Where to Look

By Wayne Elise

March 18, 2025

Dear reader,

This is a question that boggled my mind for years. I’ve tried it all. Once upon a time, I advocated looking at someone’s face and then reacting to their engagement when they looked at you. And that’s fine. When it works, it feels intimate and personal. But sometimes that’s too intense for people - however it depends on how you handle that moment. Very few things are going to be perfect anyways. I suggest playing around with it.

But another method is to look where the other person is looking. If they are looking at the sunset, you look at the sunset. If they look at the menu board above the barista, you put your eyes up there too.

And then when the person looks at you, you engage them. Perfectly executed, this technique gives a sense of camaraderie and often leads to an organic moment. It’ll be noticed that you were looking at the same thing and since the other person found this thing interesting, it will come to as no surprise that you did as well.

I use this all the time when crossing borders. Immigration officers make me nervous even though I’m not smuggling cigars or anything. I guess it’s just the feeling of authority and the uniform. I can get in this cycle of telling myself to not look nervous and of course that just makes me feel more nervous. But since understanding where to look, I just look where the officer is looking. She looks at my passport, I look at my passport. She looks at her colleague, I look at her colleague. I believe this has the effect of giving my nervous energy something to focus on and also making me actually appear more natural.

Art galleries of course are great places to meet attractive intelligent people. I often take clients there and demonstrate the technique. It’s super simple. A woman is looking at the Van Gough, you step up and look at the Van Gough. Nice. You’re both art lovers. Then a little trick. You take a half step back and this almost always draws eye contact which you can react to. “Uh… you probably have an idea. I’m curious what you feel this one means to you….” (notice the ‘you’ words packed in there).

I’ve used this technique in many situations but find it usually works best in standup, dynamic environments. I’ve gotten weird reactions when I’ve tried to force it to work in places where the thing being looked at wasn’t super open or public. For instance, definitely be careful of eye dropping on someone’s laptop on the plane. Though to be honest, you can imagine that working for some people with a lot of, “I apologize… couldn’t help noticing,” sort of thing. And at a party or social situation, there’s usually a flow of conversation to tap into so you would rarely be leveraging some shared eye contact object. But I never say never. There’s always some person somewhere making something work that I’d thought impossible. And sometimes fixing a bit of a problem is more engaging than not getting into any problems. So, as they say, your mileage may vary.

All the best, Wayne

(not written or edited by AI)