Public Speaking. Top tips for eye contact

In communication, the eyes are critical.
‘The eyes are windows to the soul’
‘The eyes shout what the lips fear to say’
‘The tongue may hide the truth, but the eyes – never!’
As these three quotes clearly infer.
Maybe it is clearer if we think of a statement that I am sure most of us have heard during our childhood:
‘Look me in the eyes and tell me that!’
Psychologists will tell us that instinctively we tend to avert our eyes when we are not telling the truth, which, of course, most parents have realised!
Unfortunately, when we grow up, some of us learn to overcome that instinct,
and as Hamlet says, we learn to
‘smile, and smile, and be a villain’
Nevertheless, on some level, that connection between eyes and honesty is hard-wired into our heads.

I am going to give you three reasons why eye contact is such an important ingredient in successful Public Speaking, followed by 10 ways to improve your eye contact when presenting.

1. Eye Contact keeps the audience alive and attentive

Often, the listener feels that 'if you are not looking at me, you are not talking to me'.
Teaching Public Speaking to a room of 25 fifteen-year-old boys taught me the value of eye contact in terms of engagement.  If you are attempting to engage an audience but, for whatever reason, fail to make regular eye contact with them, you are probably not connecting with them.   And for those of you who are particularly keen on your PowerPoint presentations, one danger – and there are many – is that if you become too tied to your slides or your notes, you will lose the ability to personally engage the individuals sitting in front of you through eye contact. 
If you are trying to connect with a room of fifteen-year-olds and you lose eye contact even with a small part of the room, you will probably find that a revolution is going to break out in that spot.  Eye contact will keep your audience engaged and responsible. 
Whenever I am in an audience and the speaker does not cast his eyes in my direction, apart from not feeling addressed, I might be more likely to check my phone and emails.  If I know that those eyes could hit me at any time, I feel more compelled to behave!.
Therefore, if nothing else, eye contact will gather your audience together and keep them attending.

2. Eye Contact makes you seem confident

I used to tease school students – especially if they were a little nervous about speaking – by informing them early on in the day:
‘As we go through today, I really do not care how you feel!....(looks of horror)…
…however… I care an enormous amount about how you seem!’
because as a speaker, ‘seeming’ is what matters!  None of us is going to feel completely confident, especially at the beginning of a presentation, but it is important that we ‘seem’ confident.
If you do not seem confident while presenting, I, in the audience, will start to get a little worried, and I will be asking myself:
Is it because you are not confident in your ability to put your point across?
Is it because you are not confident in the truth of what you are saying?
Is it because you are not confident in the relevance to me of what you are saying?
If I start to doubt you, I might then start to doubt everything around you.
This is why good eye contact is an immediate way of countering some of that doubt.
Someone who can look at me automatically feels like someone confident in themselves and in what they are saying.

3. Eye Contact makes you seem honest

Hence the comment above:
‘Look me in the eyes and tell me that!’
Strong eye contact suggests belief, sincerity, and trustworthiness.
If you cannot look your audience in the eye, particularly at a key moment or at a stage when you need them to buy into what you are saying, you are giving them an excuse not to believe in you.

Tips for improving Eye Contact

1. The watering can

One image I used to give to school students to help them understand the purpose of eye contact, and as a tip for maintaining eye contact, was to tell them to imagine that they were a watering can in a room full of flowers.  Every flower needs to be watered, and any flowers that fall outside the scope of their eye contact would slowly wither and die.  So they were encouraged to water all the flowers in the room equally and regularly.  However, they should avoid ‘jet-washing’ any particular flower, as too much individual eye contact can feel overwhelming to the recipient and cause them to ‘fall over’ under the weight.

2. Be democratic

No favourites.  You need to engage everyone.  One common speaking tip when you are feeling nervous is to ‘find a friendly face’ in the audience and speak to them.  I understand the purpose behind the advice – if you are uncomfortable, try to look for reassurance; however, if that person is already friendly, you do not need to win them over.  The person you really need to be addressing is the miserable, sceptical, disengaged one.  If you want to benefit from the reassurance of a friendly face, then acknowledge it to yourself, bank it, but focus more eye contact on the one who is not with you, because, as indicated above, that is the person who might use your lack of eye contact as an excuse to not engage with your point of view.

