To understand what eye contact is, you may find it helpful to think first about what it is not. Eye contact is not you looking at your audience members while they look at something else. Nor is it audience members looking directly at you while you stare at your notes or nervously gaze at the ceiling for some divine guidance on what to say next. Rather, with true eye contact, you look directly into the eyes of your audience members, and they look directly into yours.

Eye contact enables you to gauge the audience’s interest in your speech. By looking into your listeners’ eyes, you can discern how they’re feeling about the speech (fascinated? confused? upset?). Armed with these impressions, you can adapt your delivery if needed. For example, you could provide more details about a particular point if your listeners look fascinated and hungry for more or reexplain a key point if your listeners look confused or overwhelmed.

Eye contact also helps you interact with your audience. By glancing at a particular listener, for instance, and noticing that he or she seems eager to ask a question, you might be prompted to stop and take queries from the audience.

Finally, eye contact helps you compel your audience’s attention. Father Paul, a wise Episcopalian priest, once shared a secret of his effective sermonizing technique: “When I speak, I look right at my congregation. And when I do that, I make them look at me, too. And it is harder not to listen to me when I do that . . . precisely because of that!”3 When you and your audience establish eye contact, it becomes difficult for listeners to look away or mentally drift as you’re talking.

386

387

From the audience’s perspective, eye contact is critical for another reason entirely. In Western cultures, many people consider a willingness to make eye contact evidence of a speaker’s credibility—especially truthfulness. An old saying holds that “the eyes are the windows of the soul,” meaning that our eyes can betray who we really are or what we really think or believe. Of course, just because someone makes eye contact doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she is telling the truth. Likewise, a speaker’s failure to look directly at the audience may stem from causes other than dishonesty, such as nervousness or shyness. Still, as long as people believe that the eyes reveal the soul, they will associate a lack of eye contact with deception. To communicate honesty, expertise, and confidence, maintain frequent eye contact with your audience.

388

How you use eye contact depends on the size of your audience. With small audiences, try to establish and sustain direct eye contact with each listener at various points in your speech. With large audiences, this isn’t practical. Therefore, you’ll need to use a technique called panning. To pan your audience, think of your body as a tripod and your head as a movie camera that sits atop the tripod. Imagine yourself “filming” everyone in the group by moving your “camera” slowly from one side of your audience to the other. With this technique, you gradually survey all audience members—pausing and establishing extended eye contact with an individual listener for a few moments before moving on to do the same with another listener.

Panning with extended eye contact gives your audience the sense that you’re looking at each listener, even if you aren’t. And it still enables you to gauge your audience members’ interest, hold their attention, and interact with individual listeners if needed.