Rung 2 · Graded exposure
Eye contact with three strangers
Hold eye contact two beats longer than is comfortable with three people today. You look away first, unhurried.
Your attempts
Nothing is recorded against this rung. The dread you feel next time will be a guess, and you will have nothing to check it against.
Why this one
Nothing is asked of you here except to be seen. There is no sentence to get wrong and no outcome to read, which is why it is the rung everything above it is built on.
What it buys — Every rung above this one begins with being looked at. Clear this and you stop paying the flinch tax on all of them.
Across nearly 500 participants, the average preferred duration of mutual gaze was 3.3 seconds — considerably longer than most anxious people assume is welcome.
What it cannot show — Video faces on a screen rather than live conversation, and preferences varied widely between individuals. 3.3 seconds is an average, not a target.
Here — Measured with video faces on a screen, not live conversation, and preferences varied widely between individuals.
When to climb
Three logged attempts running at 2 or under. Not three that went well — three that stopped costing you anything.
Those two numbers are ours, not a finding. Graded exposure is clinical; where the line sits is our judgement.
Rung 3 — Wear the thing you save for safe companySource
Binetti, Harrison, Coutrot, Johnston & Mareschal (2016). Pupil Dilation as an Index of Preferred Mutual Gaze Duration. Royal Society Open Science, 3(7).
The full version of this rung, with the rest of its topic, is exercise 01 of that lesson.