Mel Robbins challenges the myth that looking away means someone is lying. People break eye contact for many reasons: thinking, ADHD, stress, or teaching. Eye contact behavior depends on the person and the moment, not a universal tell.
Are there any cues, though, that for you over the years became kind of a telltale, like, you know, something with people's eyes? I had always heard, for example, that if people look away, they're lying to you, which of course made me go, wait a minute, I have ADHD. A lot of times I will look away, gather my thoughts, come back. But are there telltale signs with the eyes? So this is like such BS, the whole eye thing.
It's like, I know, like it's, it's a marketing thing. Think of it this way, like, how can everybody do the same exact thing with their eyes? So here's the thing with eye contact. How a person does eye contact depends on that person. You know, sometimes you ever have a serious conversation maybe with your kids and you're trying to talk to them and they're doing the, they're doing this on you and you're like, look at me when I talk to you. You wanna try to refrain from doing that because that's just them releasing stress, releasing energy. You're also getting a really good baseline on what they do when they're stressed out. Oh yes. Now when you want to teach them, hey, when you talk to people, I want you to have good eye contact because it conveys trust, it conveys authority. That's different. What did you ask me, Mel? You asked me, what am I excited about, right? Yeah. And I had nothing. And I— but I broke eye contact with you and I looked down because you know what I was doing? I was searching my mental Rolodex and I'm like, do I? But I had to break eye contact to do that so I could really go into my head. I'm not about to lie to you. That's just what I do.
Oprah Winfrey: How to Find Your Unique Purpose, Authentic Power, and Calling in Life
