Making Eye Contact With Groups

The stock advice for addressing people in a group setting is to shift eye contact between different members of the group every few seconds.

The real answer is a little more nuanced than that though.

How much eye contact you give to each member of a group changes with every group.

This may seem like something incredibly complicated, and like too much for any human being to process while also attending to everything else that goes along with being a social animal.

However, its also an incredibly useful thing to realize, to practice and to get really, really good at.

Let’s imagine two business people.

Alfred has a very regimented view of eye contact. Three seconds here. Shift. Three seconds. Shift. No matter who he is in a meeting with his eye contact behaviour never changes.

Sandra is more subtle than that. When she makes eye contact she is aware first of all of who needs to hear what she is trying to say. If she is trying to convince a potential client to do business with her, her eye contact focus is mainly on that person. If she is speaking to partners, and one of them seems more on the fence than the other, she will direct her attention and her eye contact more to that person.

If someone asks her a question in a meeting, she’ll direct her gaze mainly to that person as she answers, though she might also shift to others if what she is saying applies to them as well. Sandra is also aware of the reactions of her listeners and uses eye contact to gauge how certain people are receiving what she is saying.

Obviously Sandra is more likely to achieve her social and business goals than Alfred.

So how does one become more like Sandra? The good news is that most of this comes naturally to people as they become more comfortable with eye contact in general. As you stop placing an arbitrary rule of three or four seconds on your eye contact, where your attention naturally needs to go will become clear.