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Published on:

2nd May 2023

Look Into My Eyes

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00:01:16 From Patrick King's book how to Extract Info, Secrets and Truth, let's take a look at the importance of eye contact and then spend some time discussing active listening.

00:03:34 Effects of Eye Contact and Social Status on the Perception of a Job Applicant in an Employment Interviewing Situation

00:03:56 Accurate Intelligence Assessments in Social Interactions, Mediators and Gender Effects

00:05:34 A 2016 Japanese study by Kajimura and Nomura titled When We Cannot Speak eye Contact Disrupts Resources Available to Cognitive Control Processes During Verb Generation

00:06:22 Helping Children Think Gaze Aversion and Teaching by Phelps and Doherty Snedden, researchers found that kids told to look away while thinking and solving problems showed a 20% increase in performance.

00:07:51 Eye Contact, Distance and Affiliation

00:22:41 Label Emotions

• Eye contact is essential for building trust. If you aren’t able to use eye contact, people will find you untrustworthy. The optimal eye contact period is around three seconds of eye contact at a time, with sufficient rest between gazes.

• Active listening is a valuable skill set that any person should master, but the techniques of active listening can also help you improve your elicitation abilities and gather more information about people. You need to comprehend, retain and respond to the information people are sharing with you.

• You can build rapport and connection in many ways, for example by restating, reflecting, summarizing, labeling emotions, probing (gently!) and using silence to encourage the other person to open up. Open-ended or leading questions (like those covered in the previous chapter) can subtly guide a person to open up to you.


• Avoid giving advice, lecturing, sermonizing or judging.


• Active listening techniques are best used when you would like someone to open up with you and share their true feelings. Other techniques are more appropriate for detecting deception.


#ActiveListener #Binetti #CommunicationSkills #DohertySneddon #EmpatheticReflection #EyeContact #GazeAversion #GazeDuration #Kajimura #Kressler #LieDetection #NeuroLinguisticProgramming #Nomura #NonverbalCommunication #PupilDilation #RussellNewton #NewtonMG #PatrickKing #PatrickKingConsulting #SocialSkillsCoaching #HowtoExtractInfo #Secrets #andTruth

Transcript
May:

Speaker:

Our lunch menu based on today's holidays is tuna and truffles, but we're supposed to take a baby with us. All right, with that in mind, let's get right into it. Society places a lot of emphasis on the eyes. Eyes are the window to the soul. You can tell someone's goodness just by looking them in the eye.

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He wouldn't look at me in the eye and lie, and so on and so on. If you look up advice on dating, job interviews, sales, or just making friends, eye contact will no doubt make the list as a key to what you want. From Patrick King's book how to Extract Info, Secrets and Truth, let's take a look at the importance of eye contact and then spend some time discussing active listening. As a society, we place a lot of value on the implications of eye contact and what it means for trust. In particular, if you meet someone who refuses to meet your eye contact, or conversely, meets it for too long, you feel discomfort and leave with a negative impression of that person.

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repeatedly, most recently in:

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scientific confirmations. In:

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The more the better. In:

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Oddly enough, you probably knew the outcomes of these studies already. Whether they represent the truth or are just assumptions, we have to make sure that we don't fall on the wrong side of those studies. As we are increasingly more caught up in a battle for our attention between our phones and our real life conversation partners, the ability to make eye contact has become an especially powerful tool. When you can utilize eye contact smartly to show somebody that they have your undivided attention, you can effectively win them over and enhance their perception of you. There was never a need to convince you about the role of eye contact in trust, but there is one rather large caveat with eye contact, how should we use it?

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d focus when we utilize it. A:

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e people a break. In fact, in:

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on and being most likable? In:

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ter. Not even close to it. In:

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And as you listen, you want whoever is speaking to see that you are engaged, but you don't want to look at them so much that they might feel creeped out. As long as you're in the general ballpark of 50% and 75% for speaking and listening respectively, you'll be making the most out of the surprisingly powerful tool of eye contact listening. Active listening is one of the strongest relationship building skills you can have in your arsenal. It's also a set of tools that you can use to help you better understand people and extract the information you want from them. It establishes respect and concern for your partner's viewpoints and makes it easier for you to process information that's intricate and difficult to understand through passive listening.

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It also eases the communication process. Active listening helps you learn what the other person's needs are and therefore makes you less cautious and more open with your responses. Perhaps above all else, active listening makes it 100% clear and certain that you are comprehending your conversation partner. They know that you're right there with them. It's not rocket science.

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People share more with others they genuinely like and trust and who they feel are actually listening. At the same time, we have to push our ego out of the way so we can truly access what the other person is saying. We call this process active listening because it engages so many parts of our mind and makes us do something to understand what's being communicated. Therapists, the good ones at least, are excellent models of how to be an active listener. They listen to their clients with a clear purpose.

