Simple ways to improve eye contact with an audience when giving a speech include

Even a newbie at public speaking knows they should make eye contact.

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1. See people
2. Shrink the room
3. Find out how long it takes to make genuine eye connection
4. Move to another person at an appropriate time
5. Look for the reaction
6. Keep your eyes up at the end
7. Don’t be a lighthouse or a tennis umpire
8. Respect people who are uncomfortable

But the term eye contact is rather vague. It can infer just making fleeting “contact” with a person then moving on. Don’t make eye contact – make “eye connection”. Eye connection means spending time with each person so that person feels like you’re just talking to them. Eye connection has two major benefits:

People in your audience will feel that you have genuinely connected with them and that you care about their reaction.
Because you’re talking to people as if you were in a one-on-one conversation, you’ll come across as conversational. That makes you easy to listen to and engaging.

Here are my tips on how to make eye connection:

1. See people

A lot of people we work with confess that they don’t really see individual people in their audience. They’re just aware of a blur of faces. If you can relate to this, next time you present, experiment with seeing people. Look at their facial expressions, look for their reactions to what you’re saying. We call this ‘listening to your audience.”

2. Shrink the room

Imagine that the person you’re looking at is the only person in the room. For those few seconds you’re having a one-on-one conversation with just that person. This has two benefits. You’re likely to talk in a more conversational style because you’re drawing on the conversational skills you already have. It may also reduce your nervousness because you’ll no longer feel like you’re talking to this big audience – but just to one person.

3. Find out how long it takes to make genuine eye connection

It can be difficult to judge how much time is enough to make eye connection. And you may be concerned that if you spend too much time with one person they’ll start to feel uncomfortable. To find out how long it takes, gather together a few friends and deliver your presentation. Ask each person to rest their elbow on the table and raise their hand (resting the elbow is so that their arm doesn’t get too tired). Ask them to drop their hand when they feel you’ve made eye connection with them. You’re likely to find that the length of time needed to make that eye connection is longer than you think.

4. Move to another person at an appropriate time

If you carried out the experiment above, you probably found that your friends dropped their hands at the end of your sentences. That’s also an appropriate time to move onto another person. By doing this you’re adding “formatting”. In a written document there’s punctuation, paragraphs, and headings to guide the reader. In a presentation, the presenter adds the formatting by the way they deliver. The movement of your eyes is one way to add verbal formatting.

Note: If you tend to talk in long sentences, you may find that making eye connection with one person for a whole sentence is too long. If that’s the case, move to another person at the end of a phrase. (And work on making your sentences shorter – that will make it easier for your audience to digest what you’re saying.)

5. Look for the reaction

After important points look for the person’s reaction to what you’ve just said. If the person feels like you’ve been talking to them, they’ll nod. People nod when they’ve processed what you’ve just said. “Waiting for the nod” is an effective way of pacing your delivery to the rate at which your audience can take it in.

6. Keep your eyes up at the end

The most powerful time to have your eyes up is at the end of a sentence. Unfortunately, it’s also the time when you’ll be most tempted to drop your eyes so that you can look at your notes. Discipline yourself to keep your eyes up till you’ve finished your sentence, then look down. Look at your notes in silence. When you’re ready to continue, look up, find someone to talk to and then start talking.

7. Don’t be a lighthouse or a tennis umpire

A lighthouse presenter goes systematically around the room. A tennis umpire presenters looks first to the left, then to the right. Mix it up – be random!

8. Respect people who are uncomfortable

Some people in your audience may show that they’re uncomfortable with eye connection by looking away. Different cultures have different norms regarding eye connection. Respect that by spending less eye connection time with them – but don’t ignore them!

Eye contact is one of the most powerful tools you have to build connection with your audience. However, far too many speakers squander the opportunity by looking back at a screen, up toward the ceiling, or down at the floor.

Here are 10 simple public speaking tips that will make you a master of eye contact.

Tip 1: Before you speak, pause and connect with distinct listeners

I recently watched Douglas Wilson’s runner up speech in the 2006 Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking. After being introduced, Mr. Wilson strode across the stage, stopped, and shook the hand of the emcee. He then took a few steps to his starting position on the stage. Once he squared his body, he silently and deliberately turned his head to the left side of the audience, then to the middle, and finally to the right. Rather than scanning, he paused with each turn of his head.

