confidence - eye contact

LegacyUser

Recently I have noticed I’m having trouble with eye contact. I used to be very shy and to the average person I would come across as confident. But the truth is I hide it reasonably well and have learned to deal with as I got older but as I have said eye contact is becoming a problem. I have noticed I have made people feel a bit uncomfortable by staring a bit much .I seemed to have lost that skill, maybe its a confidence issue. Some help would be appreciated.

Talliesin

People have different natural patterns for eye-contact. I scan the room I am in quite a bit, other people look straight ahead all the time, some people tend to look down and so on.

When you are engaging in a conversation it's natural to begin to mirror each other and move your eye-contact pattern (and other body language) closer to each other. If you find that you are either sending inappropriate signals in this regard, then do so a bit more conciously - break eye-contact when the other person does, and in the same directly - and it could help kick-start you into natural mirroring behaviour.

projectmayhem

strangely enough on the bus this morning a girl sat opposite me (the seats at the back downstairs) and it was fairly clear she was trying to make eye contact with me, but i was just glazing around the place because i'm not "on the market" as it were. fine and dandy... but then she kept it up, staring at me (i cought her several times, and clearly she wanted my earphones out and a "hello") which got uncomfortable...

there is an art to eye contact, but i find the best way to do it is not think about it... that way you're just going with the flow and not focused on where your eyes are etc.

Cake Fiend

Try the old crook's trick - look at their eyebrows.