8 tips to make your eye contact more powerful

Even a newbie at public speaking knows they should make eye contact.

But the term eye contact is rather vague. It can infer just making fleeting “contact” with a person then moving on. Don’t make eye contact – make “eye connection”.  Eye connection means spending time with each person so that person feels like you’re just talking to them. Eye connection has two major benefits:

1. People in your audience will feel that you have genuinely connected with them and that you care about their reaction.
2. Because you’re talking to people as if you were in a one-on-one conversation, you’ll come across as conversational. That makes you easy to listen to and engaging.

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9 ways to use space in your presentation

There are many benefits to movement in a presentation:

• It adds energy and variety to your presentation.
• It makes you look more confident – because people who are nervous are generally frozen in one spot.
• And as an added bonus, if you move, you may start to feel more confident. That’s partly because movement will help dissipate the extra adrenalin in your system.

Movement got a bad name because of university lecturers pacing up and down. Audiences are distracted by mindless, repetitive movement. Movement should be interspersed with stillness. That way, they both have more impact.

Incorporate movement in your presentation by planning different positions on the stage (or front of the room) that you’ll present from. In the theatre, this is called “blocking“. Blocking is deciding on the position and movement of the characters as they move through the play. You can block your presentation too. Here are some ideas: [Read more]