Make Eye Contact With Strangers

Hey there, it’s Graham with another confidence building activity for you this week. And this activity is all about making eye contact with strangers. As you’re going about your daily routine, as you’re walking particularly through crowds of people and you see other strangers, the basic thing that you need to do here is to simply make eye contact with them and hold that eye contact for as long as possible.

Now, there’s an interesting little social phenomena here when two people make eye contact, particularly two strangers. One of them will always avert their gaze first. And what happens is that the person with the highest level of social status and self-confidence, which tend to go together, is the person that maintains the gaze the longest. This is very interesting and you’ll start to notice this. Whenever you make eye contact with someone, the person that averts their gaze first is the one with the lower level of self-confidence.

So this is a pretty simple trick for boosting your own self-confidence and also for dealing with the anxiety that we feel when we’re seen by a stranger and when we make eye contact with a stranger is to simply start making eye contact with strangers and holding it so that you just maintain the eye contact until they avert their gaze first.

Now, you don’t want to freak people out. Don’t be like gazing at them so that it’s creepy or anything. All you want to do is make soft, gentle eye contact with them. Think some positive thoughts about the other person so that you’re in a frame of mind where you’re not putting out kind of freaky sort of energy. And, yeah, just go about your day making eye contact with people and notice what you feel inside when this happens.

When they avert their gaze, did you feel a little rejected? Did you feel a little uneasy? Did you feel good about the fact that you felt more confident and that they felt less confident? Did you wonder about what it was that they were thinking about you? Did you make it about you, or was he focused on them? Just notice what thoughts and feelings go through you as you do this exercise and just keep it up as a regular practice whenever you’re out with crowds of people.

And you’ll find over time that as you do this, your sense of self-confidence will increase, your fear about being seen by other people will start to decrease and gradually you’ll get more and more comfortable with the idea of simply making eye contact and connecting with strangers.