Maintaining eye contact can be difficult even for the most confident person. Fear of eye contact mostly comes from fear of letting someone have access to emotional states. We may be ashamed of something, which we may not fully accept, and we are afraid that people will know that part of us. And these feelings that we get from our eyes are mostly animal instincts and not conscious behaviour. We get a feeling that something isn't right. So to excel at eye contact, we must concentrate more on learning about ourselves and only then must we go look at the various steps we can take externally to improve eye contact. If you know your fears and shadows, we can learn to accept them and integrate them so that it doesn't impede our confidence while making eye contact. Self-acceptance is talked about more towards the last.
The method of getting better at eye contact involves systematic desensitization. Since we have started off by looking inward, we can continue the process by imagining making eye contact in our heads. Get comfortable with holding the eye contact just enough to not make it look creepy. Once we have had enough practice inside, we can take it to the outside.
Start with holding eye contact for longer and longer periods of time with people who are very close to you, like your family members or friends. It's okay to start at even one second. Make eye contact for a second, then break. Slowly increase the amount of time that you can maintain it for. If you have a friend/ family member who is willing enough, have eye gazing rituals. Just stare into each other's eyes for long periods, to get comfortable with the feeling.
Next, we can move on to making eye contact with strangers for an infinitesimally small amount of time. While walking by someone, meet their eyes for just enough time to recognize the colour of their eyes, then look away. And to not look like a creep, it's advisable to wait till you are just 4-5 steps away from them and the eye contact must last not for more than a step. When breaking eye contact, make sure you are breaking it laterally and not vertically. People of the lower status usually break eye contact by looking down which gives away your power. This exercise will help you remove the "shame" part in eye contact, boosting your confidence. Slowly you'll see that you don't end up in a hospital just for looking into someone's eyes.
After this, start making longer contact with strangers like waiters, salespeople, cashiers etc. Have a friendly look with warm expressions. Make eye contact before you speak to them. You will realize that not all of them will return the warm friendly gaze. So this exercise will mainly help you to face the rejection you may face when you are trying to have good eye contact.
Finally, with a lot of practice, you can start having substantial eye contact during conversations that you have with people, It may be people you've just met or people that you've already know. Make sure you are having a mutual eye dance and ease your way in since all are not comfortable with substantial eye contact.
Don't overdo it. One hundred per cent eye contact isn't good. Maintaining eye contact requires processing power, and so it is okay to break away when we need to think about something. While breaking eye contact, make sure you do it slowly. Rather than looking away, you can also try looking at some other spot on their face before meeting gazes again. You can also break your gaze by nodding or other such gestures. Keep your gaze soft and filled with love. While making eye contact, you can shift focus from one eye to another, just make sure you aren't shifting focus rapidly like a ping pong ball.
Once you excel at eye contact, you will feel yourself melting into the eyes of the person you are conversing with. To have depth in your gaze and to improve relations with people, the most important factor is self-acceptance, which is the foundation that we talked about in the beginning. We have to accept our successes and our failures, our brilliance and our shortcomings, and all in all, we must accept ourselves as a whole human being. Meditation and breathing exercises can help pave the road for this.
Uncover your shadows by asking yourself questions like, " What am I hiding", "What is it in my life that I am not okay with", "What is the reason why I am hiding things from other people". Sit with the feelings bubbling up inside you. Don't hide it. Don't suppress it. Don't judge it. Don't criticize it. Note the feelings in your heart, lungs, chest, veins, muscles, jaws etc. It may be tingling, constriction, energy surge etc. Don't allow yourself to push away the feeling. Accept these emotions through love and understand that these are what made you, you. If the emotions are kept locked away, you will feel your jaw and neck muscles tense. To remove this tension, let your jaw loose. Practice the exercise of self-acceptance when you are out shopping, at the mall, while walking etc, to make it a habit that you won't have to put extra energy into. It will become natural to you to the point where while you are in conversation with someone, which is when our most self-critical thoughts arise, we will have completely accepted ourselves and thus we won't be afraid of being judged.
To read further in detail, you can refer to the following book. There are a lot of examples and interviews given in the book which can help you understand the crux in a much simpler way.
- The power of eye contact ( By Michael Ellsberg)
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