Transcripts
1. Introduction: Welcome to the eye contact
for beginners class. My name is Audrey, the founder of our money talks, a media company which
helps engineers and entrepreneurs improve their
communication skills. One of the
communication skills is known as social skills. One crucial part
of social skills is known as eye contact. Eye contact them the correct
way will boost a competence, will speed up rapport, and it will put the
other person at ease. But if you do I
contact incorrectly, you're going to put
the other person in a state of unease. They're going to feel
somewhat weird around you. And we don't want to
make that happen. In this beginner's class, you're going to understand why eye contact field so difficult. What is proper eye contact
supposed to look like? How to give eye contact in
one-on-one interactions, along with scaled interactions, plus a final project at the end to boost
your social skills. If you're ready and excited and look forward to
seeing you inside.
2. Why Eye Contact Feels Hard: The reason that I contact
field so difficult is due to the other person. When they're looking
at our head, we incorrectly assume that they're looking at
our entire body. Whenever someone is
facing social anxiety. There's this effect known
as the spotlight effect, where we feel as though that there's this imaginary spotlight over our head that's
magnifying each of our moves. This is one reason why even when someone's just
looking at our eyes, we feel as though our entire
body is being watched. Another reason that
I contact feels very difficult is due to the
illusion of transparency. This is when we feel as though our internal nerves are
leaking out to the public. You ever had a moment like that where you're talking to
someone and you're like, do I look ugly
when I'm speaking? When you have that thought of, Do I look at aluminum speaking, then you become more
self-conscious and it makes it difficult to hold eye
contact with the other person. So the main reason that I
contact feels very difficult is because we feel as though our entire body
is being watched. And luckily, we
can fix that with a few concepts that we will be discussing in the
rest of this class.
3. What is Eye Contact?: Eye contact is about
looking and taking breaks. This is very important. If you don't understand this simple definition of
looking and taking breaks, what's going to happen
is that you are going to have the incorrect
theory to operate width. When I ask you, what exactly
is communication skills? More specifically, what
is speaking skills? At first, you may be like
speaking, but that's incorrect. It's speaking plus silence. If you're someone that
has the definition that it's just speaking, then you're going to be one of those individuals
that vilify silence. When you vilify silence, you talk a little too fast. And when you talk fast, you don't look confident. It's the same thing
with eye contact. When you're viewing eye contact as just looking at
the other person, then you may do eye contact. But you're gonna be
somewhat creepy. You're just going to be
doing this the entire time. And it's going to be like, Hey, go on, tell me about your
day and you're just looking. You ever had someone
do that to you. You couldn't quite tell
what the issue was, but something just felt off. You need to incorporate
the brakes as well. Eye contact is looking
Plus taking breaks. And when you think
of it like that, there's this level of
ease that you feel. Because if you're
watching this class, then chances are you have
the brakes part down. Very good. So you could be like, Well at least I have half of
the formula right? Now. I just need to work on the other part of the formula. With this attitude, you
are watching the rest of this class with a confidence, with a set of the
attitude of Amador. So once again, eye contact is
looking and taking breaks.
4. 1 on 1 Eye Contact: So to ease yourself into eye contact with
one-on-one individuals, what we want to do is we want to avoid a glaring at
someone or worse, just staring at them. Okay? And this is when we
incorporate our definition that I contexts includes
looking and taking breaks. From there, we want to just get better interaction
by interaction. If you're someone that can't
even look at someone for, let's say 2 s without
breaking eye contact, then just challenge
yourself to do 3 s. Once you are
successful with 3 s. This indicates to the
subconscious mind, hey, you're making
some improvement. And as you do more interactions, you can begin to go from
3 s to four to five. We're going with
the micro approach. In addition to this,
another thing that we can do is squint a little. When we squint a little, it does something miraculous. Remember earlier how I was
saying that eye contact feels difficult because it feels as though our entire body
is being watched. Well, when we do
this gentle squint, not only do we look as though we're paying
attention to the other person. For some reason. This also deactivates
the spotlight effect. It feels as though
that the spotlight is dimming and there's not that
much awareness on our body. This helps us go from
the three-second mark to the four second mark as we are working on our eye contact. And if you just want to keep the flow going a little bit more, a smart never hurts, a smirk to a smile,
depending on the context, will put you at a
state of a comfort. Because whenever you're smiling, you're releasing
endorphins in your brain, aka the feel good chemicals. So quick little recap. I just want to focus on
the micro approaches. Just keep getting better
interaction by interaction from their help yourself get
better in the interactions. But doing the gentle
little squint and smirking to feel
more comfortable.
