Business communication gurus often emphasise the importance of making eye contact. Make full eye contact and rapport is more or less assured. Not only that but people will trust you. Buy your product. Finance your early retirement to exotic locations. That’s the popular hypothesis repeated endlessly in the "BE a SUCCESS at …"genre books.
It’s so often repeated in various forms by so many writers that it must be true. Mustn’t it?
While, I’m questioning the hypothesis, I’m not actually saying categorically that it is incorrect. There are millions of business people out there making zillions of business transactions who do exactly that and it works for them. At least that is what they say in books. I don’t share their worlds so can’t relate what they say in secluded bars when they the truth will out.
What I’ll endeavour to do is to lay out another possibility, one you can test against the standard business model of eye contact. Those of you who are familiar with nelping paradigms will recognise this as "eliciting the difference that makes the difference."
Here is what I believe is the standard model of eye contact.
"Look the person directly in the eye,
your left eye to their right eye,
your right eye to the left eye."The direct double eye contact is a sign of sincerity.
So says the model.
Stephen Gilligan, an intern with Milton Erickson, teaches a different model.
My rendition of the model he taught me is,
"Make left eye to left eye connection. Not just superficial contact, more as though your gaze and their gaze are on infinity embedded in each others left eye. Soul to soul if you like."
"With your right eye focus short and wide as though looking vacantly at some neutral point, eg a shoulder or ear while seeing all the space between you both and all around you. The focus of the right eye is so short and peripheral that you can see the slightest movement of your hands and feet."
The left eye trances. The right eye keep you safe.
Now if that seems strange then isn't it strange that people are mostly right-handed. And polar bears left-handed. Long before they learn to write and perform other specialised tasks most people are left and right-handed. And long, long before there were people and animals there were fishes and even they exhibit left right differences. Evolution is most efficient. Nothing useful is discarded. Quite the reverse. Neurology that works is retained throughout evolution from species to species.
Take the primitive mosquito fish. When checking out a predator they tend to pair up.
Amazingly the one who has a partner on the left and the predator on the right is braver.Read Debora MacKenzie's article An Eye for Danger 29 May 1999 No 2188 New Scientist.
The left eye specialises in recognising members of the same species.
The right eye picks up sudden peripheral movements that signal change.
IMHO if you get the chance to train with Stephen Gilligan, take it. Milton was renowned for his sensory acuity and ability to utilise what he observed of human behaviour and Stephen trained directly with Milton. If modelling Milton means something more to you than the Milton Model consider what Stephen has to offer. It could be one less ego to filter out in understanding Erickson's gifts to us all.
My hat goes off to Milton and Stephen. How ever did they came up with the connection between left eye to left eye contact and rapport so many years before the scientific evidence that supports it?
Email me with your own observations.
Human understanding is a work in progress.