Using pauses in presentations
Increasing audience energy when speaking
Positive eye contact is so important in public speaking.
Eye contact is a great way to build rapport, establish your credibility and come across as a confident speaker.
However, due to nerves and adrenaline, so many of us forget to make eye contact with our audience on the big day.
We end up becoming that speaker who looks at their feet for the entirety of the presentation.
Or the speaker whose eyes dart around and everybody's more distracted by what their eyes are doing than what they're saying.
Or perhaps we become the speaker who intensely focuses (a little unnervingly) on one person for the whole of their presentation. The ‘victim’ of their stare often feels uncomfortable and the remainder of the audience feel excluded from the message.
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So today's top tip is all about how to positively develop your eye contact when speaking. To really perfect it, we need to ensure that it is a focus when we are practicing and rehearsing our speech.
When it comes to rehearsal time, place four chairs around the room. Place two at the front, (left and right) and two at the back, (right and left).
On the chairs place four items from around your home. Make them interesting and as unusual as possible. For example, a packet of sausages, a teddy bear, a coat and an umbrella.
Now whilst you practice delivering your speech, make sure you consciously cycle through looking at the sausages, the teddy bear, the coat and the umbrella in order, practicing making ‘eye contact’ with each in turn.
Once you become comfortable with that, mix it up a bit. Change the order; let's go coat, sausages, teddy bear, umbrella, coat, teddy bear, umbrella, sausages. This change in order helps your eye contact to flow and become much more natural.
When it comes to the day of your big speech or presentation, close your eyes for a minute or two and just repeat to yourself the words ‘teddy bear’, ‘sausages’, ‘coat’ and ‘umbrella’. This action will trigger in your brain the positive memory of all of that practice you have undertaken, making contact with your four unusual items. It will get you both consciously and unconsciously making sure that you move and make eye contact during the delivery of your speech.
This is an unusual and quirky tip, but one that has worked for many great speakers over the years. Have fun with it. Its success does come down to practice, but making sure you do this activity during your rehearsal period will ensure that on the big day your speech is an eye-catching success!
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All of our recent blog posts are recorded as videos too. Click the video to watch this blog post narrated by Rich Watts, public speaking expert and 2x national public speaking champion.
To watch all our public speaking tips videos, visit the Rich Public Speaking Youtube channel here.
