There is a thing that happens at corporate events that drives me slightly mad. The keynote speaker takes the stage, looks out at the audience, and then proceeds to deliver the entire presentation to a fixed point somewhere above the heads of the people in the back row. Their eyes never settle on anyone. They gaze into the middle distance, as if addressing a philosophical concept rather than a room full of living, breathing humans. And the audience, sensing that they are not being seen, gradually stops seeing the speaker in return. Phones come out. Conversations start. The room disengages.
I have been that speaker. Early in my keynote career, I did exactly this. Standing in front of a hundred people in a conference room in Vienna, I delivered my material to the air. Not consciously — I was not aware of what I was doing. But I was so focused on remembering my script, on hitting my marks, on not messing up the timing of the effects woven into my keynote, that I forgot to look at anyone. My eyes were open, but I was not seeing.
Afterward, watching the recording in my hotel room, I noticed something I had missed in the moment: the audience was polite, attentive, and utterly disconnected. They were watching a presentation. They were not having an experience. And the missing ingredient was embarrassingly simple. I had not looked at them.
The Weber Rule
Ken Weber is absolute on this point in Maximum Entertainment: never utter a word unless you are looking into a pair of eyes. Not toward the audience in general. Not at the front row in aggregate. Into a pair of eyes. One specific person, for one or two seconds, before moving on to the next.
When I first read that, it seemed like hyperbole. Never utter a word? Not a single word? What about when you are handling a prop, or setting up an effect, or making a physical gesture that requires looking at your hands? Surely there are moments when eye contact is impossible.
And yes, there are. But the principle behind the absolutism is sound: the default state should be eyes on the audience, with departures from that default being brief, deliberate, and purposeful. Most performers have it reversed. Their default is eyes on their props, their table, the floor, the back wall — with occasional, accidental glances toward the audience. Weber is asking you to flip the ratio.
I did. It took months. It took practice, real practice, standing in hotel rooms talking to imaginary people in imaginary chairs, forcing myself to deliver my lines while looking at specific spots around the room. And it changed everything.
Why Eye Contact Is So Powerful
There is something primal about being looked at. Before we had language, before we had culture, before we had any of the elaborate social structures that define human civilization, we had eye contact. The ability to meet another creature’s gaze and communicate intention, attention, dominance, submission, curiosity, threat, or connection. Eye contact is one of the oldest forms of communication in the animal kingdom, and in humans, it retains an emotional power that is almost impossible to override with rational thought.
When someone looks you in the eyes, even briefly, even from across a room, your brain registers it as a personal connection. Not a public address. Not a broadcast. A connection between you and that specific person. The part of your brain that processes social signals fires up. You feel seen. You feel acknowledged. You feel that whatever is being said in that moment is being said to you, individually, even if you know intellectually that there are a hundred other people in the room.
This is why eye contact from a stage is so disproportionately powerful. The audience knows they are part of a crowd. They know the performer is addressing the group. But when your eyes meet theirs, even for a second, their emotional brain overrides that knowledge. For that second, you are talking to them. The effect is intimate. It is personal. It breaks through the barrier of anonymity that separates a performer from an audience.
I experience this as an audience member too. I have been at concerts, at lectures, at theater performances where the person on stage seemed to look directly at me for a moment. And even knowing that it was probably incidental, even knowing that the performer was likely scanning the room and I happened to be in the path of their gaze, I felt a jolt of connection. A brief, irrational feeling that they saw me. That I existed for them as an individual.
The Practical Challenge
The challenge, of course, is that you cannot actually maintain individual eye contact with two hundred people during a forty-five-minute performance. The math does not work. Even if you spent only two seconds per person, that would take nearly seven minutes of uninterrupted eye-contact cycling, which would be bizarre and uncomfortable for everyone involved.
The solution is not to connect with every individual but to create the impression of connecting with every individual. And the key to this is understanding that eye contact does not need to be sustained to be felt. A single second of direct gaze is enough. The person on the receiving end feels it. And the people around them — the people who see you looking in their general direction — feel it too, because the human brain is not precise about the exact angle of someone’s gaze from thirty meters away. If you look at someone in the seventh row, the five or six people around them all feel like you might have been looking at them.
This is why section-based eye contact works so well. You do not need to find individual eyes across a large room. You need to distribute your gaze across sections of the room, spending a few seconds looking into each section, making genuine contact with one or two people in that area, and then moving on. The people you looked at directly felt a personal connection. The people near them felt an approximate connection. And the people across the room felt reassured that you are not ignoring their side of the space.
