I had a bad case of this starting in my late teens. I’d wonder: what am I supposed to do? Stare into people’s eyes? Stare at their eyebrows, etc.? Folks find that to be way off-putting, intimidating, as was mentioned. Look briefly, look away, return?
Trying to figure out how to look at people was part of the problem, which was: standing outside of myself and observing, and critiquing, my actions. The attention and effort required to direct yourself and coach yourself, serve only to divert you from your real task - listening to, and understanding, your interlocutor. And talking to them. If you concentrate on the discussion at hand, you’ll be busy enough processing what they have to say, and formulating your reply, that you won’t have time to - trip yourself up with minutiae, like - what part of the person should I be staring at? For how long?
Stop thinking about it. There you have it! Only how how are you supposed to stop thinking about something that stresses you? Easy, think about something else, like - what are we talking about ? what is the interviewer saying? Seems to me that eye contact is all about looking to see if they have understood what you’ve had to say, looking for confirmation of that; and looking at them to help you focus on the meaning of what they’re trying to say.
It’s like the Centipede’s Dilemma: you already know how to do this, but you’ve become caught up, entangled, in inconsequential details like, how do I look, how ought I to look, etc., and forgetting about the real issue - what the hell are we talking about?
Timothy Gallwey explained this all wonderfully well in The Inner Game of Tennis, aeons ago. Well, way back in the last century anyway.
*In every human endeavor there are two arenas of engagement: the outer and the inner. The outer game is played on an external arena to overcome external obstacles to reach an external goal. The inner game takes place within the mind of the player and is played against such obstacles as fear, self-doubt, lapses in focus, and limiting concepts or assumptions. The inner game is played to overcome the self-imposed obstacles that prevent an individual or team from accessing their full potential.
*
What Timmy was saying iirc, was that you stand in the way of your own genius, or competence at any rate, by entertaining all sorts of doubts, second-guessing yourself and wasting your time thereby, rather than just getting on with the business at hand.
To that end, he advised his protégés to look at the seam on the ball, or take note of the color of the ball, while executing their shot. I read about this, tried it out, and - it’s simply fucking amazing. Seriously.
In the context of the interview, it’s simply not going to work to just try to remember a series of strategies to overcome a nervous tic or whatever. Relax and enjoy it. The convo I mean. They can’t kill you after all, all they can do is tell you to F.O.
If you can accept that, then maybe you can forget about what you look like, how your performance is being critiqued and so on, and deal with the real thing - the exchange of information, with each of you looking to one another for cues as to how the ideas are being communicated and understood. The result is often nothing more or less than a pleasant, meaningful conversation.
