Dr. Aziz explains that people judge your confidence and trustworthiness in one second, mostly through eye contact. He treats it like a muscle you can build by holding eye contact slightly longer than usual, three times a day. Two to three weeks of practice brings noticeable improvement.
Within one second.
Three times per day.
Within two to three weeks.
Did you know that within one second, people are determining how confident and trustworthy that you are? And it comes down to one thing, which is your eye contact with them. Now, I work with a lot of people who are shy, have social anxiety, and they say, I can't do the eye contact thing. I'm not very good at it. And that is your biggest obstacle. Because instead, you need to see eye contact as one thing, which is a muscle. It's a capacity that you can build. And the only reason that you're not good at it is because you don't practice it. Because whenever you try to look at people in the eye, you get super in your head and you start looking at yourself, looking their eyes. Total mental concepts, judgments, evaluation. Just practice the raw muscle of eye contact when you go around in your life. Look people in the eye. Practice it three times per day. Just hold eye contact with someone a little bit longer than you normally will. If you keep doing this every single day, within two to three weeks, your muscle for eye contact will be radically improved and you'll feel way more confident connecting with others.
