Look Me in the Eyes

About this episode

A 72-year-old’s reflection on discovering—through restaurants, Disney, martial arts, and improv—that the most fundamental human skill is the one nobody teaches.

Every Thursday night, I’m at rehearsal with my improv house team, An Embarrassment of Pandas, and every single week our coach stops us mid-scene with the same note. “Eyes,” he’ll say, and we’ll stop everything, center ourselves, and look our scene partner in the eyes - really look, not a glance or a quick check-in, but a full, sustained connection that we have to maintain as the scene progresses.

I’ve been doing improv for ten years now, and in that time I’ve discovered something that changes everything: eye contact is the singularly most powerful tool I have as an improviser. It’s the secret to compelling, can’t-look-away improv, because everything you need to know about your scene partner gets communicated through their eyes. The moment we break that connection, the scene dies and fades into what I call “a boring chasm” - two people on stage saying words at each other instead of creating something together.

What took me seventy years to figure out: I’d been learning this lesson my whole life, I didn’t know it.

In the restaurant business, I learned to look people in the eyes in a chaotic workplace, making sure my team was paying attention, that they heard every word, that the message landed. At Disney, I learned to listen with my eyes while watching an animator explain how they’re trying to implement the famous “squash and stretch” technique, because I had to see what they were saying as I heard it. In martial arts, I learned to look an opponent directly in their eyes, as much to see into their soul as anything else.

And then, ten years ago, improv showed me that all of these experiences were teaching me the same fundamental truth: eye contact is how humans connect, how we communicate, how we see each other.

Now, at 72, as I reflect back on the skills that I think - as an elder - I want to communicate to the next generation, I keep coming back to the same thing: learn how to be comfortable looking directly into someone’s eyes, and don’t look away when you get uncomfortable. Because you will get uncomfortable, and that’s the whole point.

Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Question That Haunts Me

So if I’ve spent seven decades learning this lesson through restaurants, animation studios, martial arts dojos, and improv theaters - if every profession I’ve ever practiced has taught me that eye contact is foundational - we’re not teaching this to everyone. Why do people have to stumble into this skill through random professions and chance encounters? Why did I have to piece together the most fundamental human skill across seventy years instead of learning it at five?

I need you to try something right now - stop reading, look up, find another person, and look them in the eyes. Hold it and feel that connection form, that neural pathway light up, that moment when two humans recognize each other. Feel how powerful that is, how it changes everything, and then ask yourself this question that should terrify you: Who taught you how to do that?

Think about it - not who you learned it from by accident, but who sat you down and said, “this is how humans connect, this is the foundation of trust, empathy, leadership, love,” who made sure you could do the single most important thing you’ll do ten thousand times before you die. The answer is probably nobody, and that’s not an accident - that’s a systems failure so profound, so catastrophic, that we’ve built an entire civilization around a gap nobody wants to admit exists.

The Brutal Timeline

The progression should look like this: you’re born with a brain wired for faces, and at two days old, you already prefer faces looking back at you¹ because nature hands you the hardware and you can do this. By six to eight weeks, you’re supposed to be making eye contact with your mother as a developmental milestone,² like smiling or rolling over, something pediatricians check for because if you can’t do it by two months, something’s wrong.³

By your first birthday, you’ve developed “joint attention” - the ability to follow someone’s gaze, to look where they’re looking, to share a moment of focus with another human⁴ - and this becomes the foundation of language, of learning, of connection. By 15 months, you’re learning to say “please” and “thank you,” and right here, right at this moment, someone is supposed to teach you to meet their gaze when you say it,⁵ to look the person in the eyes when you’re asking for something or expressing gratitude or connecting.

This is where the system is supposed to catch you, but here’s what actually happens: some parents teach it, most hope you’ll pick it up, schools assume parents handled it, parents assume schools will handle it,⁶ and so the most fundamental human skill becomes optional, assumed, someone else’s problem.

