Jay Shetty

They're looking over at who just walked in.

How does that make you feel?

How about when someone's kind of turned away, you kind of feel like they don't want to be there and neither do you.

These three things take no social skill, no charisma, no clever words.

And actually what I love about them is they lead to real connection.

You're not trying to walk out with the award for funniest person at the party.

You're not trying to walk out with the medal for smartest person in the room.

Hopefully you're trying to just connect with someone, make a friend, make a new connection.

And there's a beautiful piece of research from Dr. Arthur Aron at Stony Brook University.

The same researcher behind the famous 36 questions to fall in love study, showing that sustained mutual eye contact between strangers significantly increases feelings of closeness and affection even in the absence of conversation.

Eye contact isn't a social nicety.

It's a bonding mechanism.

It triggers oxytocin release.

It tells the other person's brain you exist to me.

Obviously, don't stare at them like a creep.

I'm not recommending that.

Shift five, use the power of proximity and positioning.

This one is going to sound too simple, and then I'm going to give you the science, and you're going to realize it's one of the most powerful social tools that exists.

In the 1950s, social psychologists Dr. Leon Festinger and Dr. Stanley Schechter and Dr. Kurt Bach studied friendship formation in a housing complex at MIT.

They wanted to know what predicted who became friends.