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If there's something they're hearing that they're not 100% sure about, they encourage their clients to be clear and deliberate. These therapists try to restate their patient's statements and ask them to elaborate on what they mean. Above all, they try to make their clients feel calm and safe about communicating through contemplation, clear body language and a spirit of empathy. Therapists are driven by a very clear goal of hearing their clients out, and their every response is informed by this goal. Can we just say the same about ourselves when we're trying to listen to others.

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You might get carried away with all sorts of convoluted techniques to get a person to reveal a deception or spot how they really feel. Or you might actually have more success genuinely befriending that person so that they want to open up to you. No fancy FBI techniques Needed the listening methods we'll look at in this section are great for anyone who wants to improve their relationships and their communication skills, as well as become better in general at conversation. But they're also a subtle yet effective way of creating an environment that will make people psychologically comfortable. From there, many of the interrogation techniques we've discussed may not even be necessary.

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Granted, not everyone has the time to foster an authentic and rich relationship with the people they want to understand better. But if possible, try to work in some of the following principles when dealing with those you're trying to extract information from. Active listening involves a few essential types of reactions and inquiries that you can start using almost immediately. They're all designed to ensure that the speaker can feel you're on the same emotional page as them. After all, what's listening if it's only going on inside your head and not being conveyed to the other person?

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Comprehending the first step in active listening is, of course, comprehending what the other person is saying in the first place. If the person who's talking to us is speaking the same language as we normally do, this process is fairly automatic. But there are other potential blocks. For example, if the person uses a lot of jargon or slang that we aren't familiar with, or if there are differences in generation, social standing, or culture that we just don't know enough about. Above all else, you just want to make sure you're on the same emotional page as the speaker so you can ascertain their needs and desires.

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At the moment, a great thing to ask if we're not understanding what someone's saying is, can you explain it to me as if I were five years old? A five year old knows enough words to hold a conversation, but needs to have a relatively complex situation described to them in a very patient, deliberate way, using the words they already know, especially if you think the other person fears appearing condescending or patronizing. Asking them to describe something as if you were, let's say, far younger than your actual age, can make them feel a little more at ease. Other statements to ask for help comprehending include what happened? Tell me your story.

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What do you mean, tell me more? Can you clear this part up for me? Don't be afraid of coming across as stupid or interrupting. Most people like to feel like experts, and we're all experts in our own experience. It can even be useful sometimes to be completely transparent about your lack of understanding.

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If you frame this as a reason for you to listen all the more closely, so you can learn retaining more than just remembering what you just heard. Retaining information is hearing what the speaker is trying to say so he can give back a suitable reply. You're trying to get the whole story here, and this goes far beyond simple facts and events. The goal is to place yourself in the speaker's shoes as closely as possible, and of course, questions are necessary for that. When we're listening to someone, we tend to retain only the details that strike us more personally or in ways that we're most used to retaining information.

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But that's only our lens, and not particularly useful for trying to be a better listener. For example, if someone's telling us about a date they went on, we might be the kind who remembers the physical details of the event, what restaurant they went to, what movie they saw, what they were wearing. Or we might recall some more general narrative about the date as a whole, what personality the other person had, what the date felt like, how it compared to other dates in the past. We might not even notice ourselves picking out pieces of the narrative that push our buttons. And internally, we can set to work constructing a slightly different story for ourselves than the one we're being offered.

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You might have been on the receiving end of this when you tell someone, as they seem only to latch on to one aspect of the story that definitely wasn't your focus. It's definitely a way to listen without listening. In conversation, we generally look for openings for us to say something and get our two cent in. This is normal, but it's not conducive to active listening. To properly retain what our conversation partner is telling us, we have to put our egos away and focus squarely on the other person's words as they are laying them out.

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It's not about your interpretation, but theirs. Again, questions are a powerful tool to frame things and keep your focus on the other person's expression. To ensure you're retaining all the relevant information you need, you could ask, what does that mean to you? And just to be clear, what happened after? Wait, how did she approach that?

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How does that figure into the story? How did that make you feel? What was your reaction? Responding. Active listening requires an effort to form a knowing and proper response.

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Otherwise, the speaker might feel like they're talking to a brick wall. As has been said multiple times, listening is anything but passive. An effective response will demonstrate our concern for what our conversation partner is talking about. You're listening, comprehending and retaining already. A quality response will prove that you understand everything the speaker has said and picked up on their nonverbal communication.

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Imagine that you're speaking to someone and you're not sure that they understand the language you're speaking. They give no indication of comprehension. Do you feel listened to that's why a response is necessary. Like retaining. It's important that a response isn't tinted with our own ego or ideas.

