For the first 14 years of my life, I never made eye contact with another person. I wasn’t shy. I didn’t lack self-confidence. I just couldn’t see.
In fact, no one who knew me likely knew I wasn’t making eye contact, because I could look in the general direction of their eyes and appear to be looking them in the eyes, but I couldn’t see their eyes. My astigmatism was so bad, I had no clarity about where their eyes were.
When I started driving and had to wear glasses to drive (and thus, started wearing glasses more in life), I realized that I hadn’t been looking people directly in the eyes before, and I couldn’t deal with it. I’ve not been good at making eye contact since then. In fact, it’s been a significant deterrent in meeting strangers, because eye contact feels so intimate to me now. Too intimate.
Why do I tell you this story?
Because you may not know this about me, and if you met me and realized I wasn’t looking at you in the eyes, you might have all kinds of theories about my confidence level or about me being anti-social or what-have-you.
Added wrinkle, because my hearing is going, I now often have to watch people’s mouths when they talk when we’re in crowds, because I can’t hear them otherwise. But in general, I do not have good eye contact skills.
The reasons why someone might execute a particular behavior are complicated and nuanced. Often, even when we do the exact same thing, we think we know where we attribute the behavior, and we make assumptions about where to attribute that behavior in other people.
(i.e. If they just worked harder… if they just could be more understanding… if they just thought about the future… if they just were more selfless… etc.)
This is one of the things I love the most about Strengths. It gives me the ability to attribute positive motives to people who don’t do things I find easy, or who aren’t able to do things that seem like common sense or “everyone can do this” to me.
If someone doesn’t Google a piece of information when they ask a question, it doesn’t make them dumb or lazy. It makes them different from me.
And if your first instinct is to turn this into a discussion about someone else, resist the urge to go looking for other people mis-judging you, or mis-judging others. That’s not what this post is about. That’s not the purpose of this discussion.
The purpose of this discussion is to look at myself and look for ways I might be mis-attributing motives or I might be mis-judging someone because they’re not doing what I would do in that given situation.
Any development always has to start with me. Never with others. Just with me.
– Becca