The Assumption Gap

I’ve been watching education from the inside for 50 years - as a chef at Westmont College, UCSB, and The Cate School, seeing teachers and students work hand in hand, then as the founder of Wavefront and later as president of Partners in Education. I haven’t studied education systems from a distance - I’ve been a student of them, watching us add requirements and subtract requirements and fight over curriculum and obsess over testing, and what breaks my heart:

We will spend 180 days a year teaching a child the quadratic formula, but we will not spend one single day teaching that same child how to look another human being in the eyes.

Think about that for a moment - we’ve decided as a society that it’s more important for every child to know how to factor polynomials than to know how to build trust with eye contact. When’s the last time you used the quadratic formula? For most of us, never. When’s the last time you needed to make eye contact? This morning, this afternoon, ten minutes ago.

And yet we’ve built an entire educational infrastructure that says the math is required while the human connection is optional. Why? Everyone assumes someone else is teaching it. Parents think schools teach social skills, schools think parents teach social skills, everyone points at everyone else, and meanwhile, kids grow up never learning the first lesson of being human. It’s like watching a game of hot potato, except what we’re dropping is an entire generation’s ability to connect.

The Remediation Trap

Here’s the cruelest part: schools actually do teach eye contact, but only to kids who are already failing.⁷ I found the research and discovered there are entire curricula dedicated to teaching eye contact - games, exercises, practice sessions that are evidence-based and actually work, used by teachers all the time, but only for students with identified disabilities,⁸ only for kids in special education, only for children who’ve already been flagged as having “social skill deficits.”

In other words, we wait until the lack of this skill damages a child before we teach it. We don’t teach everyone to read and then wait to see who struggles; we don’t teach everyone to add and then remediate the ones who can’t, because we teach those skills proactively and systematically to every single child. But eye contact? That’s remedial, that’s for the kids who are “behind,” and the rest of you were supposed to learn it somewhere, somehow, from someone - good luck.

The Career Cost

Let me show you what this costs in real terms: thirty percent of hiring managers say avoiding eye contact is a red flag for potential new hires,⁹ while two-thirds say poor eye contact makes you less likely to get the job.¹⁰ I found a forum post from someone who lost two academic positions - not sales jobs or public-facing roles, but research positions working with colleagues - specifically because their lack of eye contact made them “seem nervous or uncomfortable.”¹¹

This person wrote something that still haunts me: “Both of these situations were interviews where I actually felt very confident and was intentionally being mindful of remembering to make eye contact more often than I typically do, so it felt especially frustrating to be told that it was the deciding factor.” Read that again - they were trying, they were aware, they were doing their best to perform a skill nobody ever showed them how to develop, and they still lost the job because they weren’t good enough at something they were never allowed to learn.

That’s not a skills gap, that’s educational malpractice. Hiring managers sit across from candidates and judge them on eye contact, making snap decisions about trustworthiness, confidence, and honesty based on whether someone can do something we never bothered to teach. Then we wonder why qualified people can’t get hired.

The Relationship Catastrophe

But careers are just the beginning, because eye contact releases oxytocin - the bonding hormone¹² - and it creates trust, builds intimacy, and is literally how humans fall in love. We don’t teach it.

I found couples in therapy who can’t look each other in the eye, not because they’re angry or don’t love each other, but because nobody ever taught them how to connect with their eyes.¹³ One therapist described a couple - Amy and Paul - who would sit in her office and talk past each other while Amy would speak and Paul would stare at the floor, their eyes darting around the room, never meeting, never connecting.

The marriage was dying not because of infidelity or money or any of the usual suspects. Still, because two humans never learned how to see each other, and nobody - not their parents, not their schools, not anyone - ever sat them down and said “this is how you connect with another person.”

The Human Cost

When strangers make eye contact for just two minutes, they report feeling more attracted to each other, more connected, more trusting,¹⁴ and one study found that a couple who participated in an eye contact experiment ended up getting married a year later.¹⁵ Eye contact is the shortcut to human connection, the way we say “I see you” without words, the way we build trust in seconds instead of months. Nobody’s responsible for teaching it.

