At Point Taken, we talk about the importance of eye gaze that every presenter has with their audience. Sustained eye contact connects us to each member of our audience, and them to us, the speaker. We get a lot of questions about the impact of eye contact. So let’s dive a little deeper today on how your eye contact impacts your audience’s impression of you.
Sometimes, we look directly at an individual while we are listening. This is called “Look-Listen” in scientific research. This usually indicates an active type of listening, and can be very powerful in connecting people. What we focus on at Point Taken is looking at others while we speak – called “Look-Speak.”
Turns out, to best communicate confidence and knowledge to our audience, we need to improve our ratio of Look-Speak to Look-Listen. If we only look at our audience while we are listening, but not while speaking, we are communicating a lower level of confidence to our audience. We need to increase our Look-Speak, in order to improve our audience’s perception of us.
Look-Speak can be hard for some people, especially when we discuss cultural differences. However, the more we connect visually with others while speaking, the more ‘in charge’ we appear, in a positive way. So today, try improving your ratio of Look-Listen to Look-Speak, and see the impact.