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How to detonate those grenades resting on your nose

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say Helen of Troy could sink ships with her eyes and Davy Crockett could stare down a bear. Your eyes are personal grenades that have the power to detonate people’s emotions. Just as martial arts masters register their fists as lethal weapons, you can register your eyes as psychological lethal weapons when you master the following eye-contact techniques.

Big Players in the game of life look beyond the conventional wisdom that teaches ‘Keep good eye contact.’ For one, they understand that to certain suspicious or insecure people, intense eye contact can be a virulent intrusion.

When I was growing up, my family had a Haitian housekeeper whose fantasies were filled with witches, warlocks and black magic. Zola refused to be left alone in a room with Louie, my Siamese cat. ‘Louie looks right through me – sees my soul,’ she’d whisper to me fearfully.

In some cultures, intense eye contact is sorcery. In others, staring at someone can be threatening or disrespectful. Realizing this, Big Players in the international scene prefer to pack a book on cultural body-language differences in their carry-on rather than a Berlitz phrase book. In our culture, however, Big Winners know exaggerated eye contact can be extremely advantageous, especially between the sexes. In business, even when romance is not in the picture, strong eye contact packs a powerful wallop between men and women.

A Boston centre conducted a study to learn the precise effect.⁵ The researchers asked opposite-sex individuals to have a two-minute casual conversation. They tricked half their subjects into maintaining intense eye contact by directing them to count the number of times their partner blinked. They gave the other half of the subjects no special eye-contact directions for the chat.

When they questioned the subjects afterward, the unsuspecting blinkers reported significantly higher feelings of respect and fondness for their colleagues who, unbeknown to them, had simply been counting their blinks.

I’ve experienced the closeness intense eye contact engenders with a stranger firsthand. Once, when giving a seminar to several hundred people, one woman’s face in the crowd caught my attention. The participant’s appearance was not particularly unique. Yet she became the focus of my attention throughout my talk. Why? Because not for one moment did she take her eyes off my face. Even when I finished making a point and was silent, her eyes stayed hungrily on my face. I sensed she couldn’t wait to savour the next insight to spout from my lips. I loved it! Her concentration and obvious fascination inspired me to remember stories and make important points I’d long forgotten.

Right after my talk, I resolved to seek out this new friend who was so enthralled by my speech. As people were leaving the hall, I quickly sidled up behind my big fan. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. My fan kept walking. ‘Excuse me,’ I repeated a tad louder. My admirer didn’t vary her pace as she continued out the door. I followed her into the corridor and tapped her shoulder gently. This time she whirled around with a surprised look on her face. I mumbled some excuse about my appreciating her concentration on my talk and wanting to ask her a few questions.

‘Did you, uh, get much out of the seminar?’ I ventured.

‘Well, not really,’ she answered candidly. ‘I had difficulty understanding what you were saying because you were walking around on the platform facing different directions.’

In a heartbeat, I understood. The woman was hearing impaired. I did not captivate her as I had suspected. She was not intrigued by my talk as I had hoped. The only reason she kept her eyes glued on my face was because she was struggling to read my lips!

Nevertheless, her eye contact had given me such pleasure and inspiration during my talk that, tired as I was, I asked her to join me for coffee. I spent the next hour recapping my entire seminar just for her. Powerful stuff this eye contact.

Sticky eyes also means intelligent eyes

There is yet another argument for intense eye contact. In addition to awakening feelings of respect and affection, maintaining strong eye contact gives you the impression of being an intelligent and abstract thinker. Because abstract thinkers integrate incoming data more easily than concrete thinkers, they can continue looking into someone’s eyes even during the silences. Their thought processes are not distracted by peering into their partner’s peepers.⁶

Back to our valiant psychologists. Yale University researchers, thinking they had the unswerving truth about eye contact, conducted another study which, they assumed, would confirm ‘the more eye contact, the more positive feelings.’ This time, they directed subjects to deliver a personally revealing monologue. They asked the listeners to react with a sliding scale of eye contact while their partners talked.

The results? All went as expected when women told their personal stories to women. Increased eye contact encouraged feelings of intimacy. But, whoops, it wasn’t so with the men. Some men felt hostile when stared at too long by another man. Other men felt threatened. Some few even suspected their partner was more interested than he should be and wanted to slug him.

Your partner’s emotional reaction to your profound gaze has a biological base. When you look intently at someone, it increases their heartbeat and shoots an adrenaline-like substance gushing through their veins.⁷ This is the same physical reaction people have when they start to fall in love. And when you consciously increase your eye contact, even during normal business or social interaction, people will feel they have captivated you.

Men talking to women and women talking to men or women: use the following technique, which I call Sticky Eyes, for the joy of the recipient – and for your own advantage. (Men, I’ll have a man-to-man modification of this technique for you in a moment.)

Technique 2:

Sticky eyes

Pretend your eyes are glued to your Conversation Partner’s with sticky warm toffee. Don’t break eye contact even after he or she has finished speaking. When you must look away, do it ever so slowly, reluctantly, stretching the gooey toffee until the tiny string finally breaks.

What about men’s eyes?

Now gentlemen: when talking to men, you, too, can use Sticky Eyes. Just make them a little less sticky when discussing personal matters with other men, lest your listener feel threatened or misinterpret your intentions. But do increase your eye contact slightly more than normal with men on day-to-day communications – and a lot more when talking to women. It broadcasts a visceral message of comprehension and respect.

I have a friend, Sammy, a salesman who unwittingly comes across as an arrogant chap. He doesn’t mean to, but sometimes his brusque manner makes it look like he’s running roughshod over people’s feelings.

Once while we were having dinner together in a restaurant, I told him about the Sticky Eyes technique. I guess he took it to heart. When the waiter came over, Sammy, uncharacteristically, instead of bluntly blurting out his order with his nose in the menu, looked at the waiter. He smiled, gave his order for the appetizer, and kept his eyes on the waiter’s for an extra second before looking down again at the menu to choose the main dish. I can’t tell you how different Sammy seemed to me just then! He came across as a sensitive and caring man, and all it took was two extra seconds of eye contact. I saw the effect it had on the waiter, too. We received exceptionally gracious service the rest of the evening.

A week later Sammy called me and said, ‘Leil, Sticky Eyes has changed my life. I’ve been following it to a T. with women, I make my eyes real sticky, and with men slightly sticky. And now everybody’s treating me with such deference. I think it’s part of the reason I’ve made more sales this week than all last month!’

If you deal with customers or clients in your professional life, Sticky Eyes is a definite boon to your bottom line. To most people in our culture, profound eye contact signals trust, knowledge, an ‘I’m here for you’ attitude.

Let’s carry Sticky Eyes one step further. Like a potent medicine that has the power to kill or cure, the next eye-contact technique has the potential to captivate or annihilate.