The Definitive Book of Body Language - Barbara Pease [63]
Don't mess with The Terminator
To do this, move your eyeballs first and then let your head follow, but your shoulders should remain still. The Power Stare was used by Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator and can strike fear into the hearts of would-be intimidators. Better still, have a policy of dealing only with pleasant people so you'll never need to whip out your Power Stare.
The Politician's Story
When someone looks around from side to side or won't look us in the eye when they talk, our trust in their credibility diminishes dramatically, even though they may be doing it because of shyness. We had a politician client who was a novice at being interviewed on television and he constantly flicked his eyes between the reporters and the cameras when he was being interviewed. This had the effect of making him look shifty-eyed on the screen and each time he appeared on television his popularity decreased. By training him simply to look at only the reporter and ignore the cameras, his credibility increased. We trained another politician to address his answers mainly to the lens of the television camera when he participated in a televised political debate. While this alienated the 150 studio audience guests, it impressed millions of television viewers, who felt as if the politician was talking directly to them.
Look Deep into My Eyes, Baby
For a television show, we conducted an experiment using a dating agency. A selected number of men were told that their next date was well matched to them and that they should expect to have a successful, fun time. We explained to each man that his date had suffered an injury to one eye as a child and that she was very sensitive about it because the eye didn't track properly. We said we weren't sure which eye it was, but if he looked closely he'd be able to pick it. Each woman was also told the same story about her date and that if she, too, looked closely she'd be able to spot the slow eye. On their dates, the couples spent the evening gazing into each other's eyes, searching in vain for the “problem eye.” The outcome was that each couple reported high levels of intimacy and romance on their dates and the likelihood of the couple meeting again for a second date was 200 percent higher than the agency average.
Extended gazing can create intimate feelings.
You can also drive couples apart by telling them that their date has a hearing problem and that they'd need to talk about 10 percent louder than their date to be heard. This results in a couple talking louder and louder as the evening progresses, to the point where they are yelling at each other.
The First Twenty Seconds of an Interview
Many people are taught that, in a sales or job interview, you should maintain strong eye contact with the other person and keep it up until you are seated. This creates problems for both the interviewer and interviewee because it's contrary to the process we like to go through when we meet someone new. A man wants to check out a woman's hair, legs, body shape, and overall presentation. If she maintains eye contact, it restricts this process so he's left trying to steal glances at her during the interview without getting caught and so he becomes distracted from the actual job of interviewing. Some women are disappointed that, in a supposedly equal business world, men still do this, but hidden cameras show this to be a fact of business life whether we like it or not.
Like it or not, everyone steals a look at a woman's rear when
she leaves a room, even if they don't like her front view.
Video cameras also reveal that women interviewers go through the same evaluation process with both male and female interviewees, but women's wider peripheral vision means they rarely get caught. Women are also more critical than men of female interviewees whose appearance doesn't stack up. Women look at a male candidate's hair