How to Strike Everyone as Intelligent and Insightful by Using Your Eyes

It's only a slight exaggeration to say Helen of Troy could launch

ships with her eyes and Davy Crockett could stare down a bear.

Your eyes are personal grenades that have the power to detonate

people's emotions. Just as martial arts masters register their fists as

lethal weapons, you can register your eyes as psychological lethal

weapons when you master the following eye-contact techniques.

Beloved people in the game of life look beyond the conventional wisdom that teaches "Keep good eye contact." For one, they

understand that to certain suspicious or insecure people, intense

eye contact can be a virulent intrusion.

When I was growing up, my family had a Haitian housekeeper whose fantasies were filled with witches, warlocks, and

black magic. Zola refused to be left alone in a room with Louie,

my Siamese cat. "Louie looks right through me—sees my soul,"

she'd whisper to me fearfully.

In some cultures, intense eye contact is sorcery. In others, staring at someone can be threatening or disrespectful. Realizing this,

big players in the international scene prefer to pack a book on cultural body-language differences in their carry-on rather than a

Berlitz phrase book. In our culture, however, big winners know

exaggerated eye contact can be extremely advantageous, especially

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How to Strike Everyone as

Intelligent and Insightful

by Using Your Eyes

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Copyright 2003 by Leil Lowndes. Click Here for Terms of Use.

between the sexes. In business, even when romance is not in the

picture, strong eye contact packs a powerful wallop between men

and women.

A Boston center conducted a study to learn the precise effect.5

The researchers asked opposite-sex individuals to have a twominute casual conversation. They tricked half their subjects into

maintaining intense eye contact by directing them to count the

number of times their partner blinked. They gave the other half

of the subjects no special eye-contact directions for the chat.

When they questioned the subjects afterward, the unsuspecting blinkers reported significantly higher feelings of respect and

fondness for their colleagues who, unbeknownst to them, had simply been counting their blinks.

I've experienced the closeness intense eye contact engenders

with a stranger firsthand. Once, when giving a seminar to several

hundred people, one woman's face in the crowd caught my attention. The participant's appearance was not particularly unique. Yet

she became the focus of my attention throughout my talk. Why?

Because not for one moment did she take her eyes off my face.

Even when I finished making a point and was silent, her eyes

stayed hungrily on my face. I sensed she couldn't wait to savor the

next insight to spout from my lips. I loved it! Her concentration

and obvious fascination inspired me to remember stories and make

important points I'd long forgotten.

Right after my talk, I resolved to seek out this new friend who

was so enthralled by my speech. As people were leaving the hall,

I quickly sidled up behind my big fan. "Excuse me," I said. My

fan kept walking. "Excuse me," I repeated a tad louder. My

admirer didn't vary her pace as she continued out the door. I followed her into the corridor and tapped her shoulder gently. This

time she whirled around with a surprised look on her face. I mumbled some excuse about my appreciating her concentration on my

talk and wanting to ask her a few questions.

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"Did you, uh, get much out of the seminar?" I ventured.

"Well, not really," she answered candidly. "I had difficulty

understanding what you were saying because you were walking

around on the platform facing different directions."

In a heartbeat, I understood. The woman was hearing

impaired. I did not captivate her as I had suspected. She was not

intrigued by my talk as I had hoped. The only reason she kept her

eyes glued on my face was because she was struggling to read my

lips!

Nevertheless, her eye contact had given me such pleasure and

inspiration during my talk that, tired as I was, I asked her to join

me for coffee. I spent the next hour recapping my entire seminar

just for her. Powerful stuff this eye contact.

Make Your Eyes Look Even

More Intelligent

There is yet another argument for intense eye contact. In addition

to awakening feelings of respect and affection, maintaining strong

eye contact gives you the impression of being an intelligent and

abstract thinker. Because abstract thinkers integrate incoming data

more easily than concrete thinkers, they can continue looking into

someone's eyes even during the silences. Their thought processes

are not distracted by peering into their partner's peepers.6

Back to our valiant psychologists. Yale researchers, thinking

they had the unswerving truth about eye contact, conducted

another study that, they assumed, would confirm "the more eye

contact, the more positive feelings." This time, they directed subjects to deliver a personally revealing monologue. They asked the

listeners to react with a sliding scale of eye contact while their partners talked.

The results? All went as expected when women told their personal stories to women. Increased eye contact encouraged feelings

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of intimacy. But, whoops, it wasn't so with the men. Some men

felt hostile when stared at too long by another man. Other men

felt threatened. Some few even suspected their partner was more

interested than he should be and wanted to slug him.

Your partner's emotional reaction to your profound gaze has

a biological base. When you look intently at someone, it increases

their heartbeat and shoots an adrenalinelike substance gushing

through their veins.7 This is the same physical reaction people have

when they start to fall in love. And when you consciously increase

your eye contact, even during normal business or social interaction, people will feel they have captivated you.

Men talking to women and women talking to men or women:

use the following technique, which I call "Sticky Eyes," for the joy

of the recipient—and for your own advantage. (Guys, I'll have a

man-to-man modification of this technique for you in a moment.)