Public Speaking – Seeing Eye-to-Eye

In the presentation skills classes that our firm coaches, we begin with what we call our "Benchmark" exercise. Participants, one at a time, stand in front of the group and tell us about themselves, speaking for no more that a minute or so. We tell them that we'll be observing objectively what they do with their eyes, what they do with their hands, and how they stand when they speak.

We're also listening to the speed at which words come out of their mouth, and we're listening to their volume and inflection. By volume we mean the amount of air passing through the larynx, and inflection being changes in pitch and tone. Finally, we're listening for non-words, those umms and ahhs and y'knows and so forth that many people use to fill up any dead air time, because, of course, time could not possibly go on if it weren't filled with your words, right?

As long as we've been coaching this class, it never fails to amaze us how day after day, year after year, virtually everybody who performs this exercise engages in the very same behaviors. In fact, so similar is their performance that we can predict to the second what they will do. Sure, some people do different dysfunctional things with their arms and hands, but as a group they perform six to eight movements that are always the same from one group to the next.

Very few individuals ever speak at a volume level greater than seven on a scale from one to ten, not even the ones who eventually emerge as the real extroverts in the group. And nobody - nobody - ever stops speaking, or pauses, for even a moment once they launch.

We videotape this exercise, of course, and for most participants it's a real eye-opener, especially if they have never seen themselves present before. In fact, with the chemical soup that we described last lesson coursing through your brain, it's impossible to get any kind of handle on what you look like on the outside when speaking. The advantage of videotape is that people see people differently on screen than they do when watching them live. Humans filter out a lot of things they see; cameras do not.

It's this unfiltered look at what participants actually do that provides the first epiphany to the difference that having The Skills makes when facing a group. And as we hinted last session, the most noticeable component of The Skills is eye-contact.

When we process the benchmark exercise in class, because we don't key the participants to be looking for contact time before they speak, most people don't notice how short the average time is. In fact, when we ask participants how well each speaker did with regards to eye-contact, the universal answer is always, "Pretty good. She looked at everyone in the room".

Aerosol Eyes

"Look at everyone in the audience". Just about everybody has heard this bit of advice sometime in their public speaking education. And it's true; when you get up and speak in front of the group, you want to look to everyone in the audience. (In the case of very large groups, you at least want everyone in the audience to believe that throughout the presentation you were spending considerable time looking at just them. Happily, when you’re presenting correctly, this happens all by itself.)

The problem is, although we were told what to do, we were never really told us how to do it. As result, whenever we see people speak for the first time in class, we observe the phenomenon that we call "Aerosol Eyes". The speaker gets up in front of the room and immediately begins to spray the audience with his vision. Back and forth, back and forth, rarely holding eye-contact for more than a second at a time. And that is the average - one second. Often somewhere between a half a second and a second.

You might have noticed in your experience that some people actually don't hold eye-contact at all. When speaking to groups, some people tend to look down the whole time (hoping there are notes on the podium or the floor). Sometimes they look up to heavens (hoping they'll find divine inspiration).

That behavior is actually a rather common conditioned response to the difficulty people have keeping their thoughts straight when they’re gazing around the "plane of the eyeballs". Looking away lessens the amount of visual over-stimulation they receive in the aerosol eye mode.

But for the most part people tend to sweep back and forth, unwittingly sending out all the wrong signals, while exacerbating the fight-or-flight process already started when they stood and faced the group to begin with.