The Gentlemen's Blog

It’s time again for one of those unanswerable rhetorical surveys I like to conduct: How many of you are satisfied with your job? Fortunately, thanks to The Conference Board’s 2010 survey, I know that the answer is roughly less than half of you. Having been involved in human capital consulting for several years now, I know that spells trouble for employers. A dissatisfied worker is an unengaged one, and unengaged workers are less productive and less loyal than those reporting high levels of satisfaction and engagement. In short, more than half of the American workforce is composed of people who are only there because they have to be. Is this the fault of the employers?

Maybe a little bit. In an economically efficient world, employees would slot themselves into jobs that best suited them, and vice versa. As the demand for jobs continues to outpace availability, the perceived value of a given job rises. This allows employers to be both more selective and less concerned with their employees’ satisfaction, because there’s really no incentive to be concerned. Yes, the cost to onboard a new employee is high, but at least it can be accounted for. What can’t be as easily accounted for is the more abstract figure of revenue lost due to employee dissatisfaction. Ergo, in a world where there’s an effectively endless supply of asses waiting to fill very few seats, it makes some sense for employers to churn through them until they find the right match.
So how’s your job?
So that leaves us. As employees, we’re largely responsible for our own dissatisfaction, and for a very simple reason: We don’t know what to focus on. We strive for a misconstrued version of success, when what we really need to focus on is contentment. The big-time lawyer who makes a million dollars a year but absolutely hates his job is no more a success than the bus driver who loves what he does but is a financial failure. In fact, that lawyer might represent the grandest form of failure, because en route to his lofty but miserable existence he had every conceivable resource at his disposal. The bus driver is just a guy who really likes driving buses and is perfectly happy doing so.

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I’m sitting here, a little jittery from my morning coffee, trying to think of something smart and funny to write. It’s a bit early — OK, it’s way too early — but that Don Julio Reposado on my shelf is looking like the right thing to take the edge off the caffeine and my adult ADD and get the ideas flowing. Lubricate the wheels of creativity, if you will. It’s not an unfamiliar idea — a bit of booze gets you loosened up.

How many times have you come up with a better episode of The Simpsons with two buddies and a case of beer between you? Sure, at season 23 and  with a dearth of chuckles, that may not be much of a challenge anymore, but it seems our intuitions about the creative benefits of alcohol were right. A recently completed study by researchers at the University of Illinois found out what we intuitively and, drunkenly, asserted ourselves: That this guy right here is the best! Oh, wait, that’s not right.

The study, called “Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving*,” found that a moderate level of vodka-induced intoxication gave test subjects a noticeable advantage when solving creative problems like word-association (think copywriting). The closer the people got to the legal intoxication limit, the better they were at solving these problems — they were also faster at answering than their sober counterparts.

So, before you start making every coffee an Irish coffee, remember that these testees (great word) were not totally wasted, meaning they were probably not Irish either.

*For our less learned readers, a “muse” is a small rabbit-like mammal that you find at the bottom of a bottle of Turkish raki.

In our first post in this two-part series on eye contact, we discussed the importance of eye contact and some of the reasons we don’t always feel comfortable looking someone in the eye.

But just because eye contact is a great thing and a vital tool for improving the quality of all your face-to-face interactions with others, doesn’t mean that more eye contact is always better or that all eye contact is created equal. You have to do it right—at the right time and in the right way. How to do that is what we’ll be exploring today.

We’ll start off with a primer on how to make good eye contact in general conversational situations, and then we’ll tackle eye contact tips for specific scenarios. Let’s get started.

General Principles for Making Effective Eye Contact

Eye contact begets eye contact. You might be hesitant to make eye contact with people because you don’t think they want to make eye contact with you. And sure enough, when you look at them the first time, they look away. But they’re probably looking away because they’re thinking the same thing you did; that you don’t really want to make eye contact with them! Even though you made the first move, they’re still worried about rejection. But most people are just waiting for permission to get into a mutual gaze. Studies have shown that once one person in a conversing pair initiates greater eye contact, the other person will follow suit and increase his or her own level of eye contact as well.

But don’t be a creeper. In order for eye contact to be effective, it needs to be welcome and appropriate. When eye contact is unwanted, it goes from gazing to staring, and being stared at makes people uncomfortable. Eye contact results in physiologic arousal—it increases prefrontal brain activity and activates the sympathetic nervous system, speeding up a person’s heart rate, perspiration, and breathing. And this happens not only when you’re directly looking into someone’s eyes, but also when you simply perceive that someone is staring at you. This arousal can be a good thing–if you and a lovely lady are looking into each other’s eyes, it can create a more intense connection. But when someone fixes their gaze on you in a creepy way, it can feel as if a predator is stalking you in the wild; it sets off your threat-o-meter.

Thus good eye contact is based on mutuality. As Michael Ellsberg, author of The Power of Eye Contact, puts it:

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How often have you talked with another guy who never looked you in the eye during the entire length of the conversation? Or perhaps he did meet your gaze a few times, but then his eyes shifted back to his shoes or to some point off in the distance.

I’d like to say that the ability to make good eye contact is one of the social skills a lot of young men seem to be struggling with these days, which would be true, but I’ve encountered enough gaze-averting middle-aged men to know that it’s a multi-generational problem. And actually, it’s probably something men have always struggled with—females are on average better at making and holding eye contact than males, and in fact, it’s been found that the higher the levels of testosterone a fetus is exposed to in utero, the less eye contact they make as infants—across genders. Interestingly, the exception to this rule are male babies who have the very highest levels of T; they end up being as adept at eye contact as their female counterparts—alpha babies aren’t afraid to look you in the eye!

But just because making eye contact doesn’t come naturally to us men, doesn’t mean you should just shrug your shoulders and accept this predisposition. The ability to make high-level eye contact is a skill every man should work on, as it has been shown to create some incredible benefits for the gazer. Numerous studies have shown that people who make higher-levels of eye contact with others are perceived as being:

• More dominant and powerful
• More warm and personable
• More attractive and likeable
• More qualified, skilled, competent, and valuable
• More trustworthy, honest, and sincere
• More confident and emotionally stable

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