Quick Tips: Visual Focus

Your lead and follow coaching tip for today is Visual focus. 

In most Western contexts, eye contact signals to the other person that you are paying attention to them. A lack of eye contact can signal the opposite: disconnection, dismissal, or disinterest. Just think about the last time you tried to share information or ask a question of someone who was looking at their screen, at their phone, or out the window. You may have had to repeat yourself because they literally didn’t hear you.

On stage, the quickest way to move the audience’s focus from one place to another is for the performers to deliberately look in the new direction. 

The exception to this guideline of course is when you’re both looking at the same thing and talking about that thing, a power point slide, a white board, or maybe a beautiful sunset.

In a physical sense, our thoughts tend to follow our visual gaze. That doesn’t mean you can’t look at someone and be thinking about the laundry or some urgent deadline, but it’s harder. 

In general, wherever you look, that’s what you’ll be thinking about. This is part of how the scrolling feature on your phone traps your thoughts – by trapping your eyes.

So the tip this week is to look at the person you are speaking to or listening to. 

It sounds simple, but it can feel uncomfortable if you are not used to it, or if you have a challenging history with the other person, or if you’re just feeling distracted or rushed.

One way to help yourself focus visually is to remove distractions. Put your phone away, put down anything you’re carrying, and if you can, sit down in a chair facing the person. If you can’t do that, angle your body toward them as much as you can. Sitting actually lowers your heart rate and it’s a quick way to narrow your field of vision.

You can also tidy up your own space or your desk or your Zoom background so that it’s easier for other people to look at you. Here’s another Zoom tip that completely changed my life. Turn off self-view box, so that you cannot see yourself. Likewise, in shared physical spaces, remove any mirrors. Seeing yourself is incredibly distracting.

If you still have trouble maintaining visual focus, ask yourself, what are you feeling or thinking that’s making it hard? Are you self-conscious about your appearance? Do you need to clear the air with this particular person?  

Address any internal discomfort over visual focus at a separate time, in a way that feels appropriate and meaningful to you. If you’re not sure how to do that, start with some private journaling.

Try this out, experiment, and let me know how it goes!