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.)