Page 190 - The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience by Carmine Gallo

MASTER STAGE PRESENCE 171

tell. He maintains eye contact with his audience nearly all the
time. He glances at a slide and immediately turns his attention
back to where it belongs—on those watching.
Most presenters spend too much time reading every word of
text on a slide. During demonstrations, mediocre presenters will
break eye contact completely. Research has discovered that eye
contact is associated with honesty, trustworthiness, sincerity,
and confidence. Avoiding eye contact is most often associated
with a lack of confidence and leadership ability. Breaking eye
contact is a surefire way to lose your connection with your
audience.
Jobs can make solid eye contact with his listeners because he
practices his presentations for weeks ahead of time (see Scene
15). He knows exactly what’s on each slide and what he’s going
to say when the slide appears. The more Jobs rehearses, the
more he has internalized the content, and the easier it is for him
to connect with his listeners. The majority of presenters fail to
practice, and it shows.
The second reason why Jobs can make solid eye contact is
that his slides are highly visual. More often than not, there are
no words at all on a slide—just photographs (see Scene 8 and
Scene 17). When there are words, they are few—sometimes just
one word on a slide. Visual slides force the speaker to deliver the
information to those whom the message is intended to reach—
the audience.

OPEN POSTURE
Jobs rarely crosses his arms or stands behind a lectern. His pos-
ture is “open.” An open posture simply means he has placed
nothing between himself and his audience. During demos, Jobs
sits parallel to the computer so nothing blocks his view of the
audience or the audience’s view of him. He performs a func-
tion on the computer and immediately turns to the audience
to explain what he just did, rarely breaking eye contact for a
long stretch of time. In Jobs’s early presentations, most notably
the 1984 Macintosh introduction, he stood behind a lectern.
He abandoned the lectern soon after and has never used one