Genuine Moments: What Happens When Eyes Connect
Empowering someone with the trust to work together can be daunting when the only common place is a website. There are no real means of connection, and it's well known by now that nothing you see online is real. So how should one proceed?
My connection strategy
My go-to tactic is to spend the most amount of time embracing the awkwardness of maintaining eye contact with a static image on the site of the prospect. I usually try to look for signs of openness and a form of comfort that can help me imagine a scenario where we walk together, and it helps me develop trust more easily.
Let me elaborate on how I arrived at my conclusions. I consider myself rather introverted even though I seem to be extroverted for my introverted friends, go figure. In practice, this means that I must make a conscious effort to stand next to someone and initiate conversations.
I created a challenge to aim for introducing myself to at least three unknown people when I participated in events. You might imagine that my palms were sweaty. Then as I kept practicing and overcame my fears, it became a bit easier, but I still tend to have the same anxiety at the start of events.
Reading the unspoken
This process of overcoming myself was important to me as I love to connect with others. There's an empowering moment when I feel a shift in others' presence, signaling that openness started to build and we can foster our connection. To me, that's when trust clicks and I genuinely love that moment. It means that conquering my anxiety was worth it again just by itself, before even thinking about the topic we might be talking about.
At the end of such days my unexpected micro celebration after such accomplishments is to picture myself as Russel Crowe's “Maximus” in Gladiator's opening scene, when he touches the top of the wheat plants. This resets my attention to the present as I'm walking home and notifies me that I achieved one of my goals for that day, to push my comfort zone wider that day as well.
The foundation of how I try to sustain presence and understand what on earth is going on is maintaining eye contact and looking for cues; that means that we are in this together. I'm not sure that every sign is universally looked for by everyone; my signs are the subtle smile of the eyes and that prolonged attention when I can see that my chatting partner is making similar efforts to be present in the conversation as well.
Connect
I understand it's not a "top five things to look out for" type of list, as I believe that everyone should define their signs to look for, how they feel comfortable in each situation. I do still recommend, however, to start with the eyes; they tend to reveal all kinds of hints.
I can deeply empathize with everyone in the process of looking for someone to ask for help. It is unnatural to look up strangers online, even if led by recommendation. My advice is to trust your instincts and eyes first, then be brave enough to hit that send button to start to know more.
