do so.
By making yourself sustain eye contact, you're pushing yourself to recall the words you need, rather than reading them from the page. From a delivery standpoint, it feels that your words are prompted from the page, going through your brain, then out of your mouth—rather than straight from a script to your mouth.
In other words, by focusing on sustaining eye contact, you're forcing yourself to re-engage with the message you've worked so hard to plan, thus making your notes sound more genuine and less scripted.
LEARN MORE
Explore the subtleties of excellent eye contact with our how-to guide.
For more tips on improving eye contact for a scripted speech, see this.
When it comes to eye contact and every other element of delivery, here's how you can help the presenter from you seat in the audience.
