What to do
- Leave your brows at rest: not raised, not lowered.
- Leave your eyes at their resting width: not widened, not narrowed.
- Close your lips and keep your mouth corners level.
- Keep your chin level, within 5° up or down.
- Blink without hurry.
- Look at their eyes for about 3 seconds at a time, then glance to the side, never down.
Be in the look when your eyes meet theirs: people settle on a face within about a tenth of a second (Willis & Todorov 2006; Todorov, Pakrashi & Oosterhof 2009).
Practise it live
Open How I Land and choose “calm” after “Be seen as”. Your camera shows your face with this look drawn on it, and one instruction at a time tells you what to move. When it fits, hold it for five seconds to remember the position.
Free. Nothing is recorded, stored or sent.
Why it reads this way
- Calm is read from the absence of arousal. Very anxious people showed more fear-like movements, raised brows and widened eyes among them, more blinking and more movement overall (Harrigan & O'Connell 1996).
- Widened eyes read as fear and awe, narrowed ones as suspicion (Lee & Anderson 2017).
- Drooping mouth corners read as tired and sad (Sundelin et al. 2013).
- More blinking read as more nervous (Omori & Miyata 2001). The voice carries even more: observers read momentary anxiety from the voice more than from the face (Harrigan, Wilson & Rosenthal 2004). The app does not coach the voice.
- More eye contact read as more composed (Burgoon et al. 1985).
In the app, “Why” shows the target numbers and how each was built, with its sources.
Where the people you meet are from
- Japan and South Korea: eye contact about 2 seconds at a time, aimed softly between the eyes. Japanese raters judged a held, direct gaze in person as angrier and less approachable than Finnish raters did (Akechi et al. 2013), and Japanese adults in conversation look at the eye region and between the eyes (Haensel et al. 2020).
- Nothing else changes by region: the two axes the looks rest on, warmth and dominance, were found again in all 11 world regions tested (Jones et al. 2021).
Good for
Difficult conversations, pressure, the moment before you speak.
Guides
Resting face: why you look annoyed when you are not, How to look confident when you present. All guides.
Other looks
Approachable, happy, open, confident, competent, trustworthy, alert, mysterious, intimidating. All ten on one page.