8 Reasons why eye contact is so Crucial in Public Speaking

When it comes to speaking to a gathering, the first and foremost thing that you need is your audience's attention. Yes, keeping cool will matter, but when you find that the audience is paying attention to you, it helps you to take them into your confidence. Once that happens, you gain fluency in your speech due to the confidence that you gain. But you know, you are not going to speak for a few minutes. Nor is it a touch-and-go affair. Your speech is likely to continue for some time, depending upon the subject you are speaking on. This is where eye to eye contact is so very important to be an effective public speaker. This is the reason, the trainers who conduct public speaking courses in Perth as in any other place put an eye to eye contact ahead of everything else. 

Here are 8 reasons behind it that you need to know: 

1. Focusing on people's eyes will help to concentrate. When you let your eyes wander, they will lead your concentration to extraneous images, which will distract you, not doing any good to your concentration. Maintaining a fixed eye to eye contact will help you to avert that. 
2. When you do not make eye contact, you look less confident, less authoritative, and less compelling. In short, you fail to take the audience to your confidence and they lose interest in you in no time. 
3. When you do not maintain eye contact, your audience is less likely to look at you and then stop listening to you and you will find midway through your speech that they are talking amongst themselves. When you maintain eye contact, the audience will keep on concentrating on what you say and that helps you to connect with them easily. 
4. When you look into the eyes of your audience and scan their face, you actually impart your confidence and your conviction & belief into them. This helps you to put your views across to them. 
5. When you maintain sustained and focused eye contact, it will help you feel more confident and act with more assertion. Well, it might feel a bit weird at first, but with practice, you grow a habit of looking into the eyes of your listeners and that makes you a more confident and authoritative speaker. 
6. When you maintain eye contact, you actually invite your listeners to engage with you. They will automatically feel encouraged to listen to you¸ and their body language will be a clear indication of what they think about you. Simple gestures like frowns, nods, grins, or skeptical raising of eyebrows will be enough to indicate your success in drawing their fullest attention. 
7. Intermittent, if not continuous eye contact will help you transform your audience into active participants from passive listeners. The monologue you deliver will turn into dialogue, and you may actually find interacting with your audience. 
8. Besides, when you maintain eye contact with your audience, you actually slow down your speech and thus, it helps you to sound more authoritative and presidential. 

Therefore you see, when you maintain eye contact with your audience, you enjoy string advantages, which help you to the more effective, engaging, and powerful orator. The best way to know these finer points is to enroll in public speaking training courses in Perth or elsewhere, depending upon where you stay.