This famous cover of National Geographic Magazine featured a photo by Steve McCurry. It shows a young Afghan girl staring directly in to the camera lens. She is pretty, with remarkable gray eyes, but that’s not what makes the photo so extraordinarily powerful. Rather it is the guileless intensity of her gaze that has made it probably the best-remembered cover in the magazine’s history.
In fact, if you flip through the pages of almost any issue, that’s what makes so many of the magazine’s photos so good; direct eye contact. Most photographers are either unwilling or unable to engage their subjects so directly, but when they do, it makes a photo far more compelling.
Of course, it’s nothing new to say that a good speaker needs to make eye contact with his audience, but little thought seems to be given to the eye contact of others. If you have assistants helping you with your presentation, are they engaging the audience with their eyes? Do your presentation slides feature characters looking directly at the audience? Both will draw attention away from you, the speaker. Eyes are just too powerful to compete with, so don’t. Give your audience only one set of eyes to captivate them; yours.
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