Presention Skills - The Power of Eye Contact

Graham Bennett – Presentation Skills, Train the Trainer and Building Business Relationships

Graham is one of our Senior Partners and his clients include Merrill Lynch, Aviva Investors and BP. Last year saw the very successful start of the building business relationships programme which he has run as an Open Course and tailored for specific clients. He has an interesting and diverse acting background and a long term involvement with the Globe Theatre where he has given presentations and run educational workshops.

Presenting Skills - The Power of Eye Contact

by Graham Bennett

One of the things I talk about in Presentation and Communication generally is the power of eye contact.

There's an exercise we do which helps to demonstrate the power the listener has in any face to face conversation.

As soon as the listener takes away a powerful aspect of their listening behaviour - i.e. eye contact, it immediately can make the speaker feel differently about the value of what they have to say.

So, when you're in front of a larger audience presenting or public speaking - even though having a lot of pairs of eyes looking directly at you can be immediately terrifying and intimidating, it's not generally as thoroughly dispiriting as a lot of people removing their eye contact from you, once you have it!

Eye contact is powerful because it can have so many different effects - as some very wise person told me once - it can be warm, engaging, sociable, flirtatious, intimidating, inappropriate, accusatory, helpful, damning, loving etc.

So, as a presenter or public speaker then, you can be very clear on the message you may wish to convey in the content of your presentation, but all this good work can in effect be completely undermined by a contradictory style of eye contact or indeed tone of voice.

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