Dr. Aziz explains that people judge confidence and trustworthiness within the first second, largely based on eye contact. He frames eye contact as a trainable 'muscle' and identifies lack of practice and self-consciousness as the main barriers for shy or socially anxious people.
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 through their eyes.