3. Split the room into four

A simple way to remind yourself to engage is to break the room into four sections (depending on the layout of the room, it could be more or less) and spend a few moments in each section and move on to the next, making sure that each section is properly covered.  If it is a small audience, you may be making eye contact with individuals in that section.  If it is a large room and if the audience is sitting in relative darkness and the speaker has a spotlight on them, then make contact with your eyes with the different areas of the room.

4. Hold eye contact for a couple of moments

Make contact for a couple of seconds before moving on.  Maybe you could hold your eye contact with a member of the audience for a complete sentence or idea and then move on to the next person.  You want to maintain eye contact long enough to engage with a particular person or part of the room

5. Avoid being a ‘searchlight’

Being a searchlight is when your eye contact systematically sweeps the room from one side to the other.  If I am sitting in the audience and I know your eye contact passes through the audience like a Mexican wave, I can start to predict how long it is going to be until you have scanned the whole room and will look at me again.  In public speaking, anything that becomes predictable can become distracting.  The speaker needs to cover the whole room, but it should feel more random and less predictable.  This can be a challenge for politicians who are speaking to an auditorium that has two autocues set up to the left of them and to the right of them, when they seem to be moving too mechanically from one side to the other.

6. Be aware of personal preference

Some people hold your gaze, in which case, full eye contact is not likely to feel uncomfortable to them.  In fact, if they are used to holding strong eye contact themselves, they will expect you to do the same.  If your eye contact flits away too quickly, they might be more inclined to attribute it to a lack of belief or honesty on the speaker’s behalf.
Equally, if the audience member feels uncomfortable under a heavy gaze, too much eye contact might be perceived as uncomfortable.

7. Be aware of cultural preferences

In some cultures, particularly between younger people and their elders, too much eye contact can be perceived as being too bold and lacking respect.  It is therefore useful to realise as a speaker that sometimes a lack of eye contact from members of the audience might actually indicate a level of respect, rather than a lack of engagement.
I remember hosting a training programme for a society that believed it was not right for women to look men in the eye.   One of the organisers of the event (and please note this was a training session on presentation skills) asked me to ensure that the women delegates did not look directly at the men when they were presenting.
I explained that I understood what he was saying, but that would work well if we were practising audience engagement.  Luckily, in the end, it was agreed that everyone in the room should be free to practise the skills fully.

8. Maintain eye contact between thoughts

I offer you this one as a ‘it depends’ piece of advice, as it will not always be true for every situation.
On some occasions, when you want to maintain full engagement, holding eye contact with the audience will signal continuity and continued attention.  On the other hand, there are plenty of times in a presentation when you may want to give your audience a moment to reflect as you prepare your next thought.  In fact, if you feel confident in the audience’s attention, you could actually pause for a couple of moments in silence with your eyes to the floor, and they will sit there in rapt attention waiting for your next utterance.

9. Allow the content and style of the speech to regulate eye contact

Sometimes, a speaker might be talking on a subject that has deep personal emotional significance, and their words are like an internal monologue shared with their audience, and the audience is almost eavesdropping on the speaker’s private thoughts.  In this case, full eye contact may not seem appropriate.  When Marc Antony breaks down in emotion in Shakespeare’s famous ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ speech, the actor will usually avert his eyes as he tells us
‘My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.’

10. Zoom or Teams

Since so many meetings are now hosted over the internet, speakers must get used to the idea that an illusion of eye contact is created, not by looking at the images of the participants on the screen, but by looking past them and into the small black camera directly ahead.  The great news is that by looking at the camera, the speaker is perceived as making eye contact with every individual at the meeting; there is no need for watering cans or breaking the room into four, as full eye contact is through the camera. 
And by doing so, all the principles of engagement, apparent confidence, and honesty are achieved in one go.