|
The next time you find yourself fortunate enough to be a
member of the audience for a business presentation, take careful
note of just how long the presenter spends in eye contact with
any one listener before she moves on to the next.
You might expect that time to be in the are of 3-7
seconds. But what
you’ll find is something quite different: the average speaker
never averages more than one second!
When 99% of speakers get up in front of a crowd, they
actually engage in what we call “aerosol eyes”, spraying the
audience with their gaze back and forth, back and forth, holding
eye contact with any one person for between one-half and one and
one-half seconds.
Aerosol Eyes causes numerous problems. As a matter of
fact, it causes most of the problems that face speakers who have
not learned a better way. And just as our Rule #2 says
that if you're doing it right, its always a Win-Win for both the
speaker and the audience, it's also true that when you do what
most speakers do, its a Lose-Lose for all. Spraying the
audience with your vision, never holding eye-contact for more
than a second or so, creates problems for both the speaker and
the audience.
The first thing that happens is that every time you look to
a new person in the audience and do your spray, you force your
brain to pick up and then process a new field of view.
When it moves to a new field of view, your brain has to
re-calculate everything that it's seeing. And when it does
that once a second, over and over again in a situation where the
body is already tensed up, you quickly reach a state of visual
over-stimulation.
When you spray the audience as you speak, you ask your
brain to take in and process way too much information per unit
time. Remember, in this situation of one-against-many,
your brain is in its threat calculation mode, and every time you
ask it process a new scene, it has to also perform a new threat
calculation.
Every time you look around, every time you frame a new
image, you're picking up the color of the audience member's
clothes, the look in their eyes, the hunch of their shoulders.
You're registering their countenance. You're trying to
decide: is this person going to jump across his seat, come up
here and try to kill me? Do I have to kill him first, or
would it be best to try to run away? And pretty soon –
performing the visual threat calculations and re-calculations
once a second - pretty soon you find yourself in a state of
visual and mental over-stimulation. You just get too much.
Every single time you change your field of view, your brain
unfortunately takes in everything, and it's constantly
performing these recalculations. It has to. That’s its
job.
Train of thought
Let's remember that when this is happening, when you are
trying to process this onslaught of visual information, it’s
at a time when blood is draining from the thought-processing
centers of your brain to feed the motor sections. Because
your body's priority at this point is not trying to appear
poised and intelligent and well-prepared for your boss in the
back of the room, it's getting your body prepared to fight or
flee. Is it any wonder that you so often find yourself
with a loss of train of thought?
Know this: no amount of logic, reasoning, or positive
attitude training is going to change the way your body responds
when you subject your brain to the repeated stimuli of looking
at a new strange face every second, over and over again.
Please don't set yourself up for certain failure by believing
you can change a physiological result by thinking nice thoughts.
We're huge believers in and proponents of the power of positive
thinking. Think positively about this: you can change the
result by changing a few behaviors. But not your
chemistry.
People who appear calm and collected, or even enjoying
themselves, when facing a large audience don't appear that way
because they have more inner strength than you or because they
have more self-discipline or they're better at conquering their
weaknesses. They feel competent and confident because they don't
have nature's fear juice surging through their veins. And
they do that by simply not subjecting themselves to the stimuli!
How? Simple. They don't scan. Rather
than doing the aerosol eyes thing, they focus on one person at a
time and maintain that direct eye contact through the end of
their thought.
A complete thought might take anywhere between 2 and 10
seconds to say. It’s
important to note that there is no rule about how long one
should hold eye-contact, although the average is around 5
seconds. But if the
average thought takes about 5 seconds to complete, that means
that a speaker doing it correctly spends five times the average
in eye contact, and thus reduces the amount of visual
stimulation he asks his brain to process by 80%.
An 80% reduction in over-stimulation yields huge
differences in the amount of hormones coursing through your
veins, and the result is a lowering of the feelings of anxiety
by an equal amount.
We've said many times, and we'll say it again, that most of
the problems that people have becoming great speakers, or even
becoming confident when speaking, are based in trying to do too
many things at one time. You don't need to scan the room
at 60 PPM (people per minute). You're working too hard when you
do that, when you're working too hard, you're doing it wrong.
But you already knew that, right?
The takeaway, then, is this: You can not change the way
your body will react to a given stimuli, but you can easily
change the type and volume of the stimuli to which you subject
it.
|
