Episode #86: I've Got My Eye On You

Eye line in Japan is a tricky subject. This is a non-confrontational, high harmony, consensus culture. Looking people straight in the eye is just too aggressive for polite society here. Children are taught to look at the forehead, the chin, the throat rather than the eyes of the person they are speaking with. This idea carries on into established and accepted societal norms of interpersonal interaction. Foreigners burning the retinas of their Japanese counterparts by maintaining continuous strong eye contact makes Japanese people feel very uncomfortable. As a foreigner living here, after a while you find yourself shying away from making eye contact. This creates another set of problems for when you are dealing with other foreigners here, or when you are going overseas. In the West we are trained to “look a man straight in the eye”.

So, what happens when we are doing presentations and public speeches in Japan? Where should we be looking? Most Japanese speakers have no training and less of a clue about what they should be doing, when speaking in public. They are not much of a role model for us. No point modeling yourself on the hopeless. But won’t the audience react negatively to us if we are making eye contact with them?

We need to distinguish between a social conversation and a presentation. The former is by nature informal and the latter is a more businesslike affair. We are not a member of the audience chatting with our neighbour. We have been given the opportunity to speak to an audience, we are on stage or at the podium, we have the microphone, we have everyone’s attention. We are in the limelight. Our job is to inform, engage, persuade, impress, differentiate.

I was at a presentation about matching your wine glass with the variety of wine you are drinking. Our presenter had obviously given this type of presentation many times. One thing he did very well was engage with his audience, who were all senior businesspeople. He kept moving his eye line around the attendees, but not in a linear fashion. He was breaking it up, looking left, front, right, left, back etc. By keeping it unpredictable, the audience members couldn’t drift off and lose touch with what he was saying. Our brains are quite smart. If we understand that the eye line is going around in a set order we get distracted and our thoughts are also subsumed by something other than what the speaker is talking about. Even worse today, they will be whipping out their phones and playing around with email or social media.

By engaging our eyes, to keep continuous contact with our audience, we can really control the proceedings. Be it Japan or anywhere else for that matter, we have to regulate the length of our eye contact. Making eye contact is good. Holding it for too long is not so good. Boring a hole into the head of our audience member becomes oppressive. Staring at someone continuously is hard to take for the recipient. Too short and it becomes fake eye contact, which has no benefit. Too long and it creates an uncomfortable feeling in our audience member, which pretty much defeats our purpose. There is no hard and fast rule but around six seconds allows sufficient eye contact to drive home the point we are making without it becoming too oppressive.

Combining voice, gestures and eye contact together professionally is the Power Three of public speaking. If you want to make a macro point, a big picture point, then make eye contact with someone at the very back of the room. You should also open up your arms in bigger gestures sizes to make the point feel more inclusive in a big room. By the way, as an additional bonus, depending on the size of the audience, the twenty people sitting around that person you have selected, will all imagine you are looking directly at them as well. So despite the distance you can engage with more people, more powerfully, in the time allotted to you.

If you want to make a micro point, a strong assertion, a powerful statement, then pick someone in the front row and address them directly. Stand on the very apron of the stage when you do this, if you can. Your physical proximity is also a big trigger for credibility, because you are turning the body language up to max power. Even those seated at the back will pick up on the power of your assertion, despite the fact you are not speaking to them directly. They will recognize this is an important statement, by the way you have presented it.