✰2 How to Strike Everyone as

Intelligent and Insightful

by Using Your Eyes
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say Helen of Troy could launch
ships with her eyes and Davy Crockett could stare down a bear.
Your eyes are personal grenades that have the power to detonate
people’s emotions. Just as martial arts masters register their fists as
lethal weapons, you can register your eyes as psychological lethal
weapons when you master the following eye-contact techniques.
Beloved people in the game of life look beyond the conven-
tional wisdom that teaches “Keep good eye contact.” For one, they
understand that to certain suspicious or insecure people, intense
eye contact can be a virulent intrusion.
When I was growing up, my family had a Haitian house-
keeper whose fantasies were filled with witches, warlocks, and
black magic. Zola refused to be left alone in a room with Louie,
my Siamese cat. “Louie looks right through me—sees my soul,”
she’d whisper to me fearfully.
In some cultures, intense eye contact is sorcery. In others, star-
ing at someone can be threatening or disrespectful. Realizing this,
big players in the international scene prefer to pack a book on cul-
tural body-language differences in their carry-on rather than a
Berlitz phrase book. In our culture, however, big winners know
exaggerated eye contact can be extremely advantageous, especially

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10 How to Talk to Anyone

between the sexes. In business, even when romance is not in the

picture, strong eye contact packs a powerful wallop between men
and women.
A Boston center conducted a study to learn the precise effect.5
The researchers asked opposite-sex individuals to have a two-
minute casual conversation. They tricked half their subjects into
maintaining intense eye contact by directing them to count the
number of times their partner blinked. They gave the other half
of the subjects no special eye-contact directions for the chat.
When they questioned the subjects afterward, the unsuspect-
ing blinkers reported significantly higher feelings of respect and
fondness for their colleagues who, unbeknownst to them, had sim-
ply been counting their blinks.
I’ve experienced the closeness intense eye contact engenders
with a stranger firsthand. Once, when giving a seminar to several
hundred people, one woman’s face in the crowd caught my atten-
tion. The participant’s appearance was not particularly unique. Yet
she became the focus of my attention throughout my talk. Why?
Because not for one moment did she take her eyes off my face.
Even when I finished making a point and was silent, her eyes
stayed hungrily on my face. I sensed she couldn’t wait to savor the
next insight to spout from my lips. I loved it! Her concentration
and obvious fascination inspired me to remember stories and make
important points I’d long forgotten.
Right after my talk, I resolved to seek out this new friend who
was so enthralled by my speech. As people were leaving the hall,
I quickly sidled up behind my big fan. “Excuse me,” I said. My
fan kept walking. “Excuse me,” I repeated a tad louder. My
admirer didn’t vary her pace as she continued out the door. I fol-
lowed her into the corridor and tapped her shoulder gently. This
time she whirled around with a surprised look on her face. I mum-
bled some excuse about my appreciating her concentration on my
talk and wanting to ask her a few questions.
 How to Strike Everyone as Intelligent and Insightful by Using Your Eyes 11

“Did you, uh, get much out of the seminar?” I ventured.

“Well, not really,” she answered candidly. “I had difficulty
understanding what you were saying because you were walking
around on the platform facing different directions.”
In a heartbeat, I understood. The woman was hearing
impaired. I did not captivate her as I had suspected. She was not
intrigued by my talk as I had hoped. The only reason she kept her
eyes glued on my face was because she was struggling to read my
lips!
Nevertheless, her eye contact had given me such pleasure and
inspiration during my talk that, tired as I was, I asked her to join
me for coffee. I spent the next hour recapping my entire seminar
just for her. Powerful stuff this eye contact.

Make Your Eyes Look Even

More Intelligent
There is yet another argument for intense eye contact. In addition
to awakening feelings of respect and affection, maintaining strong
eye contact gives you the impression of being an intelligent and
abstract thinker. Because abstract thinkers integrate incoming data
more easily than concrete thinkers, they can continue looking into
someone’s eyes even during the silences. Their thought processes
are not distracted by peering into their partner’s peepers.6
Back to our valiant psychologists. Yale researchers, thinking
they had the unswerving truth about eye contact, conducted
another study that, they assumed, would confirm “the more eye
contact, the more positive feelings.” This time, they directed sub-
jects to deliver a personally revealing monologue. They asked the
listeners to react with a sliding scale of eye contact while their part-
ners talked.
The results? All went as expected when women told their per-
sonal stories to women. Increased eye contact encouraged feelings
12 How to Talk to Anyone

of intimacy. But, whoops, it wasn’t so with the men. Some men

felt hostile when stared at too long by another man. Other men
felt threatened. Some few even suspected their partner was more
interested than he should be and wanted to slug him.
Your partner’s emotional reaction to your profound gaze has
a biological base. When you look intently at someone, it increases
their heartbeat and shoots an adrenalinelike substance gushing
through their veins.7 This is the same physical reaction people have
when they start to fall in love. And when you consciously increase
your eye contact, even during normal business or social interac-
tion, people will feel they have captivated you.
Men talking to women and women talking to men or women:
use the following technique, which I call “Sticky Eyes,” for the joy
of the recipient—and for your own advantage. (Guys, I’ll have a
man-to-man modification of this technique for you in a moment.)

Technique #2
Sticky Eyes
Pretend your eyes are glued to your conversation
partner’s with sticky warm taffy. Don’t break eye
contact even after he or she has finished speaking.
When you must look away, do it ever so slowly,
reluctantly, stretching the gooey taffy until the tiny
string finally breaks.

What About Guys’ Eyes?

Now gentlemen: when talking to men, you, too, can use Sticky
Eyes. Just make them a little less sticky when discussing personal
matters with other men, lest your listener feel threatened or mis-
interpret your intentions. But do increase your eye contact slightly
 How to Strike Everyone as Intelligent and Insightful by Using Your Eyes 13

more than normal with men on day-to-day communications—

and a lot more when talking to women. It broadcasts a visceral
message of comprehension and respect.
I have a friend, Sammy, a salesman who unwittingly comes
across as an arrogant chap. He doesn’t mean to, but sometimes his
brusque manner makes it look like he’s running roughshod over
people’s feelings.
Once while we were having dinner together in a restaurant, I
told him about the Sticky Eyes technique. I guess he took it to
heart. When the waiter came over, Sammy, uncharacteristically,
instead of bluntly blurting out his order with his nose in the menu,
looked at the waiter. He smiled, gave his order for the appetizer,
and kept his eyes on the waiter’s for an extra second before look-
ing down again at the menu to choose the main dish. I can’t tell
you how different Sammy seemed to me just then! He came across
as a sensitive and caring man, and all it took was two extra sec-
onds of eye contact. I saw the effect it had on the waiter, too. We
received exceptionally gracious service the rest of the evening.
A week later Sammy called me and said, “Leil, Sticky Eyes has
changed my life. I’ve been following it to a T. With women, I
make my eyes real sticky and with men slightly sticky. And now
everybody’s treating me with such deference. I think it’s part of
the reason I’ve made more sales this week than all last month!”
If you deal with customers or clients in your professional life,
Sticky Eyes is a definite boon to your bottom line. To most peo-
ple in our culture, profound eye contact signals trust, knowledge,
an “I’m here for you” attitude.
Let’s carry Sticky Eyes one step further. Like a potent medi-
cine that has the power to kill or cure, the next eye-contact tech-
nique has the potential to captivate or annihilate.