How To Make Your First Two Seconds Count

Forbes

22-07-2025

Speaker at Business Conference with Public Presentations. Audience at the conference hall. ... More Entrepreneurship club.
Malcolm Gladwell spent 288 pages of his international bestseller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking discussing what he calls 'those first two seconds' of how people make snap judgments based on first impressions—validating the maxim, 'First impressions last.'
Unfortunately, what most presenters do in those first two seconds creates a negative impression. Presenters, like all human beings under stress, experience a jolt of adrenaline. Those first two seconds are stressful to even the most experienced presenters, including yours truly, even after a decades-long career as a coach. This adrenaline rush is also known as 'The Fight or Flight Reaction,' a series of innate involuntary physical responses that enable an organism to manage stress. One of those responses is for the eyes to scan the immediate area for signs of danger. In prehistoric terms, the eyes are driven to become hyperalert to a potential attack by saber-toothed tiger.
In a presentation, that scan is perceived by any audience as shifty-eyed. Would you or anyone do business with someone you perceive as shifty-eyed?
This prejudicial judgement is imprinted in all human beings at birth. A team of British and Italian scientists conducted a study of newborns that concluded, 'human infants prefer to look at faces that engage them in mutual gaze and that, from an early age, healthy babies show enhanced neural processing of direct gaze. The exceptionally early sensitivity to mutual gaze demonstrated in these studies is arguably the major foundation for the later development of social skills.'
The conventional solution is to make eye contact. An additional convention is to make eye contact with everyone in the audience, all of which results in rapid scanning. However, scanning is the opposite of eye contact.
But those first two seconds are also known as the 'throat clearing moment,' and most presenters use that moment to start with an amenable welcoming statement. 'Good afternoon. Thank you for taking the time to…' and then go on to cite the event.
You can use this moment to let your eyes do what your adrenaline is driving them to do, scan the room. No one can possibly view that behavior as shifty-eyed because as William Shakespeare had Hamlet say, you will have 'Suit(ed) the action to the words, the word to the action.'
That sweeping action accompanying your gracious words will appear appropriate and courteous to your audience. By making that involuntary scan purposeful, you will no longer appear furtive.
Once you've scanned the room, your Fight or Flight system will be satisfied that you are aware of the escape routes and will diminish the need to scan. That's when you can begin to make eye contact, but now you can do so with one person at a time.
Analogously, the U.S. Army understands the natural inclination of the eyes to scan an environment. In a manual on night firing, a challenge for vision, they recommend that, before focusing on a target, a soldier should scan 'from right to left or from left to right using a slow, regular scanning movement' because it 'enables soldiers to overcome many of the physiological limitations of their eyes and reduce the visual illusions that so often confuse them.'