Articles Tagged ‘eye contact’
Make Eye Contact to Engage Your Audience
You’re looking good, but how do you engage with the audience?
So – now you are looking good but your audience don’t seem to look that interested – how do you engage with them?
It’s no good waiting for your audience to become interested in you – you need to take the initiative. Often people tell me when they present they just see a sea of blank faces staring at them. This is because they are treating the audience as one body – of a mass of people, rather than individuals.
To start to treat the audience as individuals you need to look at them – individually. This means you need to make eye contact with individuals in the audience. People are often hesitant about using eye contact – they feel it may intimidate their audience. But it actually has the opposite effect – it draws people in and engages them more fully.
Some help making eye contact
To help develop confident, controlled use of eye contact practice this exercise. You will need to stand in the middle of a room – ideally without anyone else there – as they will probably put you off!
Start to tell a story – something like what you have done today from when you got up in the morning, travelled to work, went to lunch etc. As you recite your story – focus on different objects in the room for about three seconds at a time. For example, you can look at the door, picture on the wall, light, chair, plant etc.
What you are now doing is giving eye contact around the room in a controlled and purposeful way. This is what you need to do with your audience – to keep everyone interested and involved.
By practising this exercise it will soon become a habit to automatically share your eye contact around the audience. You will look more purposeful and you will actually start to see a response from the audience. It makes the whole experience more interesting and a lot more fun to do!
Obviously this is even more effective to practice with an audience present. On our public courses we work on using eye contact by learning to engage with the other people on the course when we are presenting to them. It is a fun exercise to do with others and once people start to do it they soon find it difficult to present without looking at their audience!
The ability to Engage with the presentation audience is a key skill that many presenters simply don’t possess. You might have a great presentation ready to deliver but if you cant really connect with the audience – engage with them – then you are unlikely to have a successful outcome.
But how do you engage with the audience? And is it a skill that can be developed? Read more »
Presentation Skills from London Training Course Providers – The Power of Eye Contact
One of the key areas that can have a significant impact on the success (or not) of your presentation is how you connect visually with your audience. And one of the main ways of achieving that is by using eye contact. Read more »
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