A Making It Personal 205
He continues the prolonged eye contact for what seems like an
eternity, even though it’s only 10 seconds. How important is the
type of smile in this case? Is your normal reaction fear? Anger?
Annoyance? Curiosity? What other factors of timing in his body
movement affect your response? If the young man bore multiple
tattoos, and was wearing a beat-up hunting jacket, how would you
react if he quickly shoved his hand inside his jacket as he stared at
you? Now take this same young man, tattoos and all. He gives you
a lingering stare with a blank face. The jaw is slack; his eyes are
focused somewhere beyond you; his gate is ambling and discon-
certed; and his skin, pale. These are signs of shock, and his sense
of timing will be way off—so far off that even if he does do some
of the same actions as the person I described previously, your reaction
would probably be curiosity or sympathy, rather than fear.
Personal strategy
Humans have an ingenious ability to find what works. Once
we discover what works, we use it until it doesn’t.
When you were a child, the first strategy you learned was to
shake your head to stop something from happening. You used that
until you discovered the word no, which you probably repeated until
your parents wanted to throw you in the trash can. In short, it stopped
working for you.
As “no” failed, you learned other strategies to stop things from
happening. You never completely discarded the old ones, you
simply put them away or incorporated them into your much more
polished scheme.