How to Develop Observation Skills and Learn to Pay Attention
It’s easy to ignore the world. We lower our eyes when walking and avoid eye contact in the supermarket. For most of us, the default state tends to ignore our surroundings. But because of this, we lose inspiration and do not develop our curiosity. Here’s how to train yourself to pay a little more attention to the world around you.
We know that going outside and walking can boost creativity, and a little mindfulness can help in many things. But all this is useless if you are still looking at your navel. Observation means observing people, situations and events, and then being critical of what you see. We are missing a lot in this world while we are busy moving back and forth. While it is impossible to quantify how this affects our well-being, it is clear that the more attention you pay, the more often you come up with new ideas. At the very least, you will expand your worldview. First, you must train yourself to pay attention again.
Train yourself to seek out what’s important to you.
Our brains are not designed to see everything. We focus on specific things and then filter out everything else. Most of the time, this is great, because if we paid attention to everything, we would miss out on what is important. However, you can tune your brain to pay attention to new things with a little practice.
Whether you’re starting a new job, learning a new hobby, or just trying to expand your skill set, you need to retrain your brain to pay attention to what’s important at the moment. It sounds simple, but it takes some effort. In an interview with NPR, psychologist Dr. Daniel Simons explains:
What you can do … is teach people to look for certain things.
Thus, script managers, the people who work on filming, know how to look for certain mistakes that can lead to making a movie that gets noticed. And they look for exactly that – and ignore other things that will never matter, or things that will never get cut.
What they know, what most people don’t know, is that they have a bad memory, that they cannot rely on their memory. And they know how to take all sorts of notes and keep a close eye on what might matter.
It may seem counterintuitive that the best way to train yourself to observe the world is to learn to ignore, but this is the basic idea. You can’t pay attention to everything, so decide what you want to pay attention to to retrain your eye. When you do this, you will naturally have more ideas on any subject.
Challenge yourself by paying attention to new things.
Keeping track of “new” is easier said than done. You can’t just say to yourself, “Today I’m going to see the world with new eyes,” and expect it to happen. Instead, you might be better off giving yourself a series of tests. These problems can be anything, but it’s probably best to start with something that matters to you. Here are just a few ideas to get you started, partially compiled from this Quora thread and this Medium post .
- Observe people in crowded places : If the first thing you do when sitting in a crowded place is pulling out your phone, stop. Take some time to reflect on all of this and observe people. See how they operate in crowded places, how they interact with others, and how they deal with it all.
- Assign yourself a scavenger hunt : pick something and look for it throughout the day. It could be anything, broken windows, security cameras, or a specific graffiti artist. Find it, take a photo or tag it. Look for more. When you’re done, try to figure out why this is needed.
- Watch local news (or read your local newspaper): It might sound like it isn’t, but local news is a great way to get to know your city, flaws, and everything else. Since they tend to talk about local issues, this is also a good way to find out about what’s going on in your area. This, in turn, helps you pay attention to all sorts of new things.
- Walking with an expert : Chances are, you have friends who have different careers and hobbies. Take a walk with them and they will teach you new things about the space around you. This could be local history, geology, or even typography.
- Take the sonic walk: it sounds a little silly, but teacher Mark Weidenbaum took students on a sonic walk where they found sound origins, explored the area in new ways, and trained their ears to listen to new things.
- Take field notes : we’ve talked about this before and the idea is pretty simple. Pick a seat, sit down and write or sketch whatever you see. This trains your brain to pay more attention and observe the world more.
- Take part in the 365 Day Photo Challenge : If you’re not quite sure where to start, the 365 Day Photo Challenge is the place to experiment. The basic idea is that you take pictures every day throughout the year, facing different challenges every day to keep things interesting. This will certainly teach you to look a little differently into the camera lens.
You can choose any task that suits your needs. If you are an application developer, you need to pay attention to what people need, if you are a writer, it means paying attention to what people are doing, and so on. However, don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone. Just because you don’t have the ambition to become a designer doesn’t mean you can’t spend a week looking at the typography on local buildings. The trick is to challenge yourself and take a fresh look at everyday life.
Learn to look better at people
Inanimate objects are one thing, but observing and understanding people is a science in itself. Most of us are pretty good at observing in high stress situations, be it a fight, a first date, or a job interview, but we relax during our day to day interactions. But as former FBI agent Joe Navarro tells us, it’s better to observe both comfort and discomfort :
What do we evaluate in the end? First of all, there are two things: danger and comfort . Only that? No, but let’s start with this. Just ask yourself all the time, “How does this situation or this person make me feel?” For example, you walk to your car at night and out of the corner of your eye you see someone walking fast and you feel that you both will cross. Your limbic brain senses this for you and lets you know that something is wrong, but you have to listen to that inner voice. This discomfort comes from your brain saying “warning is a possible hazard,” so you become more alert, you look for a well-lit place and wisely change the pace or return to a safe place in the store.
The comfort score can really open your eyes. When meeting someone new, ask yourself, “Do I always feel comfortable with this person?” If he does not, then the question arises “why?” We should never ignore clues that something is wrong, no matter how much we want the friendship to work. Your subconscious mind is always working to protect you, for a reason, but you must be willing to observe and recognize what you are feeling.
We talked a lot about reading body language , recognizing lies, and reading facial expressions . All of this is great, but they all require a more general act of observation. Sure, you have to pay attention to the conversation, but it’s also worth keeping a close eye on everything else that happens. It’s not just about keeping yourself safe or spotting inconsistencies. By observing people and paying attention, you will notice many new things in them.
Follow the patterns
Observation is great, and the more you do it, the better you will get it. But it will be much more useful if you can choose patterns. Small snippets of observations are useful, but they are useless for creative or intellectual endeavors unless you have a broader understanding of how the world works.
Identifying patterns and combining them with your experience is what allows you to predict what will happen next. The more you observe the world and people, the better you will discover patterns. Subsequently, you will learn to better predict what will happen next.
For example, whenever someone talks about reading body language, they point out that it is not a universal thing. You have to observe someone for a while, find their individual tics, and then make an assumption based on this. If you are not paying attention and watching, you will miss it. Verbal hiccups for one person can mean one thing to one person and another to someone else, so you need to find a pattern. Maybe someone rubs their nose when bluffing in poker, and rubbing someone else’s nose might mean they are angry.
It’s the same with everything you see in the world. Observing the world is only the first step. Until you start piecing it all together into something bigger, it’s hard to do anything with the information you’re collecting. For example, it might be interesting that your block has a video surveillance system, but much more interesting that every block in your area has video surveillance cameras. The more you watch, the more you ask why. The more you ask why, the more you learn. Observation is helpful, but subsequent critical thinking is something that can help you come up with new ideas and learn more about the world around you.