Eye contact is one of the most important things you can do as a public speaker. Reaching and communicating to the audience through your eyes.
Effective public speakers have this nailed because what eye contact does is it builds credibility and trust between you and your audience.
Speakers who look down at their notes the entire time and never get that visual feedback from their audience by looking around the room lack in credibility. They're perceived as not as knowledgeable on the topic and people don't trust them as much.
Eye contact conveys that honesty. It shows your audience that you're ready to engage with them. And using that and opening yourself up to that relationship is very important.
For smaller audiences, make sure you focus on everyone in the room whenever you can. For large audience, try the triangle method below.
Triangle Method
This method is really good for eye contact when you're speaking to very large and vast audiences, about a hundred people or more. When you have large audiences, it's difficult to make eye contact with every single person in the room like you'd want to with a smaller audience.
So what you should do in order to encompass the whole room with your eye contact is focus on the triangle. You can start at the bottom-right hand area of the room, later in the speech you move over to the side and then up to the point of the triangle.
And by doing that, you will project your eye contact to all those different areas of the triangle. If you're doing really well with your eye contact, you can take that triangle and invert it upside down.
You want to make it natural, look people in the eye, communicate honesty and you'll get that trust.
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