Becoming more observant

Becoming more observant.

 

When do we really teach people to be more observant of things in everyday life. There is a great corporate team building exercise where they ask everyone to close their eyes and describe parts of the office. what colour is the carpet? What kind of lights are there.? That kind of thing. A lot of great actors biographies suggest to aspiring actors to learn to be more observant. I remember Michael Caine in his autobiography talking about how his favourite passtime was to just sit somewhere and observe people.  Have you heard of those great experiments that would have a group of students in a room in the middle of a lecture or something and a cleaner would come in and potter about and then leave. A pretend cop would come in later and tell the room that there was a robbery and ask the room to describe the cleaner. People would argue vehemently. 

“No he was tall! He was old!. No He was Young!”

 

We observe things so differently and often so inaccurately and

Quite often the smallest observation can be very powerful