For the longest time, I was suffering from depression and I didn’t know it. I thought it was my personality, and I had this idea in my head that people did not like me. I always thought people were treating me unfairly, which led to anger. I was so angry with people that I started avoiding them. In my head, I thought if I did not see them it would make it so much easier not to deal with them, then I wouldn’t feel as angry anymore. The only time that I would relate to other people was when I would suppress my feelings by being high or drunk, which I thought made me this funny, cool and outgoing person. Despite how bad drinking made me feel, one thing that kept me going was the curiosity of why I would feel angry, resentful, emotional, and mad all the time.
Most of the time I knew in my heart it was not the right feeling to have. We all know that observation is the action or process of observing something or someone carefully in order to gain information. You can imagine where my information was coming from! Poor observations. I thought that if I were able to change people’s behaviors around me to make my reality more accepting, I wouldn’t feel like it was me that was having a problem.
So how can an observation reduce stress?
When I was working as a bartender, I used to see a lot of people coming and going out of the bar. I was not a professional bartender by any means and I wasn’t bartending in an ideal bar where customers knew the bartender name or even bothered to get to know me after many times of attending. I was bartending at an Indian catering hall and only doing parties. Most of the people I was interacting with were doctors, lawyer’s CEO’s of the companies, and etc. You get the idea!
So, every time they would come order a drink, their tone of voice and the facial impressions would immediately change.
They would look at me as if I was a person that just came out from under a rock, didn’t know how to have a conversation, didn’t know much about life, and importantly they thought I didn’t have any education at all. That was the reaction I would get most of the time. Granted in some cases I did not have knowledge in their field but it was the impressions that they were giving me that made me feel worthless.
The conversations they would have with me were extremely short and minimal. “Hi, what’s your name? How old are you? Are you single?” Some of them would complement my looks just to make me feel a little important. Any other conversation besides that would somehow go like this, “Do you know what I mean by that”? They would assume that I had no concept of what they were talking about.
What I’m trying to say is that their perception of me was that I was just a bartender that didn’t know much about anything else besides her job. What they did not know about me was that I am a mother of two beautiful girls that are attending college, that I received my associates in Computer Networking, that I worked for IBM for a long time, I’m a good cook, I learned on my own how to be a makeup artist, I flipped houses for profit, I traveled all around the world. They did not know at the time I was in school to pursue my dream job to become a stress-relief life coach.
As you can see, an observation about someone or something can change our mind and give us a new reality about the world that we are living. If we can take some time and look at our whole lives, how we look at people and other things with only a little amount information, we realize that it is pretty easy to misinterpret the information or about someone’s personality.
But once you pay attention to observations and understand why people do what they do and why they say what they say, it gives us clarity of becoming a more open-minded person. It becomes easy to forgive people, to let go of any grudges, to not being judgmental to others, which will give you more peace of mind for you.
The more toxic you eliminate from your mind, the more clearly your thoughts get. It will give us more room in our head to pay attention to what’s more important in our lives and not waste time to focus on other people lives. Observation of other people behaviors will make it much easier to tolerate other people’s behaviors. By no means, their actions may not always be right but at least it will give us clarity and understanding as to why they behave that way.