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You don't want to respond in ways that suggest you're trying to steer, manipulate, or interpret the conversation according to your own agenda. You're trying to get a sense of the other person's feelings and opinions without biases. You've developed speaker A and that's why I don't like going to dinner parties. Respondent B that sounds insane. Were you flustered when that odd man jumped out of the cake?

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Not flustered so much as disappointed. I expected something a little more grown up from the Temperance League. It must have tried your patience. Did it? A little bit.

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But more than anything else, it just. Proved that I have to start putting. Some restrictions on the entertainment budget. Responses in active listening should be reflective of what the speaker has said. They should display a deep interest in your partner's thoughts and feelings rather than expressing our own opinions and viewpoints.

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Good responses in active listening help both parties make their own self discoveries. In issuing a quality response, try to reply to your partner's thoughts and feelings. The factual content is often less relevant than it first appears. You can do this by restating what they've said in your own words. Stay within their standpoint when you respond.

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Introducing a suggestion or idea that doesn't have anything to do with their immediate situation could be too jarring or distracting. Don't offer a contradictory or conflicting opinion until you've fully understood as much as you can everything your partner is conveying to you, and even then, try to keep strong judgments. Tamped down some positive responses in active listening might be I'm intrigued by your story. That sounds like a blank situation. I can see how you'd feel that way.

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I get the sense that you feel something has to change. What would you like to see happen? Do you feel blank about this situation? The general goal of active listening is to fully grasp the viewpoint or life experience of the person who's speaking to you and for you to absorb that information in a meaningful way that could spur you to new knowledge and understanding. You want to show the other person that you can step inside their world and see their experience from their point of view.

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To accomplish the goals of comprehending, retaining and responding, you can employ a few or more of these techniques. Restating paraphrasing your partner's sentiments in your own words is an exceptional way to facilitate your comprehension. It's important not to simply repeat what they said back to them like a parrot, but rather to show that you've caught the essence of what they were expressing. You'll recognize this as a kind of support response discussed earlier. You're letting them know that you heard them and are on the same page with them.

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If you're not 100% right, they will almost certainly be sure to correct you them. That situation confused and scared me. You it must have felt like a dangerous moment. It must have been hard to know what to do. Reflecting an alternative way of restating is to frame your reply along the lines of emotions rather than events or story points.

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Reflecting gives the speaker's story a deeper level that you can prove you have a handle on. Literally tell them or ask them about the emotion they're experiencing. So in the end, my dad said he knew all along I wouldn't get into that college. That's terrible. That sounds like a cruel kind of rejection.

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Summarizing. Try to verbally round up the details of a speaker's story into a concise form that displays your grasp of the whole picture. This is similar to restating, but you're going for a broader overview. You can also treat this as a test for your understanding. Many points and arguments may have been stated, and you may have lost sight of the primary emotion, action, or purpose.

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So the baker got your order wrong, the dinner was burned, and they sent a hypnotist instead of a clown. Man, if that were my kid's birthday party, I'd feel ticked off. Label Emotions often, a speaker will get lost in the practical and physical details of what they're relating to you as sensitively as possible. Try to identify the emotions they haven't been able to specifically verbalize yet. This is not inherently difficult to do, as you only have to state a type of positive or negative feeling.

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But when you accurately label someone's emotion, you're going to be seen as psychic. Just watch out that you're not overreaching or trying to inject your own ideas into the matter. Finally, my boss apologized for overlooking my work and assured me that he was going to pay more attention from now on. Wow. I'm guessing you feel pretty relieved and vindicated by that.

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Not to mention a little cocky. Probing without sounding like an invasive interrogator. Try to ask leading questions that will elicit a deeper level of understanding and meaning from the person you're speaking with. Most people enjoy being asked questions that are well formed and not too presumptuous. When you probe, you can try to make guesses at how people feel, their reactions and desires.

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This type of forecasting shows that you're so engaged, you want to jump to conclusions with them and keep riding their train of thought. You're not only there with them, you're caught up in their emotions. What did it feel like when that woman berated your child at the supermarket? How did you really want to respond? Silence.

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Frequently, there's more to be said by a well placed silence than by filling up the space with additional verbiage. Silence can give every participant a miniature moment of time to gather themselves and their thoughts. It could also help reduce the tension that could arise from a heated or fruitless interaction. And that's when I decided Skydiving wasn't my thing, especially when it's work related not. Sermonizing, giving unsolicited advice or glibly reassuring nobody likes to be put on a level secondary to someone else.

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And in communication, this might make the speaker feel like shutting down further discussion. And worst of all, he can't remember to put the toilet seat down. Sermonizing you you should never have let him in your bathroom in the first place. Unsolicited advising you you should barricade the bathroom until he agrees to your demands. Glibly reassuring you don't worry about it.

