Facilitate - Challenge Accepted

Facilitate magazine

Overview

I’ve always had an issue with video conferencing. If your eyes are focused on your subject’s face, ironically they’re not on the camera that would show you looking at them, with that being typically positioned just above the screen. The other party gets to see me looking slightly above or to the side of their eyes, not directly into them. Richard Mullender may have helped me with this. At last month’s IWFM Conference, the former hostage negotiator spoke of how ‘eyeballing’ your subject - locking eyes directly - can make people uneasy, changing the nature and quality of a conversation. A good face-to-face exchange, and good listening in general, involves this kind of body language. My off-kilter camera gaze may actuslly be a good thing...