We have a generation with 241 social media friends who can’t communicate in person,¹⁶ college graduates showing up at MIT’s “Charm School” to learn how to network because nobody ever taught them how to talk to humans face-to-face,¹⁷ and employers complaining that young hires can’t hold someone’s gaze, can’t read a room, can’t build relationships. Instead of looking at the system’s failure, we blame the kids and say “kids these days don’t have social skills,” when the truth is that kids these days were never taught social skills - there’s a difference.

The Responsibility Black Hole

The blame game goes in circles. Parents are busy and assume school handles it, and honestly, most parents learned eye contact by accident themselves, so how are they supposed to teach something they never consciously learned? Schools will tell you they don’t have time - they have testing standards to meet, Common Core requirements to fulfill,¹⁸ academic benchmarks to hit, and social skills aren’t on the test so social skills don’t get taught. Employers expect you to show up ready - that’s not their job. And by the time life teaches you the hard way - through failed interviews, broken relationships, missed connections - the damage is done.

So whose responsibility is it? Everyone’s, which means nobody’s, and that’s exactly how a critical skill falls through the cracks.

The Automation Irony

Here’s the part that keeps me up at night: we’re living in an age where we’re terrified that AI and automation are going to take our jobs, spending billions on STEM education and preparing kids for a tech-driven future, making sure they can code and build and engineer, while we’re ignoring the one skill that AI will never be able to replicate - authentic human connection.

ChatGPT can write your code, but it can’t look a frightened patient in the eyes and make them feel safe before surgery. AI can analyze market trends, but it can’t read the microexpression that tells you your business partner is lying. Eye contact, empathy, the ability to read someone’s face and respond to what you see, the capacity to build trust in a moment - these are the skills that will matter most when everything else can be automated, and we’re not teaching them. We’re preparing kids for a world where they’ll need to out-compute computers, when we should be preparing them for a world where they’ll need to out-human the machines.

What Should Happen

It’s not complicated. At age 1-2, integrate eye contact into manners training with “look at Grandma when you say thank you” and “eyes on me when you ask for help,” making it as automatic as saying please. At age 3-5, practice in preschool during circle time and games with “look at your friend when they’re talking” and “eyes on the teacher during story time,” reinforcing it daily.

At age 5-10, provide formal instruction - not just for kids with deficits but for everyone, teaching it the same way we teach reading and math as a fundamental skill every human needs. At age 10-18, move into application by role-playing job interviews, practicing difficult conversations, and learning the difference between professional, intimate, and casual eye contact, and teaching the nuance. At age 18 and beyond, reinforce through professional development, relationship counseling, and communication training.

It’s a progression, it’s systematic, it’s how we teach everything else that matters, but we don’t do it. Nobody owns it. It’s not on the test. We’ve convinced ourselves that humans will just figure it out.

The Call

I’m not writing this to blame anyone - I’m writing this because we have a chance to fix it. If you’re a parent, start today. When your daughter hands you her drawing, look her in the eyes and say “thank you, sweetheart” - and wait until she meets your gaze before you take it. When your son asks for more milk, say “eyes on me first” and make it as automatic as saying please. Not as remediation but as essential human development.

If you’re an educator, advocate for social skills curriculum not as remediation but as core instruction for every student every year. If you’re an employer, stop judging candidates on skills they were never taught and either teach them yourself or adjust your expectations. If you’re someone who struggles with eye contact, understand that it’s not your fault - nobody taught you, but you can learn now by practicing with safe people, starting small, and working up to it.

And if you’re someone who makes policy, who designs curriculum, who decides what matters in education, look at what we’re teaching and what we’re ignoring, look at the gap between what kids need to be human and what we’re requiring them to learn, and ask yourself: what matters more - that every child can factor a polynomial, or that every child can look another human in the eyes and feel the connection? We don’t have to choose because we can teach both, but right now we’re only teaching one.

Where This Leaves Us

I started this essay asking you to make eye contact with someone, and maybe you did or maybe you didn’t, but here’s what I know: every single time you make eye contact, every time you look someone in the eyes and see them - really see them - you’re doing something profound, something ancient, something that connects you to every human who’s ever lived.

