I’ve been teaching public speaking to college students for over 16 years now. Many things have changed. And many haven’t. One of the things that beginning speakers still struggle with is eye contact.
I usually make notes like, “try not to look at the floor” or “look at your audience rather than the ceiling” or the most frequent, “we were jealous of all the attention you gave your notecards; it would have been nice to see your eyes more often!”
We know that eye contact is important to get our ideas across, to appear trustworthy, and to connect with our audience. So why do we have so much trouble with it? Eye contact is a form of nonverbal communication. Like other forms of nonverbal communication, it is spontaneous, unedited, and therefore, revealing. (You know, that whole “the eyes are the windows to the soul” stuff.) So let’s try to figure out why exactly we break eye contact during our presentations.
Why Do We Look Away?
Researchers Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon and Fiona Phelps devised an experiment to try to answer this question. They explored how human eye contact patterns emerge as early as 8 years old. They were specifically studying what they called “gaze aversion.” Through research, they concluded that most speakers look away for one of two reasons.
Insecurity
The first reason we look away has to do with insecurity. Some speakers are self-conscious, feeling like they are on display when they are speaking. Another form of insecurity emerged in the research as some speakers were simply uncomfortable with the intimacy of eye contact. It was this finding that explained why we tend to make less eye contact with the people seated closest to us. In addition, we make more eye contact in online situations than in face-to-face situations because the technology barrier makes us more comfortable.
Focus
The second reason we may break eye contact with the people we are talking to is to focus on what we are saying. In the 1970s, psychologist Paul Bakan hypothesized that our right or left lateral eye movement (LEM) is controlled by our brain hemispheres. While researchers have tested Bakan’s theories, no consistent conclusions have been made about why we look left or right. But the research into LEMs did produce some interesting patterns.
One was that difficult questions or scenarios in which the speaker had to think harder resulted in more gaze aversions. You have probably guessed the reason for this. David Gamon, who has a PhD in cognitive science, says, “Averting your gaze allows you to cut yourself off from a particularly attention-getting and distracting environmental stimulus – the questioner’s face – in order to focus on the answer to the question.” In addition, Gamon says, “Recent experiments have added a twist: If you somehow prevent people from averting their gaze, they have a harder time answering a question.” That means we might look away from our audience members if we are having trouble remembering what comes next in our speech, or if we are trying to recall a word, or if we feel distracted during our presentation.
How Do We Maintain Eye Contact?
So we might break eye contact because we are insecure or uncomfortable or because we are trying to focus. If we are looking away because we are insecure, we can work to build our confidence. We can become more comfortable speaking in public through practice. If we are looking away because we are thinking or focusing, it’s going to be more difficult to break this pattern because it’s an innate, biological coping mechanism that actually helps us perform better. However, if we are having trouble with recall, it could be a clue that we aren’t as prepared as we need to be. We might need more practice time so that our presentation comes more easily.
Working with a presentation coach can help us to understand both when and why we are gaze averting. And we just happen to know a few great coaches at Ethos3. Get in touch with one now.
