I can safely say that noticing isn’t one of my strong suits. Unless I make a deliberate effort, I tend to get caught up in my own thoughts and can often let the world completely pass me by. I like to think it’s just that my brain is extremely efficient at deciding whether information is useful or irrelevant from moment to moment, so I only concentrate on whatever cognitive task is currently most important to me. This is fantastic in some contexts (on the train, for example), but it did lead to a slight fail situation in this week’s Workshop.

Louise ran a quick exercise where she asked everyone to turn around and write down what we thought she was wearing, from memory. Some people were bang on, but I could not remember a single thing. I wasn’t trying to be funny, I literally couldn’t remember a single thing about her clothes.

So that definitely wasn’t the best vote of confidence for my awareness skills. But it was useful to know that about myself, so I can work on it in future.

The funny thing is, when I’m watching a movie or television show I can notice the most seemingly insignificant details and recall them long after watching. The difference is that when I’m watching something I’m in a noticing frame of mind, so I make a conscious effort to take note of things and can commit them to memory easily.

So this week I’m going to give myself a little exercise to start noticing more. Any time I walk into a room I’m going to try to notice how many lights are on, what the temperature is, and how many people are on their phones.