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Public Speaking - Seeing
Eye-to-Eye
J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com,
an international consulting firm specializing in training
businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency.
The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site
classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be
reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.
In the presentation skills classes that we coach, 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.
If you observed people who spoke to you but avoided
eye-contact, how did that make you feel? Did you find it
affecting the way you felt about what they were saying?
How did it make you feel about yourself?
There are some people who have been taught that it is
disrespectful to look people directly in the eye, but even in
cultures where there are rules for eye contact based on social
hierarchy, the exceptions are when one is teaching or when one
wants to know he is being told the truth. 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.
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