Transcription:
Look Into My Eyes…..
Hi, it’s Diederik Gelderman here.
How did you go with the handshake practicing in the last week?
Over the last three weeks we’ve practiced;
- the smile,
- we’ve practiced the visible hands, and
- we’ve practiced the handshake.
I hope that you have those well and truly ingrained into your neurology now, and that it’s second nature for your hands to be visible when you meet someone or walk into the room, for you to have a big smile plastered all over your face, and for you to put your hand out and get that handshake and make that connectedness happen. I hope that’s all natural now.
If it’s not totally locked-in yet, then just keep at it – it will come!!
If you have a challenge with learning any of this, please contact me. My email is diederikgelderman@gmail.com, – just contact me and we’ll set a time to talk or to go through this together.
Or, you contact me through Facebook. By the way, I’d love it if you went to Facebook this week and like Body Language Australia, it would mean so much to me.
What are we talking about today? Today, we’re talking about eye contact.
This is the fourth of the things that you can really do to improve your connectedness and your trustability and likeability with people you meet, it’s making eye contact.
Sixty percent of the people that you meet are what are called ‘visual processors’. In other words, they store and code and process information primarily visually. There are also auditory processors, there are also kinaesthetic processors, or people who process information by gut feel, and then the fourth group is what are called the auditory-digital processors, these are the people who process everything based on facts and figures, and we’ll talk about all this at a later date.
But 60% of people are visual processors.
A visual person feels that you’re disrespecting them and not paying attention to them if you don’t look them in the eye!
So, the way to create better trust connectedness, rapport and be more liked is by looking people in the eye; and if you look people in the eye like this (staring at the camera), they’re going to think that’s a little bit creepy. And, if you look people in the eye like this (looking sideways), they’re probably going to think that you’re being sneaky.
How long should you spend looking in the eye, either when you meet them for the first time or when dealing with them on a re-acquaintance type basis?
When you meet them for the first time, I’m going to suggest that you look in their eye, and then look away, look again a little bit longer, look away, and then look back a third time and then look away again.
In those first three ‘looks’ into someone else’s eye, what you’re trying to do is to learn the colour of their eyes; are they blue, green, turquoise …. — what are the colour of their irises.
When you have that information, you’ve looked in their eyes long enough, and your ability to build trust, rapport, respect and connection significantly improves.
From that point on, you’re going to look in their eyes probably for about 50%-65% of the conversation.
So, if you are talking with them for a five-minute period, you’d probably want to be looking in their eyes for about two and a bit up to three minutes of that period of time.
Less than that, you’re being sneaky, more than that, you’re being invasive and over the top.
So, it’s really important that on a first meeting, you learn the colours of their irises, and look at them for just over half of the time in the conversation, and especially look at them a lot early on to build that trust and rapport.
When you then meet them again on subsequent occasions, again, look at them more initially and as that relationship builds, and as you become familiar again, you can look at them a little bit less. I’m going to suggest that you should never look at them less than 40% of the time.
Let me explain that; if you’re having that five-minute conversation, and you’ve met this person two or three or four times, and if you’ve got a good relationship already, you should look at them for about two minutes, never less than two minutes because you’re breaking that relationship down if you look at them for less. So, about 40% – 50% of the time when you know them well, about 50% – 65% of the time when you’re initially starting to know them.
You’ve got NEW things now to practice and ingrain in your neurology now. Please, go to Body Language Australia on Facebook, and give us a big tick, a big like, and I’ll catch up with you again on the next video.
See you next time.