FR: Developing Super Power Eye Contact...

Ever want to develop superpowers of discernment for the low price of $0?? Read on my friend…

Early on in my seduction training I noticed on a few dates that I had a lot of trouble holding eye contact with women. These dates also, incidentally, were ones that fizzled out and went nowhere. There were other factors, of course, than just bad eye contact in those days (Summer 2008) but I knew it was something that I needed to get a handle on.

I read in a few e-books about various eye contact exercises that involved attempting to hold eye contact with various strangers as I walked down the street. It sounded easy enough since I didn’t actually have to approach and speak to them. I work as a civilian electronics engineer on an Air Force base so during the work day I’d walk around base and try to hold eye contact with strangers as they pass by. Men, women, young, old, military, civilian, it didn’t matter. I’d give them a sly, friendly smile and as much eye contact as they wanted. As a white dude, 35 year old conservatively dressed civilian my presence was fairly inert in the social experiment that transpired.

At first it was surprisingly VERY difficult. I found that I could only hold eye contact for about a second before a huge feeling of social anxiety would overwhelm me and I’d look away. But I kept at it. Eventually I just plowed through that feeling and got to a place where it usually didn’t bother me. I also found that women locked eyes much more willingly at a place where you had to have a background check just to pass through gates manned by guards with machine guns versus at a bar or club where anyone could get in mainly just to hit on them.

But I kept at it. And here’s where it starts to get weird. I found that the more I did it I could start to read the faces of the strangers better and better. I could start to tell instantly the level of confidence of total strangers that I never spoke to. One day it just seemed to click like learning a new language where all of the sudden I could just understand and speak it after months of studying. I could start to see how women can tell how much confidence a man has just by looking at him because I could easily tell. It wasn’t some mysterious superpower it was just a matter of being able to speak the language.

But then it got way weirder. The reactions among the civilians were very mixed and hard to categorize but among the military some very strange patterns started to emerge. It didn’t matter if they were male or female, young or old, officer or enlisted but I started to be able to predict their reaction to me based solely on their rank before we even got close to passing by each other. I’m pretty sure they don’t train them to do this so it must have been completely subconscious. The same pattern generally holds for officers or enlisted but here is the basic breakdown I noticed:

2nd Lt or lowest enlisted: Usually will not even look at me or acknowledge that I am passing by.

1st Lt or Sr. Airman: Less than one second of eye contact. Maybe slight head nod.

Captain or mid level sergeant: One second of eye contact, head nod, maybe an incomprehensible grunt of hello.

Major or Master Sergeant: Two or Three seconds of eye contact, a clear ‘hello’, maybe a smile.

Lt. Colonel or Sr. Master Sergeant: Will generally hold eye contact as long you want, smile, say ‘hello, how are you?’

Colonel or Chief Master sergeant: Holds eye contact from far away, big smile and says ‘hello how ya doing?’ like they are your long lost best friend.

In the military the status levels are very defined and rigid and everyone literally wears it on their sleeves. My opinion after this little exercise is that in the social hierarchy we subconsciously wear our status levels for everyone to see as well in our body language, eye contact and in our levels of interaction with people.

Interesting side notes: These days besides actually approaching and talking to women I’m working on my Colonel ‘hello’ with total strangers, which is, not surprisingly, still very difficult.

The above story makes great date conversation if you decide to actually do the exercise. Chicks love to geek out on body language stuff.

My superpower eye contact and a few other tweaks I made really took my game to a new level.

A four star general ‘hello’ to an entire crowd of people begins before he is even in the room and he uses a speaking voice loud enough to fill an entire hangar. I’m still trying to figure out how he did that.