There's a whole section in this course on body language. But I do want to focus on the number one presentation skill when it comes to body language, your eyes ever see somebody asking for something, or act like they're trying to be really serious and convince you, but they're looking over here at the floor, they're looking away, their eyes are darting. Your eyes are your most powerful body language tool. When you are giving a presentation, you need to be looking at people. Now most of us know that so for speaking one on one or two people, we'd look at them most of the time. Now you don't want to stare someone and make them feel like you're giving them the deadeye.

But you do want to be looking at people most the time, find a look down occasionally a little bit different when you're presenting to a larger audience and that case, you want to make sure you really do lock eyes for a few seconds. couple of sentences and then go to the next person, be more tips, advanced tips on icontact during presentations later on in the course as well but for right now, I just want you to focus on really looking at people, human beings are funny, we are very tit for tat sometimes somebody is mean to us will be mean back, somebody is rude to us will be rude back, not saying that's good, or you should be way that way. But in my experience, that is how people are. So if you're giving a presentation, and you're ignoring your audience, your audience is going to respond in kind by ignoring you because they've got something a lot more interesting.

If you don't find them interesting. They're gonna find something interesting on their cell phone, they're gonna check email, texts, what's going on on Facebook, Whatsapp, there's a lot of opportunities out there. That's why it's so critical that when you're getting giving a presentation and it's not incredibly comfortable one on one talking to one friend or one colleague, you're going to be tempted to stare at notes, you're going to be tempted to look at a screen and read bullet points. If you're really nervous, you might be tempted to stare straight ahead or stare at the floor, that one thing is likely to destroy any possibility you have of actually communicating your ideas, it's going to give people an extremely negative sense of your presentation skills. On the other hand, it can be relatively stiff, maybe your voice isn't that engaging. But if you're looking right at people, most of the time, they'll feel like you cared about them that you spoke directly to them that you were trying to have a conversation with them.

So while we're in this beginning of the course, I do want you to focus on things that are really going to have a big impact. Even if you can't do all 10,000 tips in this course, you're really focused on having great eye contact. Every time you give a presentation, it's going to help you a lot. Now I do realize we have students in this course are 192 countries, there are some cultural differences in some places and audience showing respect to you might actually close their eyes and you think they're sleeping. I understand that. All I can do is give you basic principles that I do find work most of the time in most places.

And I have worked with people from six continents. I do have students from 192 countries, and I've trained personally in 30 different countries around the world, but you're still going to have to filter it through the reality of your own environment. If I say something that's against what works in your culture, you're going to have to focus on what works in your culture. and ignore my advice from time to time. Remember, unless there's a really strong reason not to you need to be looking at your audience, whether it's one person 10 100 or 1000