Your two most effective tools for making friends with the security guard in your listener’s brain are direct eye contact and a smile. Used together, they are an unbeatable combination.
By “security guard”, I mean the partnership between the brain stem (instinct) and the limbic system (emotions) – a partnership that operates below the level of conscious awareness. You could say it’s the level of “gut reaction”. When you “just have a feeling” about someone, whether positive or negative, that’s your security guard in action. Its job is to ensure your safety, and it does that by observing and evaluating the behaviour of the people you come in contact with. If their behaviour doesn’t feel right, you won’t be receptive to what they’re saying.
Few behaviours give a stronger message to a listener’s security guard than what a speaker does with her eyes. In western culture, lack of direct eye contact, along with the position of the head, can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways, none of them positive. If you want to be received as a “straight up” sort of person, keep your head straight up and look your listeners squarely in the eye.
But it can be so difficult! I watch participants in my SPEAK UP! workshops struggling to maintain eye contact for more than a split second. They’re fine during the initial exercise – looking into the eyes of each group member while counting aloud to five. Maybe that’s easy because it’s meaningless. But the moment they have to think and speak and, hopefully, make some sense, their eyes are skittering off in all directions. Why? I wonder if the problem is not so much looking at others, but letting them look at us.
Does it feel as if people can see too deeply inside if we look directly at them? As someone who was once painfully shy, I can attest to having used eye contact avoidance as a shield, particularly with someone with whom I wasn’t comfortable. Letting such a person look into my eyes made me feel unsafe.
The eyes don’t just take in information. They give a lot away about the person behind them. What are we afraid to reveal when we let people look into our eyes? Inadequacy or unworthiness to speak? Or simply our own fear that we might be inadequate or unworthy? We tend to avoid eye contact because of how we feel inside. It’s important to be aware of what we’re feeling before we can do something to change it. If you have difficulty with audience eye contact, check inside to see if you feel you have to protect yourself from “all those eyes”.
Ideally, you want to maintain eye contact with one member of your audience for as long as it takes to speak a complete thought. Then you pause and move your eyes to another listener for another complete thought. This means you will lock eyes with each listener for around five to seven seconds. If audience eye contact is a challenge, you may not at first be able to do that. (If you can’t tell, get a friend to watch your eyes and give you a report.)
You’ve probably heard the expression “the best defence is a good offense”. This principle worked wonders for me, and I’ll bet it will work for you, too. Practice it first with individuals before you present to a group, but it works just as well for many as for one.
Instead of defending yourself, take the initiative. Instead of shrinking away inside, intentionally have an attitude of moving outward in a warm and welcoming manner. Instead of being concerned that you are feeling uneasy, ask yourself what you can do and say to put the other person at ease. One of the best things you can do to make others feel at ease (which relaxes the security guard, remember) is to show them that you see them, you acknowledge them, and that they are important to you. And what’s the best way to do that? By looking into their eyes. Not only will you make a real connection with your listener, you will experience yourself as a larger, more assured individual and a more engaging speaker.
