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The second article in the series speaks about the eye contact. You have
probably heard before, that 'the eyes are the window of the soul'. I do
not believe in souls, but that doesn't believe that I do not believe
into eye contact. And I do. Extremely actually.
Well lets see why.
One of the most important things again is, that people hear, what we
have to tell them, and that they believe us that.
Well, if you
have been a small child (and I presume you have), probably not only
once, you heard from your parents "Look me in the eyes and tell me...".
Obviously we believe, that if people look us in the essay , they are
more sincere to us than if they don't. And you should really give your
audience a feeling, that you are as sincere as possible. Of course you
should be, you shouldn't lie to your audience, and because you don't,
make it obvious to them.
The next thing that you are going to
achieve if you maintain good eye contact is, that everyone in the
audience will feel personally involved into your speech. You can
achieve that with looking everyone in the eyes. If you go from one
person to the other and tell them a sentence or two, they will feel, if
only for a second, that they are important to you and that you are
telling all that stuff only for them. This way they will pay more
attention to your speech and the chance that their brain wanders off is
smaller.
But if it does, you can get them back to listen to you with
the eye contact. If you have someone in the audience, that is
disturbing your speech/lecture, you can use the eye contact, to make
him/her to shut up or even to listen to what you are saying. You just
need to stare into the person for a while. The person will feel, that
you are looking at her and he will feel bad about disturbing, and maybe at least try to be less disturbing. Hopefully. Of course this little trick does not work always, but it works most of the time.
At
the end I need to answer a question, what is a 'good eye contact'.
Well, while you speak, you should not look into the wall behind the
class, or to the floor in front of you. If you are nervous and not
really sure what you should speak about this can happen to you, but you
need to control that. A lot of people look outside thought a window
while they speak. Don't do that, because you give a 'I don't care about
what I'm saying' attitude. What you should be doing is slowly wander
from one person to the other in the audience. As I previously
mentioned, tell a sentence or two to each person in the room, and move
on. If your audience is too big and you are not able to do that, don't
worry, all you need to do is sort of scan through the audience, and
every person will fill as if you are looking straight at them, even if
you are looking a group of 4, 5 at once.
So to sum up. Look at the people while you speak and they will listen
to you instead of doing other things and they will believe you more.
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