Probably the single most important aspect of non-verbal communication relates to the amount of eye contact you give to the other person. In my workshops, I have a little exercise that I always announce as probably the shortest exercise in the world. I ask people to turn their chairs to face the person they are sitting beside and then ask them to look directly into the other person’s eyes for a period of one minute, without talking.
Usually, after just ten to twenty seconds, you can see many people already having a great deal of difficulty with the exercise and after about thirty seconds, some people are ready to give up. At the end of the exercise, I first allow people time to settle down and then ask the question: who found the exercise difficult? Usually, I find the vast majority of people in the room will raise their hands. However, not everyone finds this difficult and that’s the first important thing we need to understand about the topic i.e. that this is not the same for everyone.
The next thing I ask is: for those who did find it difficult, can you say why? After a little thinking, people will usually be able to say something about why they found it difficult. Often, they will say that it felt ‘too intimate’ or something similar. The reason that most people find this exercise difficult is that we don’t generally engage in prolonged eye contact like that, except in two particular situations: aggression and sexual interest. So, in the exercise, they were engaged in projecting a signal that is entirely inappropriate.
Sometimes, I tell the group about my experience of getting my first pair of varifocals, when a beautiful young woman had me looking directly into her eyes for a period of about fifteen minutes, off and on. She would disappear for a minute or so to make subtle adjustments to the frames and then return for another bout of eye contact with me. With varifocals, you have to get the adjustments exactly right for both distance and reading to work properly. As I sometimes tell the group, that was probably the most difficult fifteen minutes of my life.
Now whenever we are speaking with another person, the place to look is the definitely in that person’s eyes. Giving eye contact communicates openness, honesty and integrity, just as avoiding it communicates the reverse, so we do want to look into the eyes, but not too much. For most people a good rule of thumb is to look into the other person’s eyes for about a third of the time. More than that is too much. So, just as you are speaking or listening, occasionally break eye contact; just look somewhere else for a moment or two and then return to the eyes.
If you want to become an expert, you need to recognise, as we discussed above, that eye contact is not the same for everyone, and learn to develop the ability to return the same amount of eye contact being given by the other person. This technique is known as ‘mirroring’. It is easy enough to see how comfortable the other person is with eye contact. Your job is to return just a little eye contact to those people who don’t look into your eyes too much and return a lot more to those that do.
What someone will usually ask, after I explain mirroring, is something like this: what if you are both sitting there trying to size up how much eye contact the other person is trying to give? But the fact is that most people will not give the matter of eye contact too much thought in conversation and, even if you do find yourself in that situation, as my little one minute exercise shows, you can still find out, easily enough, how much eye contact the other person wants you to give.
The subject of body language is a fascinating one and we do have a free book on the subject. You can download it here. But master this one skill and I can promise you that your ability to develop rapport with other people will improve significantly.
