James Humes, former presidential speechwriter, who identifies public speaking as “the language of leadership, says, every time you speak—whether it’s in an auditorium, in a company conference room, or even at your own desk—you are auditioning for leadership.”
Let’s take a look at the physiology of vision. Light enters the front of the eyeball, hits the rods and cones at the back of the eye, and creates an electrical impulse that shoots around the optic nerve to the optic lobe at the back of the skill. Your brain then takes the better part of a second to decipher this electrical Morse code. While the act of turning the electrical impulses into light, color and contrast is an unconscious brain activity, putting the shapes into a comprehensible context is a conscious brain activity. That is where we create a problem for ourselves as speakers.
It is perfectly natural to look rapidly around the room when first standing in front of an audience. This rapid eye movement creates visual over-stimulation. It forces our brain to process incoming visual stimuli on a conscious level. When speaking to a group, we have another conscious activity that is trying to occur simultaneously… the delivery of our prepared topic! Our brains do not do two things at once very well, on a conscious level. This is why our mind will sometimes go blank during the delivery of our prepared topic — to allow our brain to catch up on the processing of visual stimuli. Effective speakers naturally solve this problem by glancing at the ceiling or floor, where there is usually a blank space with little visual stimuli to process. This works! It would also work to close your eyes, as a speaker, to limit incoming visual stimulus. For obvious reasons, closing your eyes would not be an acceptable strategy. The most productive way to limit visual stimuli is to make contact with the eyes of an audience member.
There are four powerful benefits to limiting visual stimulus this way:
1. You can “read” the response from your audience as you deliver a whole thought to one individual.
2. Direct eye contact conveys sincerity in all cultures across the world.
3. Direct “eye contact” provides time to limit visual stimuli so you can think more clearly.
4. It allows you to practice the 93% rule. We know from a famous study by Professor Albert Mehrabian of UCLA, that words – the things we say – account for only 7% of the total message that people receive. The other 93% of the message that we communicate when we speak is contained in our tone of voice and non-verbal elements, such as body language and eye contact. It’s important, then, to spend some time to understand how we are perceived when we speak with others.
Finally, when pauses are added to this controlled eye contact technique, you enhance your non-verbal effectiveness and positive audience reception. The pause plus eye contact puts your words into one cohesive thought at a time for the audience. It also adds emphasis to the key points you wish to convey as a speaker. Also, when you can’t think of what to say next, this pause buys you thinking time without giving away to the audience that your mind has gone momentarily blank.
The mastery of this controlled eye contact technique is the foundation skill for successfully connecting with an audience from one to one thousand.
