Are You Really SEEING the People in Your LIfe?

I watched a video of Dustin Hoffman this morning talking about the awareness he received as a result of his involvement in the movie Tootsie. The movie required Hoffman to dress as a woman. Before the project started he went through the process of being made up and trialling whether he could walk down the main street of New York and not be singled out as a cross dresser.

When he was made up by the makeup artist for the first time, he looked in the mirror and then asked the artist if he could then make him look like a 'beautiful woman'. He said "If I'm going to be a woman, then I want to be a beautiful woman". Sadly the makeup artist said that was about as good as it was going to get.

In this very moment, Hoffman realized what he and most men do when entering a room full of new people. He saw how he had always bypassed the plain women and only spoken to the beautiful women. He realized how much of life and people he had missed out on because of this 'beautiful' filter he was running.

I don't think for a moment that this behavior is limited to men, by the way, as women can be equally visually driven.

If we're to live a more happy and fulfilling life, then maybe it's time we stop and question the filters that we may be using to navigate our world and the people around us. Keep in mind that this filtering process is actually a basic survival mechanism humanity has adopted. We have such a huge volume of stimuli to process through our conscious mind, that about 95% of it gets automatically delegated to the subconscious mind for processing.

The sad part of this however is that most of us are rarely PRESENT in any of our daily interactions. We greet our coworkers with a grunt or a quick glance, then quickly get back to the work we were attending to. Or we march our children through the morning routine as quickly as we can, never stopping to actually look into their eyes and SEE them. That beautiful beaming individual you brought into the world has become just another part of the morning shuffle.

Even on our drive home we can often arrive without even knowing how we got there. Our conscious mind was somewhere else completely while our subconscious mind faithfully manoeuvred our way through the traffic.

Perhaps you might like to get back in touch with the world you live in and the people you share it with by consciously stopping to really look at the person you're speaking to or really hear what they're saying. So many times we have conversations with familiar people and immediately we start to zone out, thinking that we pretty much know what they're going to say.

I had a good wake up call with this recently when a friend rang for a chat. This lady would constantly lament about the same problem situation in her life. I immediately noticed myself zoning out from listening to her, but this time something made me stop and REALLY listen to her. I put every other thing out of my mind and just listened. Within about 5 minutes, the feedback I was able to provide her from listening properly gave her the greatest breakthrough she had been seeking for years.

How much of your life are you missing? Perhaps you've asked "What's missing in my life?" If you make a habit of stopping to really SEE and really HEAR, really TASTE, really SMELL, really TOUCH - imagine how abundant and fulfilling your life would be! Suddenly you would see how many things you have to be grateful for already!

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
John Lennon


Here is the link to Dustin Hoffman's video...
http://www.upworthy.com/dustin-hoffman-breaks-down-crying-explaining-something-that-every-woman-sadly-already-experienced-3

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