Bold Confidence: How To Instantly Improve Your Eye Contact

Are you good at eye contact? Are you powerful in your eye contact? Are you able to look people and sustain that look in their eyes without fear, without worry, with confidence? Are you able to show up powerfully in that way? Or do you struggle in this area? Do you look away? Is it hard to look if there's someone you're attracted to, you're like someone that you're intimidated by, someone who you want a certain outcome, you want them to like you and you can't look at them. Your eye contact is kind of shifty and not confident. And if so, watch this episode. We're going to help you transform that so you can have bold, solid, strong eye contact with anyone and everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Art of Extraordinary Confidence. I'm your host, Dr. Aziz, and today we're going to be looking at eye contact. So if you want to have extraordinary confidence, eye contact is huge. I mean, body language, we all know body language communicates a ton, communicates more than we say and all that stuff. I'm sure you've heard that. But one of the biggest factors of body language is your eyes, is your eye contact, your ability to look at people in the eye and sustain that. And we've all had the experience of someone that we find we're really attracted to some. Someone we're intimidated by, someone we think is powerful, and before we know it, we're looking away. It's hard to look at them, or you're looking at someone and they look at you and you're like. And it's hard to sustain that eye contact. Why? Why is it hard to look at someone? And you could probably look at some sort of evolutionary psychology thing. You know, people do and they say, well, eye contact is a sign of threat or whatever, and we're scared and we can go down that rabbit hole, but I don't want to. We're looking at it from a different angle or a fresh perspective that's actually going to. You know, sometimes the evolutionary psychology stuff is like, it's interesting. You're like, oh, I guess that is a theory why everything is the way it is. But it doesn't give you anything. You don't have any more power. You're not able to go do it after that. So knowing why in that context, it doesn't serve us. If it doesn't help us transform and break free, then I'm not interested in it. What I'm interested in is the why that's going to help you transform. So why are we so scared to look? People in the eye. Have you ever thought about that? Think about that right now. So there's someone that you want to look at, you want to look at them right in the eye and you want to sustain it. Why not? What are we scared of? What are you scared of? I'm scared of doing it wrong. I'm scared of looking at them too long. I'm scared of seeming too intense. Basically it's some form of they're not going to like me. I'm scared of them not liking me. Another thing we can be scared of, this is sometimes subconscious, but maybe talking about it will help you see it. Sometimes we're scared of being seen. Like when someone looks at your eyes, there is a lot that they can pick up on. If you're sad, they can see it. If you're scared, they can see it. If you're any emotion that you want to hide that you think is not good, not attractive, we want to hide even just sometimes just not even feeling negative feelings. Just being so seen feels vulnerable. They're seeing into me. There's deep connection and eye contact and it can freak us out. They're going to see that I'm not good enough. They're going to see right through me. They're going to see that I'm a fraud. They're going to see that I'm an imposter. They're going to see that I'm not who I pretend to be and present myself as in the world. All these reasons we're scared. So how do we overcome any fear? And if you don't know that by now, maybe this is the first episode you've watched of the show or any of my videos. Watch more videos. You're going to learn how to overcome fear, get confidence unleashed. You're going to learn how to transform and blast through any fear. But how do we overcome any fear? We face it. We face it. So we make eye contact with people. You know, one place that I really worked on this at was I met my wife Candice at a personal growth workshop that she was actually teaching. It was called Solsara. It's in Portland and Eugene and a couple other places in Oregon. Fantastic workshop, life transforming. And one of the things they do, it's all about how to be more bold to you, more authentic, more expressive. It's really influenced what I teach and I learn from her every day. She's amazing. And one of the activities that you do is they call it milling. And you start in the morning and you have your circle and people share and Stuff, they're small groups, maybe like, whatever, 20 people there. And then you just, like, go around, you take turns, and you kind of find a partner, and you just like, stand there. And, you know, this is kind of a hippier thing. So you might hold hands, but you might not. If you're not comfortable with that, you don't have to. And you stand there, but you're kind of close, you know, and you just look at each other, and you don't talk, look into each other's eyes, and you breathe. And you do it for, I don't know, a minute. And then you go to someone else and you do it again. And my wife and the other instructors are kind of like, guiding you on how to, like, be mindful as you do it. Like, pay attention to what's happening to your body. Can you let go? Are you trying to, like, impress them