The last post was about why eye contact matters. This one is about how to actually do it in a room where you are outnumbered two hundred to one.
Because understanding the principle and executing the technique are very different things. I understood, intellectually, that I should be making eye contact with my audience. I understood that looking at people creates connection, that it breaks down the barrier between performer and spectator, that it transforms a broadcast into a conversation. I understood all of this and I still could not do it consistently, because understanding a principle does not give you a method.
The method I eventually developed came from a combination of sources — primarily Scott Alexander’s notes on eye contact and connectivity, supplemented by Weber’s insistence on talking to people rather than things, and refined through a lot of awkward experimentation in front of real audiences.
Let me walk you through it.
The Problem With Natural Scanning
The first thing I tried was just scanning the room naturally. No system, no structure, just moving my eyes around the audience as I spoke. The idea was that if I was conscious of the importance of eye contact, my natural instincts would distribute my gaze appropriately.
They did not.
I discovered this when I watched a recording of a show in Salzburg. I had felt, during the performance, like I was connecting with the whole room. I remembered making eye contact with people on the left, in the middle, on the right. I remembered looking at the back rows.
The recording told a different story. My gaze had spent roughly seventy percent of the time on the center-front section of the audience. The first three rows, directly in front of me. The people I could see most clearly, the people whose reactions were most visible, the people whose faces were closest and therefore most comfortable to look at.
The people on the far left had received almost no direct attention. The far right got slightly more, but not much. The back rows were a wasteland. I had occasionally glanced toward the back, but those glances were fleeting and unfocused — my eyes sweeping past rather than settling on anyone.
The result was predictable. After the show, the people who came up to compliment me were almost entirely from the center-front section. The people on the periphery were polite but noticeably less effusive. They had enjoyed the show, but they had not felt personally included in it.
This is the natural scanning problem: without a deliberate system, your gaze gravitates toward comfort. You look at the people who are easiest to see, the people who are already giving you positive feedback, the people whose reactions reinforce your confidence. And you neglect the people in the peripheral zones — the sides, the back, the far edges — who need your attention most precisely because they are the ones most likely to feel excluded.
The Grid System
The system I developed is straightforward. Before every show, I mentally divide the audience into a grid. The specific grid depends on the room layout and the audience size, but the principle is always the same: break the room into zones, and cycle through those zones throughout the performance.
For a typical corporate event — a rectangular room with a stage at one end, audience seated in rows — I use a nine-zone grid. Three columns (left, center, right) and three rows (front, middle, back). Each zone is a section of the audience, maybe twenty to thirty people, that I treat as a unit.
During the performance, I cycle through these zones. Not mechanically, not on a fixed schedule, but with enough awareness that no zone goes unvisited for more than a minute or so. Within each zone, I find one person — one pair of eyes — and I deliver a line or two directly to that person. Then I move on. The person I looked at felt a direct connection. The people around them felt approximately included. And the zone as a whole received a signal that I know they are there.
The key insight is that I am not scanning. I am landing. The difference matters. Scanning is what security cameras do — a continuous, unfocused sweep across the space. Landing is what a conversation partner does — settling on a specific point, engaging with it briefly, then moving to the next. Each landing is a micro-conversation, a moment of direct connection, before the gaze moves on.
Alexander talks about this in his notes on connectivity. He describes making personal eye contact with specific sections, not just focusing on the front rows. He emphasizes that even in darkness, you should imagine you can see specific people — because the audience’s perception will be that you can see them and that you are talking to them personally. This breaks what he calls the “fourth wall” between performer and audience.
The Technique in Detail
Let me break down how I actually execute this during a show.
I start center-front. The opening lines of any performance are the most important, and they need to be directed at the core of the audience — the people directly in front of you, the people whose reactions you will see most clearly, the people who set the tone for everyone else. I find someone in the second or third row, someone who looks engaged and receptive, and I deliver my first few sentences to them.
Then I move. The first deliberate shift is to one of the sides — left or right, it does not matter which. I turn my body slightly, not just my eyes, because a head turn communicates to the entire room that I am including the periphery. I find someone in the left-front zone, deliver a line or two to them, and then shift again.
Over the course of a few minutes, I have covered the front three zones. Then I push deeper. I look toward the middle of the room, then toward the back. The back rows are the hardest because they are the farthest away, the least visible, and the easiest to fake. You can glance toward the back of the room and no one in the back row will know whether you actually saw them or just looked in their general direction.
