האם קשר עין גורם לפחד קהל? - בית הספר לדיבור מול קהל

In order to be successful in speaking in front of an audience and persuading an audience, you need to understand how different it is from a dialogue, and in what ways it is different. The basis of the difference is the one-sidedness of speech in relation to dialogue, a difference that in my experience is the main reason for the fear of an audience and the inability to convince many: when we hold a dialogue, we constantly receive feedback that helps us understand what our interlocutors are thinking, and allows us to steer the conversation. This feedback can be verbal - "I agree" or "I think differently" or "I didn't understand, can you explain again". The feedback can also be non-verbal - a nod, a yawn, a raised eyebrow or an admiring smile.

Be that as it may, this feedback - which is present in a dialogue but is missing in a speech in front of an audience - gives us a precise orientation of the state of the conversation, and allows us to steer it in the necessary direction. It's such a natural and automatic process that we don't think about it at all, until we have to speak in front of an audience.

When we stand in front of an audience, we naturally try to get an understanding of what they think and feel, and for that we make eye contact with different people in the audience, and here comes a problem: there are a lot of them.
You can't really make personal eye contact with more than a handful of people. And so, when we look at an audience of ten, a hundred or a thousand people, it turns out that each of them transmits something different - one looks with a smile, another with disdain, a third even checks the time and the fourth chats with the fifth. In such a situation the right thing to do is to simply ask for the audience's attention and start, but for many people the result even before that is anxiety that comes from a lack of control that comes from disorientation, that comes from an excess of messages that are mostly inconsistent.

A long-term solution - read the audience as a group and not as a collection of individuals

The winning solution, used by experienced speakers, is to replace the detailed feedback from each individual participant with a situation where we scan the entire room, build a picture of the 'general mood' and act on it. it requires Practice in front of an audience And it is very difficult to do, but with proper practice it becomes natural.<

Here it is important to learn to recognize the body language of an audience and to understand what it means that the audience leans forward (interest) or back (fatigue and lack of interest), when the level of 'buzz' of conversations within the audience increases or decreases, etc. Then it is important to know how to use style and rhetorical techniques to stimulate the audience's attention and to arouse or calm them.

Medium-term solution - to avoid emotional dependence on the audience

In the medium term, the best way to avoid audience anxiety resulting from a lack of feedback is not to avoid need emotional in feedback In other words, not to feel the need to get approval from the audience that understood and agrees, but to build self-confidence in our preparation and our ability combined with an understanding that there is no point in hoping for approval from each individual participant. The solution proposed here is actually to lower expectations from the audience, and avoid relying on feedback from them. This technique (like the short-term technique) slightly hurts the effectiveness and persuasion towards the audience, but it reduces anxiety and therefore its overall effect on persuasiveness is positive.

The short-term solution is to avoid eye contact and stick to the heads of the chapters

The short-term solution for those who suffer from anxiety is to work with chapter leaders and stick to them without paying attention to the audience's reaction. This recommendation is of course the opposite of what is usually recommended in rhetoric books - where they always recommend looking at the audience "and if you are afraid of them, imagine them all in their underwear".
In the reality outside of the books, there are many who get anxious precisely because of the need to look at the entire audience and the inability to make a personal connection and receive supportive feedback from each and every one of the audience. For these, the short-term solution is to stick to the chapters, gain skill and confidence in speaking in front of an audience. And only then, gradually, raise your eyes from time to time and get a picture of the whole room.

And about the method of 'imagining them in their underwear'? In the ten years that I have been teaching rhetoric, I have encountered many people who have told me that this method was recommended to them. Not even one of them reported that she helped him. It only distracts the speaker, and confuses him. I personally would not want to be a student who sits in class while the lecturer tries to imagine her in underwear.