The Power of Eye Contact: Essential Skill with Huge Benefit
Eye contact is a very powerful form of non-verbal communication that can convey words and emotions without using words. As is the case with other non-verbal such as body language, facial expressions, and gestures.
All forms of nonverbal communication can help us in communicating, such as forming a bond with the person we are talking to, showing honesty or seriousness, increasing understanding, and most importantly, forming respect in communication.
We also need to know that eye contact can help in various aspects of life, such as:
- Relationships: eye contact can increase emotional intimacy, attraction, and can build trust with our partners. Eye contact can also help in solving problems in relationships, it can also show your expressions.
- Work: Eye contact can help us improve our image in the world of work, build self-confidence, and credibility. Another powerful thing about eye contact is that this attitude can help us to convince colleagues, clients, and customers to convince them to hear your ideas in proposals.
- Self-confidence: with eye contact, we can eliminate anxiety, shyness, and nervousness in social situations.
Below are some of the benefits that we can get from eye contact, and why eye contact is important in communication.
1. How eye contact can help you build rapport:
Rapport is an action to build connections or relationships with other people through effective communication. Both parties will understand each other, both feelings and ideas, support each other, and create a sense of mutual trust.
So why is rapport important for communication and relationships? These few points can answer that because:
- Rapport can help us to learn or improve skills with someone more professional (you could say a mentor).
- Building rapport with the people you work with can make us collaborate more efficiently. That’s because having a common goal and closeness makes work more productive and more enjoyable.
- By building rapport with new people, whether at meetings or events, it can help us to achieve new things later.
As we already know, eye contact is an important aspect of nonverbal communication, just by using a visual connection with the eyes of the person you are talking to you can build a connection of emotions and intentions without using words.
When we listen attentively and maintain eye contact with the person we are talking to, this will show honesty and respect. On the other hand, when we avoid eye contact it will allow things we don’t want, such as creating discomfort, disinterest, and possibly showing dishonesty.
When you use eye contact well, it will create quality and authenticity in an interaction.
The following are some examples of eye contact in nonverbal communication:
- Direct Eye Contact During a Handshake: this action shows courage and honesty
- Prolonged Eye Contact in Conversation: demonstrates attention and engagement
- Eye Contact with a Slight Nod: shows acknowledgment of understanding
Other examples can be seen at this link
2. How eye contact can convey emotions
Because eye contact is a form of nonverbal communication, surely eye contact can certainly show us many emotions, such as happiness, sadness, boredom, and so on.
According to mind.help, eye contact can show emotions by stimulating neurons in both minds which can show empathy, this process is called the limbic mirror system. With this statement, eye contact can make us feel what other people feel.
With eye contact, we can immediately know the feelings of the person we are talking to, such as feelings of interest, attraction, and boredom. Here’s an example:
- Interest: when a person shows interest in the person they are talking to, they usually make eye contact more often for a long time.
- Attraction: When someone shows interest, they usually look at the eyes, lips, and body, eye contact to show deeper intimacy.
- Boredom: when someone is bored with their hat or that person, they usually tend to look away, look around, or they can also open their cell phone. This could be said to be less enthusiastic.
3. How eye contact can persuade others
As previously discussed, we already know eye contact can help increase your sense of confidence, credibility, and authority. Eye contact here can also help us to persuade others.
Like when we make eye contact before speaking, this can build a connection with the audience that we as speakers are ready and confident.
When we are communicating and want to give points, it is best to do it while making eye contact because this can help convey your message with full trust and honesty. So the explanation we give can provide greater insight to the audience.
However, we also need to pause in eye contact, we don’t need to always make eye contact, because who doesn’t feel intimidated if the person they are talking to is always looking at them, especially if they are telling a story.
Because eye contact can also see someone’s emotions and their body language, we can then understand what the audience needs, their concerns, and their motivations. from here we can arrange our words and convey them according to the situation they present.
4. How can we make eye contact even though we are shy?
This might be quite challenging for people who are shy when in public (I was also a shy person before, don’t worry). The following are some tips that can help us build confidence in making eye contact in public.
- Start small: You can learn to make eye contact with people who make you comfortable first, although this is still challenging, just take it slow. Even if you make eye contact for a short time during your studies, if you keep practicing then you can make eye contact better as time goes by.
- Use the 50/70: Eye contact 50% when talking and 70% when listening. As someone who previously admitted to being an introvert, I used to realize that it was quite difficult for me to make eye contact 50% of the time when speaking for the first time (You know time feels very long at this moment). However, to learn 70% eye contact when listening, I think introverts like us can do it at this stage.
- Practice active listening: without realizing it, sometimes we tend not to listen to other people enough and for those of you who feel this, you should start being a listener while we practice eye contact because this can help those who are communicating with us that their information is valuable.
Based on these points, it is clear that eye contact in communication can provide many benefits, and of course, for friends who are learning eye contact, this can be a challenge for us to boost our self-confidence and prove that we can.
There are still many things we can see about the benefits of eye contact when communicating. The following is reading material that I think can help readers get in-depth information from this discussion.