Eye Contact Can Be Awkward!

You are at a business event and want to present yourself as a strong, confident and independent person, but then you are approached face-to-face with someone new. While looking into their eyes, you suddenly freeze. The awkwardness sets in and you don't know where to look or even how long to look at this other person. You certainly don't want to look intimidating, but you also don't want to look like you are shy and diffident, either.

First impressions are very important and eye contact is one of the best ways to leave a lasting impact.

With that said, all that emphasis on eye contact and first impressions most likely isn’t helping you stay calm, cool, and collected. You begin to sweat and you may even feel like you want to throw up all that delicious buffet. Making eye contact seems to be in a special space where people simultaneously know what is happening and are completely unable to do anything about it to make things better. You feel like running out of the room!!

So, what can we do to get past this awkwardness?

First, don’t be that person who stares deeply into the other person's eyes the entire time with minimal blinking. Too much eye contact is just as bad, if not worse than limited eye contact. Creepy!!!

But you also don’t want to go to the other extreme and pick some random object to keep looking at when you don’t know where to direct your gaze. I once met someone who spent the entire time looking at my purse—and talking to my purse. That was very awkward and certainly did not make a great first impression.

Is there a happy medium? Well, I choose to think so. Here is a trick that I learned from Dale Carnegie. Look at the other person's eyes long enough to register what color they are before looking away. For some reason, this amount of time feels natural—and effectively mimics those lucky non-awkward people who can do this naturally.

If eye contact is something you really struggle with, it can be hard to go from active avoidance to being the perfect and always present conversationalist. To ease the transition, try to focus on making eye contact when you are the listener in the conversation. Since you don't need to worry about what you’re going to say next, you can spend more of your effort on eye contact. Once you get the hang of it, you can move on to making a bigger effort when you’re the speaker.

With a little bit of practice, you’ll be able to make eye contact for the right amount of time during introductions or conversations and can focus on the rest such as relaxing your shoulders, and smiling. And before you know it, everything will become second nature.

Relax, smile and have a fabulous day, friends!!