I hope you’ve had a wonderful 2024 and are looking forward to great things in 2025. 

Have you made a New Year’s resolution? And if so, who is the subject of it? Traditionally, resolutions are self-focused: eat better; exercise more; finally finish that endlessly-procrastinated-project. What if this year’s resolution was about other people?

With that as a gentle provocation, we at GK Training humbly submit the following suggestion for a worthy New Year’s resolution: Eye Contact.

In case you missed it, I wrote an essay for TIME magazine that garnered Essay of the Week designation during the holiday break: “The Lost Art of Eye Contact“.

It’s worth a read because it may inspire you to make 2025 a year of improving your life and communication interactions by improving your eye contact.

The synthesis of the article is this: eye contact is your tool to notice, reach, affect, touch, inspire, comfort, persuade, and invest in those around you.
You’ll also learn why the term “eye contact” itself is misleading.

So if you want to make 2025 even better than what’s come before, make eye contact your way to focus more on people and less on preoccupations.

And if you want to explore eye contact on a deeper level, I give it its own chapter in my forthcoming (5 days from now!) book, Don’t Say Um. For the analysis of eye contact, check out Chapter 12. (I’ll also be on Good Morning America Jan 9th talking about how the book can even help teens and tweens with this crucial skill).

Happy New Year to you and yours,

Michael Hoeppner and the GK Training team