You will be able to use eye contact, stance and gestures that support your message.
Picture two speakers giving the same update in the same meeting room. The first stands behind the laptop, eyes moving between the screen and a spot on the far wall, one hand gripping a pen that clicks every few seconds. The second stands to one side of the screen, looks at one person while finishing a sentence, then at someone on the other side of the table, hands moving loosely as they talk. Same words, same slides. You would trust the second one more, and you might not be able to say why.
Body language does not carry your message. Your words do that, as lesson 5.4 explains. But it can help the audience follow and trust those words, or it can pull their attention away. This lesson covers eye contact, stance and gestures, and why there is no single right way to do any of them.
The common advice to "make eye contact with the audience" is hard to follow, because an audience is not one person. Speakers who try to look at everyone end up looking at no one: a sweep across the room, a fixed point above people's heads, or the slides.
A more practical approach is to talk to one person at a time. Look at one person for about a sentence or a short thought, then move to someone in a different part of the room for the next one. Over a few minutes, you will have connected with people across the room, and each of them will have felt spoken to rather than spoken at.
Make sure your attention reaches the sides and the back of the room as well as the middle. Many speakers favour the person who nods most, or the most senior person, and ignore the rest. In Wei Ling's management meeting, the natural pull was towards the managing director. She made a point of finishing sentences while looking at the warehouse managers too, especially when she talked about safety, which was their concern.
If eye contact makes you uncomfortable, start with the friendliest faces and widen from there. A sentence's worth of attention to each person is plenty; nobody wants to be stared at.
How you stand affects how you sound and how you are seen. Stand with your weight on both feet, roughly hip-width apart, knees soft rather than locked. This gives you a stable base, helps your breathing and stops the shifting from foot to foot that nerves tend to produce.
Movement is fine, and often helps, as long as it has a reason. Step towards the audience for a key point. Move to the screen to point at a chart, then step back. Walk to a different spot when you start a new section, which reinforces the transition. What distracts is pacing: walking back and forth with no purpose, usually to burn off nervous energy. If you notice yourself pacing on a recording, try planting your feet for each point and moving only between points.
Where you stand matters too. Standing behind a laptop or lectern puts a barrier between you and the room. If you can, stand beside the screen rather than in front of it, so the audience can see both you and the slides.
Many speakers do not know what to do with their hands. They grip the clicker, fold their arms, put their hands in their pockets or clasp them in front. None of these is wrong as a brief resting position, but held for a whole talk they look stiff.
The simplest approach is to let your hands gesture as they would in an animated conversation, roughly around waist height, where they are visible but not dramatic. Talking to a friend, you probably do this without a thought; standing in front of a room, nerves tend to freeze it. Rehearsing out loud while standing, which lesson 6.3 covers, brings it back.
Put down anything you might fidget with. Pens, clickers you are not using, lanyards, rings and water bottle caps all become distractions when nerves look for an outlet. Arjun found on his recording that he clicked a pen roughly every ten seconds. He now leaves pens on the table before he stands up.
Norms for eye contact and gesture vary between cultures, and between individuals within any culture. In some settings, steady eye contact with a senior person reads as confidence. In others, it can read as a challenge, and a slightly lowered gaze is the polite choice. Expansive gestures that feel natural to one speaker can look theatrical to an audience used to a more reserved style.
Singapore workplaces often bring many of these norms into one room, along with colleagues dialling in from the region. Communicate at work explores this in lesson 8.2, Hierarchy, face and hearing an indirect no. For presenting, the practical approach is not to follow one rule but to watch your audience. If people seem uncomfortable when you hold their gaze, hold it more briefly. If the room is formal and still, tone down big gestures. If they are relaxed and animated, you can be too.
Be wary of anyone who gives you strict rules here, such as always holding eye contact for exactly a certain number of seconds or never doing a particular gesture. Lesson 5.4, The body language statistic that is usually misquoted, explains why single-gesture rules mislead.
The best way to see your own body language is on video, with the sound off. Without your words, you notice only what your body is doing: where you look, how you stand, what your hands do. The activity asks you to do exactly that with three minutes of your talk, and to choose one habit to keep and one to change.
Video yourself presenting for three minutes, watch it with the sound off, and note one body language habit to keep and one to change.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).