The third element of body language to consider is the use of eye contact. Doing this will boost your presentation in several ways. One of the main benefits of making eye contact is that it helps you communicate directly with individual audience members. What is more, eye contact is seen by many as a sign that you are speaking honestly. In addition to this, by making eye contact with people, they will feel the need to reciprocate and this will increase their levels of engagement with you and your presentation message.
Here are two pieces of advice for making effective eye contact:
1. Order
2. Length
1. Order
Try to make eye contact with everyone but don’t have a pattern. Instead, seek to catch each audience member’s gaze in a random order. For example, look at somebody in the back of the audience, then catch somebody to the right, return to the back, find somebody in the front and so on. By doing this, the audience will know that you might be looking at them at anytime and will likely more remain alert and receptive in your speech.
2. Length
A good amount of time is 2 or 3 seconds. This is enough time to make a connection, but not long enough to feel like staring and make feel somebody uncomfortable.