You’re saying: I see you. You matter. We’re in this together.

That’s not a soft skill. It’s not optional. It’s the foundation of everything that makes us human.

And we owe it to every child to teach it - not hope they figure it out, not wait until they’re failing, not assume someone else will handle it.

Teach it. Systematically. Intentionally. The same way we teach them to read.

Because if we can’t look each other in the eyes, what’s the point of anything else we’re teaching them?

Thanks for reading Through Another Lens! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Notes & Sources

* Farroni, T., et al. (2002). “Eye contact detection in humans from birth.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC123187/

* Pathways.org. “Importance of Eye Contact.” https://pathways.org/importance-of-eye-contact

* University of Utah Health (2024). “5 Important Developmental Milestones to Watch for in Your Infant.” https://healthcare.utah.edu/the-scope/kids-zone/all/2016/11/5-important-developmental-milestones-watch-your-infant

* Allina Health. “Eye Contact Helps Babies Learn to Talk.” https://www.allinahealth.org/healthysetgo/care/eye-contact-helps-babies-learn-to-talk

* KidNurse.org (2019). “How To Teach Your Child To Make Eye Contact From An Early Age.” https://kidnurse.org/how-to-teach-eye-contact-from-an-early-age-and-why-it-matters/

* Rainforest Learning Centre (2020). “The Importance of Eye Contact in Young Children: Teaching It as a Social Skill.” https://rainforestlearningcentre.ca/the-importance-of-eye-contact-in-young-children-and-how-to-teach-it-as-a-social-skill/

* EverydaySpeech (2023). “Effective Strategies for Teaching Eye Contact in Elementary School.” https://everydayspeech.com/sel-implementation/effective-strategies-for-teaching-eye-contact-in-elementary-school/

* Study.com. “Eye Contact Activities to Improve Social Skills.” https://study.com/academy/lesson/eye-contact-activities-to-improve-social-skills.html

* Ringover Survey (2024). People Management, “From No Eye Contact to Sugary Tea: What Are Hiring Managers’ Biggest Interview ‘Icks’?” https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/article/1857347/no-eye-contact-sugary-tea-hiring-managers-biggest-interview-icks

* Roo Resumes (2018). Survey of 3,500 hiring managers. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/little-eye-contact-playing-your-hair-poor-body-roo-wilkinson-

* Ask a Manager (2014). “I’m Losing Out on Job Offers Because I Don’t Make Enough Eye Contact.” https://www.askamanager.org/2014/09/im-losing-out-on-job-offers-because-i-dont-make-enough-eye-contact.html

* PsychCentral (2024). “The Effects of Prolonged Eye Contact.” https://psychcentral.com/relationships/prolonged-eye-contact

* O’Grady Wellbeing. “Look Into My Eyes: The Crucial Role of Eye Contact in Relationships.” https://ogradywellbeing.com/eyes-crucial-role-eye-contact-relationships/

* BetterHelp (2022). “The Power Of Eye Contact: Attraction, Trust, And More.” https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/attraction/using-eye-contact-attraction-to-build-a-relationship/

* CooperVision. “The Look of Love: The Role of Eye Contact in Human Connection.” https://coopervision.com/blog/look-love-role-eye-contact-human-connection

* The Hechinger Report (2020). “Colleges Step In to Fill Students’ Social Skills Gaps.” https://hechingerreport.org/colleges-step-in-to-fill-students-social-skills-gaps.

* The Hechinger Report (2020). “Colleges Step In to Fill Students’ Social Skills Gaps.” https://hechingerreport.org/colleges-step-in-to-fill-students-social-skills-gaps

* Rosso, D. & Bonner, T. “Why Schools Don’t Have Time to Teach Social Skills.” Buffalo State College. https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/srcc-sp20-edu/23/

Research conducted November 2025. Every source verified with direct URL access.

© 2025 Mark Sylvester | Through Another Lens

Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe