Vanessa Van Edwards breaks down two gaze styles: warm gaze and power gaze. Start practicing with strangers at grocery stores or airports where the stakes are low, then move to friends and ask for feedback. Skip the VIPs until you've built the muscle memory.
There's a lot happening in interaction, especially with important people. So when you're practicing the different types of gaze, super low pressure, go to the grocery store and check out, right? Check out with a real person. Practice. Hey, how's your day going? Anything good happen today? See where does your natural gaze fall? Are you able to warm gaze with them or able to power gaze with them? You don't know them, so still stranger, but it's very, very low pressure. I want you to be having very casual conversations with everyone. Baristas, your checkout person, you're at the airport, you're checking in, you're chatting with your neighbor in the elevator. Those are actually the best way because they're very short interactions, so your brain doesn't have to do too much, and you're retraining muscle memory. So super low pressure practice. Don't start with your VIPs or your HIPs. I would rather you have that intuition and feeling with someone who you don't know very well. And then of course you can bring it to friends you trust or colleagues you trust. You can literally say, I learned this new type of gazing, can I try it with you? Do you notice it? Right, like we can actually bring it into our conversations and talk about it, which is a great way to do with our friends or colleagues.
