The eye is the window of the soul. It receives a far greater multitude of impressions than any other sense organ except touch and gives out in due proportion a large variety of emotions.

Exercises for the Eye – part 2 (link to part one “The Sense of Sight in Selling” is here)

In these and all following exercises the following rule applies: they must be repeated daily for minimum five days to get valuable result, and after that you can repeat it as long as you get good results.

Exercise Four: Capacity of Vision

The eye is focused directly upon only one minute point at a time, but hundreds of other objects in the same room or in the same general location make the observer aware of their presence, and strong impressions are carried to him by them. It is a fairly well accepted doctrine among students of therapeutic suggestion that the most powerful subconscious impressions are often carried to the mind by objects that thus come within the range of vision without being directly in the point of focus.

Select one point at which you will look fixedly not removing your gaze one particle for sixty seconds. While looking at this spot see how many other articles you can perceive in the same room, or general location. Enumerate these without allowing your direct gaze to be fixed upon them.

Repeat the above exercise daily for five days, in the same spot and with the same object. On the sixth day try a different spot and different object.

The same exercise for capacity of vision can be applied to reading. Open a book and center your gaze upon one letter on the page. See if you can read the entire word without glancing over it. See then if you can read the word before it and the word after it. Continue until you can read a group of words without removing your gaze from a single letter.

Many readers have become accustomed to reading practically a line at a time by this and other methods. One ought never to read faster than he can read accurately, but it is also possible to learn to read accurately at a faster rate than the one to which you are accustomed.

Exercise Five: Force of Gaze

Experiment first by sitting comfortably in your chair and apparently looking at nothing. Hold your eyes steady in the position in which they are.

This is not really the case because whenever your eyes are open you are looking at one point. Now while you are still resting easily, without allowing your gaze to shift, suddenly determine the point at which you are looking. You will be surprised to find sometimes that it is from six inches to three or four feet away from what you would have guessed, had you closed your eyes before finding out. You will also be surprised to find that when you do discover the exact point you are looking at, your whole mental attitude seems to be changed and you seem to have put directness and force into your gaze.

Exercise Six: Emotional Use of the Eye

Without changing the expression of your face or the attitude of your body, attempt to put into your eye the various emotions of anger, love, joy, grief, sympathy, and so on. Then practice these same expressions of emotion allowing the facial expression to correspond with the emotion, but making yourself conscious all the time of the part your eyes are playing in the expression.

Exercise Seven: Selection of the Desired Object

As in exercise two, enter a room with which you are unfamiliar except that you know that one object for which you are searching is in plain view. See how quickly you can find that object with the eye. (Note that the average person who stands erectly will first see those things on the level of his eye. If seated, with the head bent slightly forward, he will see first those things below the level of his eye. In other words, the first tendency of the eye is to look straight ahead of it, just as the first tendency of a person putting his hand on a wall is to put it directly in front of his face.)

Another exercise in the selection of the desired object, is proofreading. To learn to read proof quickly and to eliminate all wrong letters or bad type with unerring accuracy and great speed requires a wonderful development of the eye, which explains very largely the immense superiority in this line of work of a person experienced in it.

You can go through all above exercises in a period of less than five minutes per day. Please be careful not to take too much of your time at the start, as too great a strain would thereby be placed upon nerves unaccustomed to it. If you want, however, you can repeat the experiments several times a day.

Next time: Hearing in Selling.

Please take a look at my previous post “Using the Five Senses in Selling” where I was talking about how to train your senses to be able to influence the mind of the buyer.

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