5. Scaled Eye Contact: Not all conversations are
always going to be one-on-one. Plenty of times it's going
to be scaled interactions. Let's say it's a
group conversation or it's a public speaking event. For group conversations and
for public speaking events. We don't just want
to scan, right? We want to lock and hold. I learned about this when I sub E in a public
speaking club. And one of the first times that I was trying
to give a speech, I was like, I gotta look
at all of these folks. So I'm over here trying
to give the speech. And as I'm trying
to give the speech, I'm like, I look at this person that I
looked at that person. What about that person? And I'm over here, I'm just
giving myself a headache. Well, one day I was able
to learn from past members that you don't have to look at all the people in the audience. Actually, as a beginner, what you want to
do is you want to segment the audience into three, left, middle, and right. And then you just choose one member from each
of those sections, preferably the most
engaged members. And you just talk to them. And I was like,
You can't do that. What about all the other
people in the audience? They're going to get offended. That's when these folks said, when there's distance
between you and the audience are due to the way that our
eyes are structured. Others can't quite tell who
you're exactly looking at. Just look at the
person that you chose, those top three engage members. And the people around them will think that you're
also looking at them. I tried this out one day, I went back into the
public speaking club. I gave a speech and I recall I was looking at
this lady named Sue. But after the event, there was a guy named Jeffrey, one of the older gentlemen. He's like, I saw you looking at me when
he made that point. But I was never
looking at Jeffrey. I was just looking at SU
but Jeffrey was by Sue. This goes on to show
that lock-in hold is way more powerful
because you feel better and it makes the
other people around the people that
you chose feel as though that you're
speaking to them. Knowing group interactions. If it's just two
to three people, you don't really need to
select the members and stuff. That's more so for
high-scale events, for the smaller groups, you definitely still
want to do lock on hold. And this allows you to actually kill a lot of these
social anxiety. Because with social anxiety, a large part of it is
because we just think that there's this blob that's
judging our moves. When you humanize this blob by looking at one
individual at a time. Not only do you improve
your eye contact, but you melt your social
anxiety along the way.
6. Adjustments: As more time is
going on by one day, you're going to be one
of those people that has pretty confident eye contact
and proper eye contact. This is a superpower and you need to use the
superpower wisely. The reason that I say you
need to use it wisely is because there are plenty of people out there that are not comfortable
with eye contact. When you're over
here, just looking at every single person in the same way as if
they're confident. The unconfident ones are going to feel a little
uneasy around you. They're going to be
touching their neck a lot, looking down a lot
and just fidgeting. Notice these individuals. When you notice these
individuals and you want to take more breaks, right? You don't just want
to keep looking at them too much
because when they're feeling as though the
spotlight is on them, It's like you don't want to just magnify the
spotlight even more. So the main thing to take
away from this clip is that eye contact is a
case-by-case basis. Some people love it when
you keep looking at them. Other people, you just got
to take more outbreaks wet. This is a good thing because
it keeps you more engaged. It allows you to see what kind of person
am I speaking to. This is a pretty
competent person. And whenever I look at them, when they're telling
you a story, I could tell that
they're feeling more engaged in the story. But this person, whenever
I'm telling the story, they keep looking down and
they just look disrupted. So how about I just
take more outbreaks. You're putting yourself
in the moment. A large reason that charisma just keeps plummeting
with people is because they're
always planning the next thing that
they're going to say. But when you are anchoring yourself in the present
moment by seeing, how should I respond
to this person? Or you're not planning the next thing
you're going to say. Instead, you're organically flowing with the conversation.
7. Gut Instinct: There's going to
come certain times where you're great
with eye contact, with certain groups of people. But every now and then, there's one guy
that you just get a strange gut instinct from. Another good kind
of gut instinct. It's your body That's warning, use that saying
something's wrong. I recall this actually
happened to me one time where I was getting much better at eye
contact and a lot of the times I could just
interact with people smoothly. But there was this one guy
named Ralph will, I believe, of who I found it very difficult to make eye
contact with them. And I would get annoyed
by this because he had a very confident
presence around him. Sometimes a little bit cocky. And I'm like, why am I always breaking first whenever
he's looking at me? Well, as more time went on by, I came to find out that Rao who was consistently just bad
mouthing other people. Something my body knew, write something my
body was like, Hey, if he's bad mouthing
all these other people, what do you think he's doing, what you when you're not around? And as more time went on by, I actually heard from some sources that he
was badmouthing me. This was one of those
situations where it's like when you're finding it difficult to make eye contact with
certain groups of people. Don't just be like, Oh, I'm just nervous
around them. Other times it could
be my body trying to give me some sort of signal to watch out for this person. This requires judgment. And the unfortunate
truth is that, uh, to build judgment, a lot of times we got to go through the pain and
I had to go through the pain with this Ravel person talking bad about me,
for me to realize. Okay, I get it. I contact isn't always going to feel comfortable with everyone. Sometimes it's a cool, a clue into the sinister
parts of body language. Use it as moments to
build future judgment.
8. Final Project: For the final project,
your goal is to have a live in-person conversation
with another person. It could be a blind date. It could be the cashier, it could be a friend. What I want you to do is
throughout the conversation, I just analyze the kind
of person they are. Is this a comfortable person? Is this a very nervous person? As you're getting
into the groove of understanding
their personality. The next thing I want
you to do is base your eye contact off
of their personality. If they're very confident, look more than you break. If they're not feeling
that confident, I take a little bit more
breaks than you normally would once you're done
with the interaction. I want you to create a
report on this interaction. I talk about what kind of
person was this individual? How was your eye contact
in terms of being dynamic? Where are you capable of
adjusting when you got more data on this
person's personality? And how did you feel? Was it easy doing the eye contact or are
you someone who is trying to hold longer but you find yourself
taking more breaks, get as detailed as you
possibly can on this report. Because the more
detailed that you are, the more that you build
your social awareness, the more that you build
your social awareness, the more that you're capable of recalibrating for
future interactions. Get this report posted on the final project
section, right arm below. I look forward to reading it and seeing you improve
your social skills. If you enjoyed this
beginner's class and you want to learn more about the harmonic torques
brand and be sure to check out
our money talks.com, which has plenty of my blogs, podcasts, videos,
books, and much more. I discuss topics on
public speaking, social skills, creative writing much more, or money talks.com. Go on and check it out.
Arman Chowdhury, Confidence thru Communication