This is where the imagining technique becomes important. Even when I cannot see individual faces in the back rows — because of lighting, distance, or simple visual limitations — I imagine that I can. I imagine a specific person back there, and I talk to that imagined person. The physical behavior this produces — the slight squint, the directed gaze, the body angle — is indistinguishable from actually making eye contact. And the people in the back row, who can see my face more clearly than I can see theirs because I am the one under the lights, perceive it as direct attention.
The Body Turn Principle
One thing I learned through trial and error is that eye contact from the eyes alone is not enough. You need to turn your body.
If you are standing center stage and you move only your eyes to look at someone on the far left, the signal is ambiguous — your eyes might be pointed at them, but your body is still facing center. If you turn your body — shoulders, chest, even take a small step in their direction — the signal becomes unmistakable. You are addressing them. Your entire physical presence is directed toward their section.
I practice this in my hotel room warmups. Left, center, right. Center, back-left, center, back-right. The goal is to make the turns fluid and natural, not mechanical. And the key is leading with intention rather than with mechanics. If I think “I should look left now,” the turn feels forced. If I think “I wonder how the people over there are receiving this,” the turn feels natural, because it is motivated by genuine curiosity rather than by a checklist.
The Danger Zones
Every room has danger zones — sections of the audience that your gaze naturally avoids. Identifying these before the show is part of my pre-performance routine.
The most common danger zones are the far sides and the back rows. In a wide room, the people at the extreme left and right edges are almost always neglected, because looking at them requires a significant body turn that can feel awkward. The back rows suffer because you cannot see the faces back there, so your brain deprioritizes them. Out of sight, out of mind. And the balcony, if there is one, is the worst danger zone of all — I have performed in venues where I completely forgot the balcony existed for entire segments.
Once I identify the danger zones, I deliberately over-index my attention toward them. Not equal time — the center is still important — but enough time that the people in the danger zones feel seen.
The Transition Technique
One of the most useful tricks I have developed is using transitions to shift zones. Every performance has transitions — the moments between routines, the brief pauses where you are moving from one piece to the next. These transitions are natural moments to shift your body position and redirect your gaze.
At the end of a routine, I might be facing the right side of the room. During the transition, I shift my body to face the left side. The next routine opens with my gaze directed toward the section I was neglecting during the previous one. This ensures that over the course of the full show, every section gets primary attention during at least one or two routines.
I think of it like a garden sprinkler — not the kind that sits in one spot and sprays in a fixed pattern, but the kind that rotates slowly, covering the full area over time. Each routine waters a different section. By the end of the show, the whole garden has been covered.
What It Feels Like When It Works
When the scanning system is working well, the effect is remarkable. The room feels unified. There is no cold spot where a section of the audience has disengaged. The energy is even across the space. Laughter comes from all directions, not just from the front-center. Applause is full and warm.
And the post-show interactions confirm it. People from all sections of the room approach me afterward. The woman from the back-left who says she felt like I was talking to her specifically. The man from the far right who was convinced I was about to call him up. They were not imagining things. I was looking at them. Maybe only for a second or two, but that was enough.
The most powerful validation came at a corporate event in Klagenfurt. After the show, the event organizer said: “Most speakers talk to the front rows. You talked to the whole room.” She did not know about the grid or the zone cycling. She just felt the result.
The Deeper Truth
The grid system is a technique. The body turns are mechanics. The zone cycling is a method. But underneath all of it is something simpler and more important: the genuine desire to include everyone.
If you do not actually care about the people at the back of the room, no system will save you. The audience will feel the gap between your mechanics and your motivation. They will sense that you are going through the motions of inclusion without actually including them.
But if you genuinely care — if you genuinely want every person in the room to feel like they are part of the experience — then the technique gives you a way to express that care at scale. It translates a feeling into a physical practice. It takes the impulse to connect and gives it structure.
I come back to something Weber writes about communicating your humanity. The eyes are the primary channel for that communication. Not your words, not your props, not your effects. Your eyes. Where they go, how long they stay, what they communicate when they land.
Learn to scan a room and you give yourself a technique. Learn to genuinely see the people in that room and you give yourself a connection that no technique can replicate.
The grid is the map. The connection is the territory. Both matter. But if I had to choose, I would choose the territory every time.