Guide to Improve Eye Contact in Presentations

Having done my first presentation at office speech craft program, I was advised to improve the Eye-Contact. As a result I glanced each and everyone in the audience at my second speech. But again comments included that I need to improve my eye contact. But I didn't have any idea how. 

Luckily I got a chance to participate Business English Course at office conducted by British Council and it had a good practical session on improving presentation skills, specially eye contact. I felt that I improved my self a lot by following those guidelines. I'm sharing it here.Try yourself and be surprised with your improvements.

Eye Contact Technique

Target one person for one small sentence. If your sentence is too long, then break it into meaningful parts (you can do this from your mind). Look at one person when you say one portion and when you deliver the next part of that sentence look at another person. Remember to cover entire audience.

Lets take an example;

If you are going to say.... Hi, I'm (your Name). I work at (Your Company). My hobbies are watching movies, reading books and playing video games. Let's think if your audience has three columns. Then you can pick one person from each column and deliver one sentence to each of them. You can cover entire audience by following this method. Below image brief the whole idea.

If you have a long sentence like... I previously worked at XYZ Company, the world famous auto mobile manufacturer who invented ABC car model.  When we present this sentence we can identify three different parts as

•  I previously worked at XYZ Company...
• The world famous auto mobile manufacturer...
• Who invented ABC car model.

Then you can deliver one part to one person each.

Practicing this straightly in the presentation is not that much easy. Hence we practiced this in the class room. First we wrote a paragraph with small sentences and practiced reading it loudly in front of the audience, balancing the eye contact. Then we prepared a small paragraph with long sentences and practiced the same way.

It was really easy to maintain  and balance the eye contact in the presentation after practicing it with the method explained above. You can try it by yourself, but if you don't have a class room or audience to practice it, try in front of a mirror imagining you have a big audience. ENJOY!!!