TJ Walker breaks down eye contact in presentations. Most speakers sweep the room like windshield wipers. Top performers hold one person's gaze for a full thought (4-6 seconds) before moving randomly to another, creating one-on-one connection and boosting engagement.
Chapters
Eye contact is incredibly important in your speech, in your presentation. Why is that? Well, human beings like to relate to other human beings. It's a relationship. Now, your relationship with your audience is not like your relationship with a boss or a fellow employee or a spouse, but nonetheless, it is still a relationship. And if you are completely ignoring someone else, it's human nature to ignore you back or to at least not feel as warm and fuzzy about you. So that's the real problem with reading a speech. When your face is down, you can't see anyone, or staring at a PowerPoint slide or deck behind you or off in space. If people can't see you looking at them, they conclude that you don't care about them. If you don't care about them, why should they care about you? Now, there's basically three types of eye contact as a speaker. There's the bottom 1% of speakers. They're just staring at their notes or staring at the slides the whole time in the audience. You could stand in the front row, light your hair on fire, or fall over from a heart attack. The speaker would never notice. That's the worst 1%. Then you have the next 98.9%. They're doing some version of the windshield wiper, or they're like a water sprinkler that's quickly going around. They're never really looking at any one person, but they're looking at the whole room or sections of the whole room. And it creates sort of a distance. You don't really feel like that speaker is looking at you. And as an audience member, if you don't feel like the speaker is looking at you, it's like they can't see you. If they can't see you, well, you might as well check your email. You might as well daydream. You might as well do your grocery list. So that's the problem with that sort of eye contact. There is another way of doing it, the top 1%. And I'm using these percentages in rough approximations, folks. But, but in my view, the top 1% of speakers do something very different. They look at one person in the audience, they hold that eye contact for a full thought, just a couple sentences. It's more like 4, 5, 6 seconds. And then they go to another person in the audience, they lock eyes, and they have a private one on one conversation with that person for a full thought. And they're doing it randomly throughout the whole audience. So what does this mean? If you're speaking to 50 people, which is not a particularly large group, but it's as large as many of us speak to. In a typical month or even a year sometimes, and you're talking for 20 minutes, it means you can give each person in the room highly specific eye contact several times during your presentation. Now, you're not just staring at a friendly face and ignoring everyone else. You're trying to make it more or less equal. But you're not doing it in a machine gun or methodical way. You're doing it in a random way throughout the room. Is it possible someone looks away? Sure, it's possible someone feels a little uncomfortable, maybe. But I'd much rather make someone feel a little bit uncomfortable than make them feel so comfortable they fall asleep. So again, you're not looking at the prettiest audience member exclusively. You're not looking at the senior person or the decision maker. You're giving everyone a couple of sentences, a full thought, so it's not going to seem like staring. You're not singling anyone out, but it's a steadier look. The beauty of this is when you're looking at one person for a full thought to everyone else, you look steadier and more focused and your head isn't sort of spinning around like that water sprinkler. Try this eye contact. You can have the exact same speech where the tone, the slides, everything else is the same. You change this one eye contact and it will be a much more powerful experience for the audience.