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Tomorrow's another lovely day, full of wonderful possibilities, asking leading and open ended questions to show that you've invested in your partner's well being. Ask some nonbinary questions about their experience. These questions show that you're ready to get input and that you're interested in more than just the data or facts of a certain situation. So I decided a couple hundred dollars later, perhaps parallel parking was something we're going to have to work a little harder on. How does that make you feel?

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What are your plans for learning? Where do you plan on doing it? What do you hope comes out of it? Active listening takes a lot of patient work and practice and can even be challenging for people who are good at it. But it pays off in creating an atmosphere of true comprehension, easier information flow, and increased respect for all parties.

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What we're trying to do, albeit systematically, with active listening is to catch the habit of being conscious of other people's emotions and suppressing our own. The ultimate form of this comes in empathetic reflection. At this point, you may be feeling a little uneasy about using human beings natural desire for connection and the pretense of empathy to gather information. Rest assured that using active listening is one of the least underhanded ways to get into the heads of people around you. In fact, you and everyone you know probably already does it to some extent, albeit unconsciously.

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The techniques covered in this chapter Active Listening, Eye Contact, Building Trust, and Credibility are best suited to situations when you want people to confide in you, open up about a secret, or share their true feelings. Think of them as ways to create more intimacy and remove barriers to sharing information naturally, it's a bad move to foster closeness and trust only to gather information to harm somebody or catch them out. In the case of detecting deception or finding out deliberately hidden information, however, you may find the techniques covered in the final chapter of this book more applicable and more ethical. Thanks for joining me for this episode of Social Skills Coaching. Remember, you can join our author's email list at bitly pkconsulting.

Speaker:

There you can get more tips and tricks on how to be more likable, more charismatic, and more productive. In a moment, we'll recap the takeaways from today's episode. But first, some information to help you start your day. You remember several years ago when we. Had a dearth of new TV shows.

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And movies because the writers went on strike. Well, it's happened again. The Writers Guild of America has voted to go on strike because they couldn't reach a compensation deal with TV and film producers. We have some music information and we'll split this out. Generationally Gordon Lightfoot, legendary Canadian folk rock singer, dies at 84 years of age.

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If that's a little before your time, how about Aerosmith? They announced today a 40 date peace out, North American farewell tour. If that's still a little before your time, about fashion designer Donatelli Versace born today. Dwayne the Rock Johnson was born today. Getting right down to it.

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How about Bam Bam's birthday? No, not from the Flintstones and Blacksmurf's birthday. No, not from the Smurfs cartoon. So that should cover just about every generation some way or another. Let's review today's episode.

Speaker:

Eye contact is essential for building trust. If you aren't able to use eye contact, people will find you untrustworthy. The optimal eye contact period is around 3 seconds of eye contact at a time, with sufficient rest between gazes. Active listening is a valuable skill set that any person should master. But the technique of active listening can also help you improve your elicitation abilities and gather more information about people.

Speaker:

You need to comprehend, retain and respond to the information people are sharing with you. You can build rapport and connection in many ways for example, by restating, reflecting, summarizing, labeling, emotions, probing, but be gentle with that and using silence to encourage the other person to open up. Open ended or leading questions can subtly guide a person to open up to you. Avoid giving advice, lecturing, sermonizing or judging. Wow, that's always good advice.

Speaker:

And active listening techniques are best used when you would like someone to open up with you and share their true feelings. Other techniques are more appropriate for detecting deception. And finally, for today, Nico Sparks and Calvin Cordisar Broadus Jr. Are attempting to buy the Ottawa Senators for what may turn out to be more than a $1 billion price tag. Calvin Broadus is an artist with over 23 million albums sold in the United States, 35 million albums worldwide.

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He's received an American Music Award, an Emmy Award, 17 Grammy nominations, and is also known as Snoop Dogg. Snoop Doggy Dog, snoop lion and according to Roseanne, Snoopy snoop Dogg. The Wikipedia page for Snoop Dogg actually says at the top, not to be confused with Snoopy. Yes, the Peanuts character. And finally on today, playwright Tennessee Williams wins a Pulitzer prize for the play cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

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This is back in:

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About the Podcast

Social Skills Coaching
Become More Likable, Productive, and Charismatic
While everyone wants to make themselves and their lives better, it has been hard to find specific, actionable steps to accomplish that. Until now...

Patrick King is a Social Interaction Specialist, in other words, a dating, online dating, image, and communication, and social skills coach based in San Francisco, California. He’s also a #1 Amazon best-selling dating and relationships author with the most popular online dating book on the market and writes frequently on dating, love, sex, and relationships.

He focuses on using his emotional intelligence and understanding of human interaction to break down emotional barriers, instill confidence, and equip people with the tools they need for success. No pickup artistry and no gimmicks, simply a thorough mastery of human psychology delivered with a dose of real talk.

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Russell Newton