Mr. Wilson’s dramatic pause gave him time to connect with his audience and to build anticipation for his speech. The only change I would recommend is to go left-right-middle or right-left-middle so that your head movement ends in the position where you wish to begin your speech.

Tip 2: Pick the person you are going to speak to at the start of your presentation

Even experienced speakers have a tendency to let their eyes dart around the room for the first 30 seconds of their talk. This behavior is instinctual; when our early ancestors stood in an open field, they needed to quickly size up their surroundings to keep from being eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger.

Though the tigers are gone, the defense mechanism is alive and well and must be intentionally overridden. Expert speakers pick the particular person they are going to speak to at the start of their speech. This person is generally in the center-middle of the audience.

Tip 3: Maintain eye contact with individuals for 3 to 5 seconds

There is one sure fire cure for looking up or looking down when speaking. The fix is to make eye contact with individuals for 3 to 5 seconds. This is the same practice you naturally follow when engaging in normal one-on-one conversation. Any longer and you make the other person feel uncomfortable. Any shorter and you look less than trustworthy.

Should you count one-two-three, one-two-three when speaking? No, that is of course impossible. Instead, it turns out that 3 to 5 seconds is the duration of a full sentence or a thought. Make it a practice to engage in eye contact with a new individual only between sentences.

Tip 4: Square your body with the person you are making eye contact with

Imagine that you and another person were standing and having a conversation. How awkward would it be if were positioned sideways and talking to them with your head turned? So, why would anyone do that during a presentation? Beats me, but plenty do.

Tip 5: Move toward the person you are making eye contact with

In one-on-one conversation, you tend to stand closer to people you care about. You can apply this same principle to build rapport with your audience by moving toward the person you are making eye contact with.

Tip 6: Make eye contact in a random pattern

Occasionally, when I run public speaking seminars, people take my “make eye contact with everyone in the room” advice very literally and start shooting ducks in a row. Instead of engaging your audience sequentially, make eye contact with people in your audience in a more or less random pattern.

Tip 7: While reenacting a story, maintain eye contact with the other characters in the scene

This is another best practice that I observed in Douglas Wilson’s award winning speech. At the beginning of his speech, he tells a story from his childhood about falling out of an oak tree. He fortunately caught his leg on a branch and was rescued by his nearby father. Taking one knee, he acts out both his younger self and his father.

Playing his father, he looks down and to the right and says “I thought I had lost you. I love you son.” Changing character, he turns his head up and to the left and says “I love you too, dad.” During the story, Mr. Wilson never breaks character. In the course of reenacting a story, maintain consistent eye contact with the other characters in the scene.

Tip 8: Strive to make eye contact with every individual in the room

Spread the love by trying to talk to every individual in your audience. With very large audiences, you should focus on the person in the middle of the section you want to engage. By focusing on that person, everyone in a reasonable radius will actually feel that you talking to them. Don’t believe me? Remember when you thought a teacher called on you in class only to discover she was calling on the person next to you?

Tip 9: Make eye contact, not ‘eyes contact’

When making eye contact, you should strive to look a person in a single pupil. Though I have not seen scientific proof, some speaking coaches recommend looking a person in the left pupil when making an emotional plea and looking them in the right pupil when making a logical argument. The rationale is that the right side of the brain controls emotions but processes images from the left eye, and vice versa.

Tip 10: Know when to break the eye contact rules

Like all good rules, the preceding nine were meant to be broken. We already learned that maintaining eye contact with your audience is actually destructive when inhabiting the characters within a story. Similarly, it is acceptable and desirable to close your eyes when reminiscing. You might choose to look up with calling upon a higher power.

Try it out!

Here is a great exercise to test out the three second eye contact rule from Tip #3. If you are in Toastmasters, ask your audience to raise their hands at the start of your Table Topic. Ask individuals to lower their hand only after you have maintained three full seconds of eye contact. If you disengage, the clock starts over. Have fun!