I have developed a mental map for this. Before every show, I divide the room into a grid — left front, center front, right front, left middle, center middle, right middle, left back, center back, right back. During the performance, I cycle through this grid, spending roughly equal time looking into each section. Not mechanically, not on a timer, but with enough awareness that no section goes neglected for too long.
The hardest sections are the ones on the periphery. The people at the far left and far right edges, and the people in the back rows. These are the people who most expect to be ignored — and therefore the people who are most impacted when you include them. A moment of eye contact directed at the back-right corner of a room sends a message: I know you are there. You matter to this experience.
The Mentalism Advantage
One of the things I love about mentalism, and one of the reasons I gravitated toward it from card magic, is that it naturally supports strong eye contact. When you are performing a mentalism effect, much of the work is conversational. You are talking with people, reading their reactions, building a narrative around their thoughts and choices. The effect often happens in the space between you and the participant, not in your hands. This means your hands are often free, your props are minimal, and your eyes can be exactly where they should be: on the people.
Card magic, by contrast, is a constant battle against the pull of the props. The cards demand visual attention. When I shifted toward mentalism and started incorporating it into my keynotes, I noticed immediately that my eye contact improved — not because I was trying harder, but because the performance structure supported it. I was looking at people because that was where the effect was happening. The magic was social, not manual. And social magic lives in eye contact.
The Emotional Layer
There is something deeper happening with eye contact that goes beyond the mechanics of where you point your eyes. It is about what your eyes communicate when they meet someone else’s.
Weber talks about revealing emotions — staying in the moment, sharing what stirs you. Eye contact is the primary channel for this. When you look at someone and you are genuinely experiencing something — excitement, curiosity, warmth, surprise — your eyes communicate that emotion directly. The audience member does not just feel seen. They feel the emotion you are feeling, transmitted through the most ancient and direct communication channel humans possess.
This is why dead eyes on stage are so devastating. A performer who makes perfect mechanical eye contact but whose gaze is empty — who is looking at the audience without really seeing them, without feeling anything toward them — creates a deeply unsettling effect. The audience senses that something is wrong. They are being looked at but not seen. The eyes are pointing in the right direction, but the connection is missing.
I have been guilty of this. In shows where I was nervous, distracted, or running on autopilot, I have made eye contact that was technically correct but emotionally vacant. And the audience responded accordingly — with technically correct but emotionally vacant attention. They watched, but they did not engage. They stayed, but they were not present.
The fix is not more eye contact. The fix is more presence. More genuine engagement with the humans in front of you. More willingness to see them as individuals rather than as an undifferentiated mass labeled “audience.” When the feeling is real, the eye contact takes care of itself. Your eyes go where your attention goes, and if your attention is genuinely on the people, your eyes will find them naturally.
The Hotel Room Exercise
I developed an exercise that I do in hotel rooms before shows, and I want to share it because it sounds ridiculous and it works.
I stand in the room and I place objects around the space — a shoe on the desk, a water bottle on the windowsill, a pillow on the chair, a book on the nightstand. Each object represents a section of the audience. Then I run through my material, delivering my lines to the objects. Not just pointing my eyes at them — actually talking to them. The shoe is a skeptical businessman in the third row. The water bottle is a young woman at the back who is checking her phone. The pillow is a friendly face in the front who is already smiling.
The exercise builds the habit of distributing my gaze while speaking. It trains my body to turn, to shift, to include the whole room. And it trains my mind to think about the audience not as a monolithic entity but as a collection of individuals, each of whom deserves a moment of direct attention.
Adam laughed when I first told him about this exercise. Then he tried it. Then he stopped laughing and started doing it before his own performances.
The Connection Economy
I think we live in what I would call a connection economy. In a world of increasing digital interaction, increasing automation, increasing mediation of human contact through screens and algorithms, the experience of genuine human connection has become scarce and therefore valuable. People are hungry for it. They crave the feeling of being seen, not in the performative social-media sense of being noticed, but in the real, human sense of being acknowledged as an individual by another individual.
Live performance is one of the few remaining contexts where this can happen at scale. A performer who makes genuine eye contact with their audience is offering something that no screen, no recording, no streaming platform can replicate: the experience of being in the same room with another human being who sees you.
This is why live performance is not going away, despite every prediction to the contrary. This is why people pay to be in the room, even when they could watch the recording for free. This is why a live show that creates genuine connection will always be more powerful than a technically superior performance delivered through glass.
And eye contact is the primary mechanism through which that connection is established. Not the only one. But the primary one. The oldest, the most direct, the most emotionally potent.
Look at them. See them. Let them see you seeing them. It is the simplest thing a performer can do, and it is the foundation upon which everything else is built.