TJ Walker says the biggest mistake speakers make is poor eye contact. His fix: hold eye contact with one person for about five seconds while you finish a thought, then randomly jump to someone else across the room. It looks natural and keeps people engaged.
Chapters
We human beings are reciprocal. If someone smiles at us, chances are we smile back. If someone hits us, we want to defend ourselves by either doing this or hitting back. Well, it's exactly the same thing anytime you're giving a speech or presentation, when it comes to your eyes, the big mistake most speakers make is not that they say too many ums or uhs, except that their hands drift around and look awkward. Awkward. It's not that their tie is crooked or anything else about their appearance. The biggest problem most speakers make is the eye contact. They're staring at notes or they're ignoring their audience completely and looking at PowerPoint slides behind them. That is awful. That's what the bottom 1% of speakers do. There's another range of speakers of 98.9%. They're looking at the audience, but they're always looking at the entire audience the whole time. You don't want to be like that because when you sense a speaker is never really looking directly at you, what happens is you feel anonymous. You feel like, well, this person can't really see me. I'm not being rude. If I quickly check my phone and I check messages. Oh, let me check text. Oh, you see, Buzz rescheduled a meeting for 8:30 tomorrow. That's what happens when you don't really look your audience in the eye. So what am I suggesting? That you have a stare down for five minutes with this person and then stare down with another person? No, that's not what I'm suggesting. What I want you to do when you're speaking to a live audience in person. So I want you to look at one person and just talk for a couple of sentences. One thought. It's only about five seconds. Then go to another person in the room, look at that person strategically do that in a random way throughout the room. It's not just you don't want to seem like a really slow water sprinkler. That's going it in a mechanical way. You want it to seem natural. Front row here, back row there, middle here. You want to randomize it. That is the most effective way to use icon. If you want to be more successful, then improve your communication skills. The best way to do that, smash the subscribe button right now.