somehow magically with your eyes? And she kind of helps people just chill out and relax. And you know what? I must have done that because then I started helping with workshops and assisting and all teaching and stuff. Well, not fully teaching, but just being in the background helping out. And I must have done this exercise dozens of times with probably hundreds of people over this period of time. Couple years. And you know what? Before the first person, always, I felt tense inside, always. And then you, you know, as time goes on, you do one person, then another, then another. You start to feel more and more and more relaxed. But sometimes, then you get to someone, you're like, whoa, she's really beautiful. You get tense inside, or, whoa, this guy, like, looks. He reminds me of my dad. Right? Something like that happens and you. And you get nervous again. But in general, it goes down from exposure, from practice. Now, I don't know if you have an opportunity to do that in your life. Maybe you do. Maybe you could create it with a loved one, with a friend, with a partner, say, hey, I want to try this wacky exercise. Let's set a timer for two minutes and actually just breathe and look at each other. And it might be weird. You might laugh as you first start, like, oh, this is so. Then you'll drop into it and something life changing will happen. You can also come to a weekend of mine. We don't do this at all of them, but sometimes we do. And definitely at my Supremely Confident Conversation Master Weekend, we do that. We just had that in March. It was awesome. You missed it. Come to the next one next year because, you know, it's all about how to be supremely confident in conversations. And how are you going to be confident in conversations if you can't look at people? So we did an exercise like that to help people relax. Find a way to do that in your life. Long, sustained eye contact. Start with you. Take two minutes. Set a timer on your phone. Let it count down so you don't have to know when it's done. It'll just start dinging at you. Go to a mirror and look at yourself in your own eyes for two minutes and just breathe and notice. Get tense, get uncomfortable, feel relaxed, judge yourself, then think about something else and just sustain eye contact. And then when you go about your life, look people in the eye and sustain it. And if you break it, that's okay. Just bring it back and sustain it and breathe. And if you're like, oh, my God, I'm going to freak them out, I'm too intense, just let it go. No, you're not. That's just a thought in your head. Just breathe. The too intense is actually probably coming from. There's all this tension in you, and the more you just get more comfortable and relaxed. People love eye contact. We drink it up, we nourish it. We need it. Have you ever talked to someone and they're not looking at you? They keep looking away. How does that feel? Feels like shit, right? We want the eye contact. We need it. So when we give it to people, don't worry about it being bad or offensive. People want it, so let's give it to them. So just look at people in the eye. You know, when I walk down the street, when I'm at the supermarket, when I do whatever the hell I'm doing in the day, I look at people in the eye. It's this habit that I formed a long time ago from those workshops I did. But even before that, I did tons and tons and tons and tons of friendly greeting practice where I walk down the street and just say hi to people just to get more and more. I must have done that with thousands of people at this point in time. And so now, when I've just trained myself, I'm walking down the street, I just look at people's faces and eyes. And I do it because it's the most interesting thing to look at. You know, I'm walking down the street, what am I going to look at? The sidewalk? The sky? I mean, sure, I might look at some buildings or whatever, but the most fascinating thing to me is people. So someone's walking the other way, I just look at, you know, and most of the time, people don't look back at me. And I'm not trying to get them to, but if they do, I'm just like, you know, maybe I'll nod, maybe I'll smile, maybe not. And once in a while, someone will look at me and we'll just look at each other. And what's fascinating, 95% of people are not looking at other people. They're looking down. They're tense, they're worried. I don't know if 95% of people are tense or worried, but they're not looking at each other. And it's powerful when I do that. And it's a powerful way to show up in the world. Now, you don't have to do that. You don't have to go that far. But you want to practice your ability. You want to look at people in the eye. You want to overcome the fear by doing it. Facing the fear is the way you will break free from from the fear. So share your comments below. What works for you? How have you become more comfortable with eye contact? Any questions or challenges you have, share that as well. And until we speak again. Oh, and like the video, subscribe it, Share it with people. If someone's watching, if you're watching this and you're like, oh my God, you know, my friend John, he needs to see this, or, oh, Tiffany, she needs to see this. I remember we were talking about this the other day. Share this. Let's spread the word. Let's help everyone get the confidence they need. Because the more confident people there are in the world, the better everything gets for everyone. So until we speak again, may you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.